At the beginning of this week, we told you that a source had informed us Monster laid off about 200 employees. The company is now officially confirming those layoffs and announcing the opening of a new technology center.
On Wednesday, the company announced its plans to open a new Technology Center of Excellence & Innovation in Cambridge, Mass. Monster is now actively recruiting for about 80 new technical positions to be located at the center, although there is the potential to add a total of 170 new positions.
Kathy O’Reilly, senior manager of media relations at Monster, said the positions the company is looking to fill are “very specific.” The company is already getting the word out about just who and what they’re looking to hire. For instance, the Monster Careers Twitter page lists an opening for a senior network engineer.
Along with the opening of the new center will come an effort to make organizational changes to shift or add talent and skills within the company. Those organizational changes include the elimination of about 160 positions within the global product and technology group, with about 50 jobs in Maynard being affected.
An unnamed former manager-level employee at the Maynard site told Mass High Tech Business News that the layoffs affected staff members who had been working on the integration of Trovix Inc. Monster acquired that semantic job search product last year for $72.5 million.
Despite the layoffs, Monster has created a new leadership position, which is focused on long-term strategic planning and customer engagement. The company also has consolidated the employer and seeker product development teams and issued several related promotions.
“Over the past two years we have successfully re-launched our employer and seeker sites on a global basis and we have made substantial progress on the consolidation of our various operating platforms which has resulted in a need for different skills and expertise as we pursue our next generation of product and search technologies,” CEO Sal Iannuzzi said. “We believe that our new technology center will provide the physical and personnel resources to help us successfully execute on our strategic investments. We are making what we believe are the right moves to create the new products and services our customers need.”
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July 10th, 2009 at 9:07 am
I feel Monster still have not understood the recent market shift in the online recruiting space. They are failing to capitalize on their leadership position. Products & services have not been improved in many years and frankly I have no idea what their army of engineers doing.
There has been many departures at management level. Now I hope the company has the right leadership team in place to grow sales. There are lot of challenges in the market.