The M2 Release Plugin doesn't work with Maven 3. And even if you select Maven 2 for the build job, the Release plugin still tries to use the version of Maven it finds on the system path, and crashes with the following exception:

...
[INFO] Executing goals 'clean install'...
[INFO] Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/codehaus/classworlds/Launcher
[INFO] Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.codehaus.classworlds.Launcher
[INFO] at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
[INFO] at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
[INFO] at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
[INFO] at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307)
[INFO] at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
[INFO] at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:248)