The latest — and possibly most narrowly focused — is Just Drinks, a job board for people looking for work in the beverage industry.

We aren’t just talking about bartenders here — the site includes everything from sales and marketing to manufacturing to finance and HR. The common thread is all the jobs are for companies that make and sell wine, beer and other beverages.

Odds are you won’t have use for this particular site, but it’s appearance is representative of the state of online job boards: More and more recruiting sites pop up every day, many catered to a niche group, giving recruiters more options for attracting talent.

When you’ve got a job to fill, look to see if there are any applicable niche boards out there.

Candidates are often more honest in their LinkedIn profiles than in the resumes they send employers.

At least that’s what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said at the Social Recruiting Summit held recently at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

His reasoning: Resumes are read only by a few people in a company, who know nothing about the candidate. On the other hand, candidates might have hundreds of LinkedIn connections, and in theory, know or have worked with all of them.

Reid’s point: It’s pretty hard to lie publicly in front of current or former colleagues.

Of course, LinkedIn profiles aren’t really replacements for resumes — most users don’t put the same detail into a profile, and there aren’t many versions tailored to different types of positions.

But some experts recommend finding a candidate’s profile to quickly make sure it matches the info the candidate sent to you.

Not putting the proper care into building the page could cost a company some qualified candidates — after all, no matter how applicants hear about a job, they’ll almost always head to the company’s Web site before doing anything.

Here are four big mistakes many companies make on their Careers Web page, according to CTO Joe Rotella, speaking at the 2009 Society for Human Resources Management conference in New Orleans:

1. Using a generic e-mail address to collect applications — People want to talk to people, Rotella says. It looks better to the candidate if the company lists the HR manager or a recruiter’s address instead of “hr@company.com.”
2. Hiding the important information — The most useful or most interesting information should appear on a page before the user has to scroll. Keeping the pages arranged correctly involves working with IT to test the site on different browsers and configurations.
3. Ignoring what the audiences wants – The key question when making any decision about the site should be, “What does the target audience want to see.”
4. Dumping all the information into an FAQ section – Rotella calls FAQs the “junk drawer of the Web.” All relevant info should have already appeared in other sections, he said.

More than 64% of employers expect staffing levels to remain steady in this year’s second quarter, according to a recent CareerBuilder survey. Just 14% said they plan on adding staff. Another 14% will reduce the number of employees, and 7% aren’t sure.

As for 2009 so far:

• 13% of employers increased headcount in the first quarter
• 16% reduced headcount, and
• 60% saw no change.

Companies’ salary plans for this quarter follow a similar pattern:

• 46% expect compensation to stay flat
• 29% expect to give raises averaging from 1% to 3%
• 12% expect raises to range from 4% to 10%
• 1% will give raises greater than 10%, and
• 5% expect compensation to decrease.

Don’t ask people to e-mail you.

Apparently, spammers have been trolling Twitter to locate fresh e-mail addresses to add to their lists. The common strategy is to use a program that searches the site for phrases like “E-mail me at” or “Contact me at” and automatically copies the address that follows.

Experts recommend keeping e-mail addresses out of Twitter posts. In a post about an open position, for example, instead of giving an e-mail address to send resumes, give readers a link to a listing on a job board or your company’s site.

This employer’s taken the concept of online background checks to a new level.

Candidates applying for jobs with the city of Bozeman, Montana, are asked to list “any and all” Web sites, chat rooms and social networking groups they use (“including but not limited to Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”) — along with their usernames and passwords.

Many hiring managers Google applicants’ names or look for them on Facebook, but actually logging in to their personal profiles is something new entirely.

Why does Bozeman want that access? According to city attorney Greg Sullivan, it’s “to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the city,” The Consumerist reports.

Sullivan also said the city doesn’t look at “the things that the federal Constitution lists as protected things” (whatever that means).

The story drew a lot of attention and outcry from the media, potential Bozeman employees and HR pros. That’s not surprising, considering there’s a debate going on about whether hiring managers should even look at candidates’ profiles, let alone obtain log-in information.

Apparently all the press got the city rethinking that part of the application. In a recent press release, Bozeman announced it will “suspend its practice of reviewing candidates’ password protected internet information until the City conducts a more comprehensive evaluation of the practice.”

What do you think? Did the public overreact to Bozeman’s hiring practice, or was the negative response justified?

Should social networking profiles play any role in the background check process at all?

Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Most are spending more time on social networking sites and less money on job boards like CareerBuilder and Monster, according to a recent survey by Jobvite, a recruiting software provider.

Of the 440 HR pros who responded, 72% said their company will invest more in recruiting through social networks this year. Meanwhile, more than half expect to spend less on job boards.

What online tools are getting the most use? The most popular social networks for recruiters and HR pros:

• Linkedin (used by 80% of those who responded)
• Twitter (42%)
• Facebook (36%)
• Jobster (17%)
• Myspace (13%).

Other traditional, low-cost methods are getting more attention in this economy as well — for example, 68% of companies said they plan to increase the use of employee referrals.

The company’s working on a formula that can help them predict who’s most likely to resign.

The formula, which is still being tested and kept secret, uses data from performance reviews, surveys and pay and performance histories to identify employees who are likely to quit in the near future, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Presumably, they’ll take what they find and look for ways to convince those employees to stay.

Google’s had some retention issues lately, as several top employees have left the company. But is designing an equation to identify potential quitters the answer, or is it a needlessly complicated technical solution for an age-old personnel problem?

Some folks think it’s the latter. “They need to come up with ways to keep people engaged,” career consultant Valerie Frederickson was quoted as saying in the WSJ article. “If Google was doing this enough, they wouldn’t be losing all these people.”

Sounds like the general advice every company needs to follow.

Regular, old-fashioned networking.

A recent survey by AfterCollege.com asked recent graduates to pick the job-searching methods they found to be most effective. The top two options were searching job boards and applying directly through a company’s Web site, followed by various types of networking, such as:

• talking to someone who works at an employer of interest
• attending a job fair, and
• talking to friends or family members.

Other preferred methods include asking professors for help, looking at ads in a newspaper and attending information sessions at a school.

Last on the list: using social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, with only 11% of users finding them to be effective job searching tools.

What does it mean? While companies have been able to find employees through social networking sites, like any recruiting tools, they need to be used in conjunction with other strategies. Focusing too much on one avenue, especially a brand new one, limits the audience you can reach.

Regular, old-fashioned networking.

A recent survey by AfterCollege.com asked recent graduates to pick the job-searching methods they found to be most effective. The top two options were searching job boards and applying directly through a company’s Web site, followed by various types of networking, such as:

• talking to someone who works at an employer of interest
• attending a job fair, and
• talking to friends or family members.

Other preferred methods include asking professors for help, looking at ads in a newspaper and attending information sessions at a school.

Last on the list: using social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, with only 11% of users finding them to be effective job searching tools.

What does it mean? While companies have been able to find employees through social networking sites, like any recruiting tools, they need to be used in conjunction with other strategies. Focusing too much on one avenue, especially a brand new one, limits the audience you can reach.