If you’ve been paying attention, you know Monster is in the process of “rebuilding its site from the ground up,” all set to knock everyone’s socks off come Jan. 10, 2009. CEO Sal Iannuzzi said in the most recent earnings call that the “almost 100 percent” overhaul “will be unique and unrivaled in the industry.” Big talk by an organization not know for blazing trails.
Among the improvements they’re touting include 1) Over 50 percent easier to become a Monster member, 2) Over 70 percent easier to upload a resume to Monster.com, and 3) On average, over 60 percent easier to apply to a job (all tracked by Internal Monster Data 2008).
Well, like you, I just couldn’t wait for January and decided to try and set-up an interview for more information. Granting us the first-ever, official conversation (it must’ve been official, because a PR guy was present), we spoke with Eric Winegardner, Monster’s vice president of client adoption.
All about the job seekers
“Our philosophy at Monster is focused on life improvement,” said Winegardner. “We do what makes sense to the job seeker. A good job equals a good life. This relaunch is a big first step in that direction. Our shift in focus will be around the seeker and the journey they’re on: Focus on the things that were broken and what was the new technology that we could implement to bring the job seeker something that wasn’t there before.”
According to a sales presentation we were able to get our hands on, the Jan. release will bring “New tools that let seekers plan their career paths, giving employers seekers who want to grow with their company. In short, by dynamically improving our seeker site, we’re providing you with better, more engaged candidates—and more impactful ways to reach them.”
Huh?
Winegardner explained the improvements through buzzwords like “career mapping” and “career snapshots.” Imagine you’re a VP of marketing. Monster will begin analyzing the road you took in becoming a VP of marketing. Maybe you were a manager before, and a public relations expert and a tradeshow manager before that. Monster hopes to bring you results, content and resources around that insight. Likewise, a “career benchmarking” tool will help job seekers ready themselves for the future against others in their industry.
Location seemed to be a big part of the new offering as well. Possibly similar to looking at a job description on Jobing, seekers will be able to Google Map their way to the jobs closest to where they live more easily.
What about Trovix?
For those waiting to see the integration of newly acquired Trovix technology, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. Winegardner said those changes won’t start taking place till the first half of 2009. For the foreseeable future, however, the way candidates upload resumes and employers post jobs will not change.
Search should become more algorithmic in nature as well. Traditionally, jobs have been served in date order, but Winegardner says to expect results to begin to be served more based on relevancy and behavior. Social networking and potentially integrating Affinity Labs technology “was discussed” internally at Monster but won’t happen for the Jan. 2009 relaunch. The new look will go live in 24 countries in 30 different languages with a progressive roll out to the rest of the world to follow.
The decision to put so much weight behind this new-and-improved Monster without integrating Trovix’s technology seems like a very risky move to me. Granted, job seekers don’t know Trovix from Plavix, but the industry is watching. And if this relaunch plants the company flat on its face in disappointment, future updates that actually might be interesting could fall on deaf ears.
For employers
Winegardner didn’t go into how employers would benefit from the relaunch to any great degree, but companies should expect to see greater integration into posting a job and promoting them via the Monster Career Advertising Network (CAN). A press release dated June 23, 2008 says, “CAN is capable of dynamic targeting, driven by a sophisticated set of algorithms that factor in job title, occupational category and location, among other key matching factors. Employers can track value with the ability to monitor the number of job views and job response.”
Pricing for CAN ranges from $475 to $50 depending on volume.
According to a current sales presentation, “Innovative products, such as Monster Career Ad Network, give you the power to showcase your postings where seekers live online. With Career Ad Network, you can extend your reach to those hard-to-find seekers, leveraging Monster and our vast network of diverse partner sites. The combined power of these new Monster platforms will make the recruiting process more productive and cost efficient, so seekers can quickly find their perfect job - yours.”
Aside from the CAN integration, though, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of meat in employer-related advancements. “Our new product platform is the foundation of our Life Improvement brand. This new philosophy is a strategic and powerful approach to managing your human capital sourcing needs.” Um, OK. Guess they’re expecting the job seeker enhancements alone to translate into a better employer experience.
Will it work?
The true test for the “new” Monster will have to wait till next year, when we can all test drive it for ourselves. Attendees at last month’s ERE conference got a taste, but no one we talked with could articulate whether the changes would make much of a difference, which, considering how much chest-beating they’re doing in promoting the Jan. release date, probably isn’t a good thing.
In response to seeing a demo given by Monster, one recruitment advertising agency professional said, “Honestly, it’s a bit hard to tell if it’ll make a difference. The presentation was pretty slick and there are some cool new features but they kept claiming how much easier it was going to be for the candidates, but I wasn’t seeing it. It may be but it was tough to tell from the demo.”
Want more insight? Checkout:
New Monster.com will be an ‘almost 100%’ rebuild, Iannuzzi says
Monster Creates Expo Buzz Over Its Coming “User-Centric” Launch
Monster.com Promises to Revolutionize Online Recruiting on 01-10-09
For a copy of the complete presentation, checkout our Facebook Fan Site under Posted Items.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:25 am
The best thing they could do for employers is cut prices and deliver more qualified candidates. A better seeker experience is great but monster has two masters, shareholders and customers. Each of them usually have divergent interests.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Joel- My reaction is probably similar to yours. Oh Please! Since Sal doesn’t know anything about the recruitment business, and none of the people he brought to the company know anything about the recruitment business, and all of the good product people have left, who exactly is defining and building this revolutionary new release? The bottom line that the match between seeker and employer simply doesn’t work that well, and all of the world class search people work at Google, Microsoft, or cool start ups.
November 14th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Joel - I was unimpressed at the ERE Expo when I saw the demo the were peddling. It was geared more towards the jobseeker and they had little to say about how it would affect the employer. If I were looking at it from a jobseeker perspective I think it could potentially have some promise, but I’m not.
I was also unimpressed with their presentation during the Vendor Smackdown.
November 14th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Fake statistic alert - paragraph 2 - Ease is not a metric. You can’t say something is “50% easier”. What was measured? drop out rate? time taken? number of clicks? Likert scale satisfaction ratings? Given that the data is “internal”, I suspect it is simply made up.
November 14th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Am I the only one reading this and shaking my head in not-so-stunned disbelief? I am utterly, totally, completely bored with Monster. “revolutionize” online recruiting - pffff. Feh. Rubbish.
I predict epic failure. Changing the site? Yeah, the site sucks, but that’s not their biggest issue. Its the model. They stand directly between candidate and company like HMO’s stand between patient and doctor. They dilute their customer’s employment brand continuity. The reason this is even an issue is that nowadays there a ways of recruiting on line that either don’t do that, or at least don’t charge for it.
The useful and game changing companies in my opinion are those with technologies or approaches that unleash the hidden connections between candidates and companies. The technologies that expose the true experience of working at a company and facilitate ‘actual’ connections via technology. The technologies that don’t stand between the candidate and company, but stand to the side and facilitate relationship, ideally, invisibly. Simply finding yet another way to display ads, or another affiliate channel, or another way to charge people for diluting their employment brand is lipstick on a pig defined.
Monster might change. They might change a lot, relative to the ‘old monster’. But what is changing? Their crappy user experience? There’s no amount of improved UI or UX they could come up with that will entitle them to use the word revolutionize. Let’s keep terms like that to the companies and people that deserve it, not the ones that are simply fixing stuff that’s been crappy for years.
Save yourself, your employment brand, your candidates experience and your company a lot of time, money, and respect. Run like hell from Monster and anyone else who just repackages the same old stuff and presents it as new or revolutionary.
Have they not learned from anything that’s happened on the web in the last 2-3 years? Don’t they know that the user determines revolutionary or not?
November 14th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
“the way candidates upload resumes and employers post jobs will not change” + “Over 50 percent easier to become a Monster member” = confused
November 15th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
As opposed as I am to the “post and pray” mentality that many recruiters have, I do see value in Monster from the perspective of their Career Ad Network *IF* it works the way they tell us it will. It sounds pretty cool and we are considering it. I am not expecting much from the re-launch, but if it turns out that there is something to it, I will be pleasantly surprised.
November 15th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I participated in the demo last week and saw some pretty good features for the candidate but really did not see anything that would make an employer say “Wow”. We’ll see I guess. It seems to me the employer side should get the most benefit out of a redesign or it’s still the same ol’ Monster wearing a different mask!
November 15th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
If you make the experience more engaging for job seekers wont that help bring more traffic to the site which in the end will help employers more?
November 17th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Monster’s user interface has been so bad for so long, and their usage stats relative to other job boards have lagged, and now they are run by folks who come from outside the HR recruiting space… I am not holding my breath for any new site release.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:27 am
So all I ever hear is that employers want “passive” candidates. If I’m a passive candidate why would I upload my resume anywhere just to compromise my privacy, and potentially have my employer find out I’m looking?
Active candidates care about benchmarking and career path, but if I’m in a position do I really have that kind of time to use all of those tools. Statistically speaking the lowest job searches happen on the weekend.
The real skinny it seems behind this “relaunch” is another way for Monster to grow their resume database, and pitch that to employers. Which is fine if you want to share the same candidates that everyone else is going after.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Are we just putting lipstick on this barn yard animal or is the a functional change. Lipstick we don’t need. Simple functionality without the hacker threats would be a better marketing tool.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Career Paths - it is hard as hell to predict a career path in today’s helter skeltor economy why doesn’t Monster focus on the best damned matching system with no bells or whitles to distract job seekers.
November 20th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
That is my son’s birthday. I am pleased that Monster would honor him in this way.