Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

An anonymous e-mail came across my desk last week charging Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi with deleting content on Yahoo! Finance’s message board containing less than flattering words for the stock and its leadership.

“Sal our CEO seems to be upset with my Yahoo MB posting and keeps getting it pulled down! He cannot handle detractors who have figured him out. Here’s to free-speech,” said someone calling himself “Tim Goldman.”

Now, there’s no way I’m aware of that anyone can publicly know Iannuzzi is manipulating Yahoo!’s message board, or that this source is even legit. However, the post in question is in Google’s cache but not currently live on the message board (someone is even asking for it to be re-posted). Therefore, the post did, in fact, exist at some point (last indexed on Nov. 22) and was deleted at some point thereafter.

So what’s causing all the fuss? Here you go:

Investor day disaster-so who cares any more?
The investor day was a complete disappointment to Sal. He was so upset that more analysts did not turn up at JFK. The ones that did show to continue to show no support for Sal or his team. It’s a $5 stock by end of 2008.

I found it funny that both Darko and Steve Cooker both tried to make it known that they came in just before Sal..so as to disassociate themselves from the team led by Pastore/Pogorzelski (the guy with the real brains behind Monster)that took the stock from $8 to $60.

Darko was his usual truculant self and his star wars product roadmap was laughable. Did he really expect analysts to read it? He is completely useless and all his does is make a bee-line for Sal’s office when the going gets tough. But Sal will turn on him in January when there is zero new for the sales team to flog. Tell me again how a new job wizard competes with CraigsList or why enhanced candidate manager is a selling point vs HJobs? Who do seekers need their own home page a la MySpace? Good luck with networking.

Darko tried to justify spending $70M on Trovix by saying he acquired it for contextual seacrh. What a scam. No due diligence means they bought a lemon.

Ted the mkting guy is like the guy from the office. His big announcements were:
1. Do more with less.
2. Do the Superbowl (innovative)
3. Think local, act global (he should trademark that one)
4. Innovate or else. (CAN as a product is around for over a yr- no future there).

Poor Ted is miserable and is trying to understand how he was scammed by Sal. Give us a smile once in a while Ted please. Or else.

Cooker’s big thing was Teaming and Geos. He is moving all the accounts around and he will lose customers and reps. He is so far out of his depth. Another re-thread.

Andreas could not answer a simple question on pricing- not surprising since they eliminated the pricing team. Surely he could have anticipated a question on pricing?

What we did not hear:
1. How Monster will compete with Craigslist.
2. Why Monster is looking at acquiring HotJobs for $400-500MM.
3. Why bar-coders and bankers feel they are qualified to run an online recruiting company.
4. Why they spend $90M on capex in a down economy.
5. What they are doing to take the company private.
6. When Monster has to go back to it’s bankers for more loans as it’s on path to self-destruction with acqs and restructuring.

The analysts no longer believe Sal. No wonder he has a headache and is angry. Let’s hear some more on corporate philanthrophy from Lise P. Maybe we all can have 100% bonuses again this year in Maynard-please? Sal is clearly not qualified to be a CEO. Here’s to $5.

Pretty juicy stuff that certainly sounds like an insider, but it will remain hearsay unless someone official comes forward (which isn’t going to happen). A current post on the message board says Yahoo! HotJobs is interested in acquiring Monster, which could explain Y!’s motivation to keep the message board clean of negative comments, but that’s just for the big-time conspiracy theorists out there. And you know who you are.