The agreement will see Monster provide career- and job-related content on Yahoo’s homepages in the U.S. and Canada for three years.  Monster’s also getting the opportunity to negotiate similar agreements with other Yahoo properties worldwide.

Then, according to a press release, there may be "performance based annual payments calculated by clicks and expressions of interest, subject to annual floors and ceilings."  (No further details were given on this front.)

Anyway, Hilary Schneider, Yahoo’s Executive Vice President, explained the sale by stating, "The transaction with Monster enables us to continue to provide an important service to our users through the traffic agreement.  Yahoo! remains focused on its core businesses and delivering exceptional experiences to users, partners and advertisers."

Yahoo and Monster expect to complete the acquisition (and subsequently start the three-year traffic agreement) during the third quarter of this year.

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More than six months ago, reports indicated that Yahoo was trying to get rid of these divisions as Carol Bartz tried to focus on Yahoo’s core interests.  Intermittent reports since then hinted that Yahoo’s had difficulty getting other organizations to consider its asking prices.

Now, with respect to Yahoo Small Business, Jeff Bercovici wrote, "[A]fter finding a shortage of interest, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet firm has put the sale on hold, according to a source close to the situation."

And Rafat Ali added, "Also, we have been hearing that its jobs site Hotjobs’ sale process is not going well . . . .  Not a single confirmed bid came in when the process started, our sources say."

So it sounds as if Yahoo’s garage sale wasn’t exactly successful.  The big question is whether the company will lower its expectations and try again, or decide to keep Yahoo Small Business and HotJobs, after all.

CORRECTION: Whoops, sorry everybody (including Yahoo) . . . turns out at least half of this information was wrong.  Monster announced its acquisition of HotJobs this afternoon.

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Xoopit, which "connects with your email and lets you browse photos & videos, find files, and share with friends," is the supposed new Yahoo asset.  Kara Swisher reported that the deal will be announced tomorrow, and put Xoopit’s price in the neighborhood of $20 million.

Interestingly, Xoopit’s current homepage and "About Us" section focus a great deal on its connections to Gmail, but Yahoo Mail and Flickr at least rate a mention apiece, too.

As for what’s on the auction block, Connie Loizos identified HotJobs and Yahoo Small Business as being for sale.  Their price tags remain unknown, but it may be relevant to remember that Yahoo started the HotJobs acquisition process in late 2001 with an offer of $436 million.

Assuming nothing too wonky happens, then, Yahoo seems likely to come out of this whole thing with a fair amount of extra cash to show for it.

The idea is that this will help recruiters tie their dollars directly to their results. The recruitment community will get its first look at the product at the upcoming Society for Human Resource Management conference starting June 28 in New Orleans.

"Recruiters are being asked to find top talent using fewer resources than ever, and Yahoo!’s Pay Per Candidate model gives them the tools to increase the accountability of their listings," says Yahoo! HotJobs Vice President and General Manager Chris Merritt." With recruiters facing resume overload in today’s job market, the Pay Per Candidate solution will allow them to spend their time and budget on only the best candidates."

According to Yahoo’s site, Pay Per Candidate lets users:

- Closely manage costs for your online recruiting needs.

- Cap the number of Applies per job and re-allocate unused Applies to other jobs throughout the term of your contract.

- Save time, because when you use the HotJobs application process, you no longer have to evaluate candidates that haven’t been pre-screened by your questionnaire.

Recruiters can choose one of two application methods when using Pay Per Candidate: candidates complete the entire job application on the HotJobs site, or candidate clicks-through to their company’s hire site. With the first option, recruiters have the ability to pay only for pre-screened candidates. With the second, recruiters keep candidates on their career website for the application process.

More information about Pay Per Candidate can be found on this FAQ page (pdf). What do you think about the concept? 

HotJobs Smart Ads will work on behalf of passive jobseekers by turning job listings into display ads and showing the ads across the Yahoo Network.  Not that active searchers should mind the advertisements, either, since Yahoo stressed their relevance as an important highlight.

 

The second feature, Premium Company Profiles, is blessed with a fairly self-explanatory name.  A formal statement expands on matters by pointing out, "Working with popular Yahoo! properties such as Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Answers, each page comes with an added layer of information and insight about the company in addition to a full listing of positions available to job seekers."

Perhaps Yahoo doesn’t seem like the best company to boast about ads and job listings; recent executive departures and its deal with Google make the development seem ironic.  Also, it’s not hard to imagine some Yahoo employees "testing" HotJobs and happening to find their next places of employment.

Still, the economy has everyone on edge and some people out of work, and there’s no harm in having another option available when it comes to job sites.

Success in the job listings business means finding candidates that suit the recruiter’s requirements. Yahoo touted a new initiative today to enhance that pool of desirable job seekers through its HotJobs service.

Yahoo calls its new search ranking system R.E.A.L. They already consider it a success, noting in a statement how “applies” per listing have already increased by 25 percent, thanks to the new algorithm.

R.E.A.L. stands for the following:

R – Relevance: Matching text in job titles and descriptions to the keywords candidates use

E – Engagement: Measuring how well candidates respond to the job listing

A – Availability: Determining that the positions displayed are still unfilled

L – Location: Showing jobs in a location of interest to the candidate

The arrival of R.E.A.L. should improve classifieds in the important local job search market for members of Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium. Those sites use HotJobs, reaching 30 percent of daily US newspapers.

Yahoo said R.E.A.L. includes location-based job searching features which enhance the ability to narrow or broaden relevant job search results by zip code, city, nearby cities, full metro areas, or entire states. They also laid claim to fastest growing job board site, passing Monster.com per rankings from metrics firm comScore.

The newspaper industry has always been more interested in keeping money in-house rather than sharing even a little with others. Publishers have big egos, and depending on someone else to bring home the bacon doesn’t have much appeal, even with the newsprint industry facing financial troubles.

Even the newspaper-savvy duo of Yahoo’s Sue Decker and Hilary Schneider, architects of Yahoo’s HotJobs alliance with the print classified industry, aren’t appealing enough to keep the publishers’ eyes from wandering to other girls and fantasizing about their revenue undergarments.

Classified Intelligence recounted the recent deal with Kaango by Hearst and MediaNews, a $20 million infusion that gave them an 80 percent stake in the company. Kaango has deals with about a hundred newspapers for community-oriented classified sites.

There is no mincing of words when it comes to why Hearst and MediaNews bought into Kaango, as well as cutting Lee Enterprises in for a ten percent stake. They want to take on Craigslist as well as eBay’s classifieds product, Kijiji.

Details of the deal came as news to Yahoo, according to Classified Intelligence. A Yahoo spokesperson said the company was not aware of the Kaango announcement and requested more details about it from Classified Intelligence.

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The latest figures note Yahoo has about 415 daily papers and 140 weeklies participating in the effort, according to AP. Their arrangement provides the newspapers with wholesale pricing for placing listings on HotJobs, giving the papers room to sell online job classifieds at a profit.

An option to have Yahoo serve advertising on those newspaper websites should be available some time in 2008. Yahoo rolled out a long-awaited upgrade to its contextual ad system this year, with a ranking model that makes it work more like industry leader Google’s does.

Profitability at various levels for the consortium has not been enough to entice the biggest news publishers to join on with Yahoo. It has been suggested that Gannett and Tribune want to create their own ad network, rather than share any portion of revenue with a third party.

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Yahoo Newspaper Alliance Shaky?

“A restaurant serving only lunch and dinner can boost its sales quite a bit by opening for breakfast,” explained Alan D. Mutter in an article on Silicon Valley Insider.  “But it can’t add other meals in the second, third and fourth years to match the first-year bonanza.”

Of course, the restaurant might continue to benefit from breakfast revenues, just as newspapers won’t be abandoned by Yahoo.  And a couple of weeks ago, our own David Utter covered a Deutsche Bank report that looked favorably upon the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium.  Newspapers could find themselves locked into their arrangement with Yahoo, however, and unable to adapt to new trends.

Mutter identified our troubled economy as one such trend.  Yahoo’s Hotjobs has been a major contributor to the Newspaper Consortium’s success, and if employers stop hiring, Hotjobs’s value will be greatly lessened.  Yahoo itself isn’t doing so well, either, and that has to affect the matter in some way.

To get a conclusive answer, though, we may simply need to wait this one out; publishers had been joining the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium with some regularity, so any change (or lack thereof) in that pattern will indicate how far these concerns have spread.

Those deals for classifieds and other services provided by Yahoo for newspaper websites received a glowing review from Deutsche Bank analyst Paul Ginocchio. Newsosaur blogger Alan Mutter cited the analyst on an upbeat projection for the newspaper industry, fueled by deals with Yahoo:

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