TheLadders pulls super-cool brand move

TheLadders, the premium job site exclusively for 100k+ talent looking for 100k+ jobs, pulled off a really cool branding stunt.

They left $100k cash unsupervised in a park and recroded the reactions of people passing by. Check out the video they created. It's way cooler than hanging upsidedown and it completely associates TheLadders brand with the $100k+ lure.

Now, if they would only hire the same people who did the video to redesign their site. (They really gotta get rid of that stock photography.)

BrandWeek peeks into role changing employment landscape plays on job boards

BrandWeek recently questioned what the changing employment or should I say, unemployment landcape means to job boards. Author, 'Mike Beirne's article, 'Career Sites Get a Monster Reboot,' shares some input from Monster and CareerBuilder brass. HotJobs was absent. Mike and I talked about a bunch of things. Somehow my thoughts on what HotJobs is doing made its way into the article. I think what employers themselves are doing is a more interested topic. i.e., the use of blogs and video in corporate career sites.

Dice giving away free gas

Monster's sucking wind.

CareerBuilder's giving a thorough ass whipping to the field.

HotJobs plans to release SmartAds for recruitment.

And Dice is giving away free gas.

This was recently forwarded to me...

Want some good news about gasoline prices? You can get TWO MONTHS OF FREE GAS when you buy one year of Dice service.*

We are currently offering a 40% discount on an annual recruitment package for first-time customers. You'll also receive two months of free gas if you sign up by June 13.* This package includes full access to our growing resume database of technology and engineering professionals and five concurrent job posting slots on Dice.com.

Why Dice is the right choice:

• 2 million unique tech professionals visit Dice.com each month
• 71% of candidates have more than five years of experience; 47% have more than 10 years
• 20% increase in online applications over last year

If you're fed up with filling up at the pump, Dice can help ease your strain and connect you with uniquely skilled tech candidates.

Update (June 13)

Chad & Cheezhead covered this topic among others in their most recently published podcast. Joel brought up an interesting issue. Is this legal?

Recruiter publicly insults young female sales rep, falls flat on glamour shot

* Update: This post has been edited from its original version. The recruiter's name was removed because he responded professionally both on and off-line.

Note to bloggers, if you ever post a glamour shot of yourself on your blog and decide to publicly insult a young female sales rep...get your facts straight.

Unfortunately for Bill, this wasn’t the case when he picked on a young hotjobs sales rep in his post, ‘Hotjob’s Failed Attempt to Steal Me from Monster.’

His post fell short of calling the girl an idiot and giving himself a medal for knowing more about job board traffic than she did.

Since the girl, whom I don’t know has no way to defend herself as publicly as she’s been ridiculed. I figured I'd point out a few things that are wrong with Bill’s post.

First: He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

His original post (it has since been changed) quoted Google Analytics as a source for major job board traffic reporting. That’s wrong. Analytics does not track and report major job board traffic.

Second: He didn't admit he was wrong. 
I commented on his original post, pointing out that Analytics does not report on this traffic.

Rather than comment back, he edited the original post; erasing the error, never admitting he was wrong. Weak.

Third: Even his fix is wrong.
His post now references Google Trends as the source of job board traffic reporting.
Wrong again.

Google Trends does not report on traffic to any site, let alone major job boards.

It estimates the number of search queries for a particular term, which is in no way an indication of job board traffic.

My point is this…
If you’re going to insult someone publicly to prove how smart you are, you should

1. Know what you’re talking about
2. Admit when you’re wrong
3. Go after someone who can defend herself just as publicly

Exciting news on the way...stay tuned

Exciting news on the way...stay tuned

CareerBuilder expecting short-term spike in traffic thanks to SuperBowl Ad

Everyone knows the New Jersey Giants are going to put a big hurt on the New England Patriots this coming Sunday in SuperBowl XLII.

Brady knows it. Manning knows it. You know it and I know it.

Those who don't know it are either massholes like Boston based, veteran HotJobs sales reps Dan Ludmar and Steve Pisarra or they are part of the CareerBuilder team working on this year's SuperBowl Ad.

As usual, CareerBuilder is expected to kick off its 2008 advertising campaign with a SuperBowl ad.

Why not? According to Nielsen Online: CareerBuilder Network traffic more than doubled the Monday following SuperBowl Sunday last year.

Jobfox Named 'Most Promising' Start-Up of 2008

From the release...

American Venture Magazine Honors Revolutionary Web Site for its Intelligent Matching of Jobs and Candidates

MCLEAN, Va., Jan. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Jobfox, a revolutionary Web site with highly intelligent and effective matching of jobs and candidates, has been named a 2008 most promising start-up by American Venture Magazine. Jobfox is led by CEO Rob McGovern, who is also the founder and former CEO of CareerBuilder. more

American Venture also named Itzbig as, 'most promising start-up of 08'. Which is it?

I havent heard much from recruiters using Itzbig but I have worked with recruiters using JobFox. The common feedback is that its takes over 15min to post a job on JobFox. When you have over 300 jobs open, 15min/job is a lot to ask. From what I understand, the JobFox team is working on making posting a job easier and faster.

Related: Former Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg reflects on what he learned as CEO of the well funded start-up.

How could compete.com have it so wrong?

I just came across this report on Y!HJ traffic from compete.com and asked myself, 'Self, how could compete have this so wrong?'

I've personally watched traffic to Yahoo! HotJobs blow through the roof this past year thanks to the roll out of a major newspaper partnership, increased spending on search engine marketing, promotions and more.

I've heard directly from customers that have seen increases in traffic to their jobs and performance. Yet compete.com paints a very different picture. So I did some digging.

I looked into compete's numbers and compared them to that of industry standard comScore. Each company is reporting Yahoo! HotJobs traffic to be moving in dramatically different directions.

Compete, which reports on a proprietary metric they call, 'People Count,' says that HotJobs traffic is down significantly year over year; with a, 'People Count,' of 825k in Oct '06 down to 275k in Oct '07.

comScore reports significant growth in traffic to HotJobs. In Oct '06 comScore reported unique visitors to HotJobs to be near 7m. In Oct '07 they reported unique visitors to be near twice that; up over 13m.

WHATS GOING ON?

I'm not exactly sure but one thing I noticed was that compete's report for HotJobs traffic does not include traffic to HotJobs' main domain, http://hotjobs.yahoo.com. Among other things, you'll notice that this is the domain most often found in search engine results pages.

CONCLUSION

There is a reason why comScore is the industry standard.

In this case, comScore more accurately reports on Yahoo! HotJobs traffic growth because it's numbers include the site's main domain. This is a big miss by compete.com.

If compete's mission is to, 'help create a more trusted, transparent, and valuable Internet for consumers,' then I think the company should more accurately report on the traffic to one of the Internet's leading career sites.

HotJobs, Linkedin, SnagAJob Growth - comScore August 2007

Monster crushed by Silicon Alley Insider

The post sites comscore data and compares Monster's 6% decline in global users to increases in traffic of 9% and 45% at CareerBuilder and Yahoo! HotJobs respectively.

You can read, 'Monster (MNST): Usage Trends Stink,' here.