Dice.com 2007 Annual Salary Survey just got published. Key points:
- Average IT professional’s salary rose 1.7 percent to $74,570
- Leaders are Project/MIS Managers with 5.0% and 7.8% raise
- Banking/Financial industry was almost flat - 0.6% growth

Apparently terminally ill multimillionaire Monster.com founder Andrew McKelvey just confessed in falsified SEC filings and back-dated stock options for company employees. As part of a deal McKelvey has agreed to pay Monster.com $8 million and convert his 4.7 million shares from super voting to common type (voting power went from 10 to 1 per share).
One might wonder is recent departure of EVP of Sales Steve Pogorzelski has anything to do with this.

Steve Pogorzelski, Monster.com’s executive vice president of global sales and customer development, appears to be leaving the company. Officially he is planning to stick with the company as advisor. Advisor? I am not buying that. That’s what company officials are usually coming up with to make investors less nervous. Apparently, by the time of announcement there was no one to take his place. Coincidentially, this all took place in about a week prior to company’s quaterly earnings report.

I see a lot of quite different stats published on the web about market coverage for these jobboards. Every report has some different one ranked as number one.

Let’s see Alexa ranking (today’s data):
CareerBuilder - #99, traffic rank 639 (all will be 3 mos avg)
Monster - rank, 641
HotJobs - unknown, it’s merged with Yahoo which has rank 1

You can see Monster and CareerBuilder are pretty close. What’s up with HotJobs?
I see Yahoo is spending a lot of money recently on PR. Whole spread of them or have direct information or just have hints about supposedly increased traffic on Yahoo websites. Some of those articles and blog posts tell us that HotJobs became #1 job search engine. Where all that new traffic came from? Wasn’t they complained not that long time ago about Craigslist stealing their employment traffic?

In the middle of 2005 Nielsen//NetRatings rated career related sites and HotJobs were lagging quite a bit. Top3 were rated like this: CareerBuilder with 4.1m visitors, Monster with 3.56m and HotJobs with 1.6m.

CareerBuilder.com just released survey [pdf], conducted by Harris Interactive.
32% of employers said they ave plans to add full-time employees in 2008. The same survey for 2007 year ago had this number at 40%. Top growing industries are professional and business services and IT.

It was supposedly broadcasted on Discovery Channel and The Science Channel. Definitely targeted for kids. I wonder if they are planning to roll it on CartoonNetwork right after Spongebob

Korn/Ferry International just released their recent poll numbers. 55% of recruiters who are specialized in executive positions stated that it’s more difficult than in the past to convince candidate to relocate for new job position. The leading factors for resistance are: family ties (50%), lifestyle factors (25%) and housing market (10%).

I call BS here. In my experience people tend not to acknowledge the fact that they have financial problems with moving. Considering current housing market conditions and typical executive salary most of such candidates stuck with big houses that they are just too greedy to sell at this point, because potential loss might be in $XXX.XXX range. Of course they cannot tell “You know, I was stupid and bought a house in a housing bubble time and I cannot move because selling this house will be confirmation of me making bad choices. I will keep telling that prices will have go up and the reasons I cannot move are my family and lifestyle choices”.

Just found an article on Slashdot, it cracked me up. Guy is complaining that his company’s main phone number is getting attacked by recruiters. They receive hundreds of phone calls every day, on every possible extension from their phone directory - getting trolled for contacts that might be potential candidates. The original poster complains that company has no way to stop this kind of phone SPAM, because there no such thing like “do not call list” for commercial lines.
But most interesting is development of ideas in comment threads about how to fight those recruiters
Here are just some of them:

• First attempt was to post recruiter’s phone number and have every thread reader to call. This did not get too well, because there was not enough of a volume in calls. No one was able to get busy signal and no one was able to upset receptionist.
• Ask calling recruiter to hold just a moment and transfer phone call to some 3rd party phone (like public time voice announcers and so on)
• Put him on hold forever.
• Transfer them to their own phone number
• Blacklisting phone numbers.
• On hold with very annoying music.
• Setting up computer with voice recognition and bot to engage the caller in pointless but realistic conversation with the robot.
• Asking recruiters long series of stupid questions to get them pissed off.
• Act paranoid. Tell recruiter that you know that he is hired by your boss and this phone call is for loyalty verification
• Every time recruiter calls set up interview and not show up.
• Ask about potential salary and then tell that you are already making twice as much.
• Forward phone to the fax machine
• Set up phone interview with potential employer and explain to them that recruiter they are hired is extremely annoying
• Hire someone with minimal wage to waste caller’s time
• Forward the call to random public payphone

According to recent poll from SEI employer’s culture is more important than compensation in motivating employing to stay at their job. 69% of participants say that they stay where they are because of workplace culture and environment. Most important factors in decision to join their company are “brand and reputation” (59%) closely followed by “culture and workplace environment” (56%)