Is Monster.com any good?
I started looking into this, and found some interesting feedback including this piece “It’s a scary time for Monster.com” by Scott Kirsner this month with The Boston Globe:
Earlier this year, when Hans Gieskes’ son graduated from Connecticut College, Gieskes suggested that he post his resume on Monster.com, and start job hunting. Gieskes the Younger had a different idea. ”He said, ‘Dad, I’m using SimplyHired,’ because it gives him all the Monster listings, the listing from HotJobs, and all the other sites in one single search,” Gieskes recalls.
It was a surprising answer, since Gieskes was for a brief period the president of Maynard-based Monster. But now that Internet job hunting is more than 10 years old, the established leaders — companies like Monster, Yahoo’s HotJobs division, and CareerBuilder, a joint venture of several newspaper companies — may be showing a few flecks of gray, as a generation of scrappy young sites elbow in. SimplyHired, headquartered in Silicon Valley, is one new player, pulling together job postings from across the Web.
Gieskes’ new start-up, Cambridge-based H3, is another, offering cash bounties for quality referrals.
”You’re seeing a lot of activity, because the recruitment market is coming back,” says Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research. And the irony, Li says, is that where newspapers felt their business was being upended by websites like Monster in the mid-’90s, now it’s Monster, the online recruiting leader, with nearly $600 million in revenues last year, that is concerned about keeping its franchise.
”Anytime companies get big, they innovate less,” says Auren Hoffman, a San Francisco entrepreneur who earlier this year launched KarmaOne, a site that offers rewards to people who refer their friends or colleagues for open positions, similar to H3.
Hoffman and Gieskes both believe that cash can motivate people to circulate job listings through their personal networks, perhaps enticing highly skilled candidates to apply, even if they weren’t in the market for a new job.
”If you ask Americans how they found their current job,” Gieskes says, ”60 percent will say they got it through a network or a referral.”
The idea of dangling incentives to encourage people to tap personal networks for candidates is not new. In Boston, Refer.com tried the same tactic, before going out of business in 2001. ”They produced very bad quality candidates,” Gieskes says of Refer, ”because they allowed any stranger to put forward names of people to try to get a reward.”
Read the full article here
So a few minutes at Simply Hired showed them to be an excellent way to search the web for jobs. This still begs the question, is it worth the effort to post a resume at the online search engines? Are they searching the resumes for people rather then posting jobs and seeing who applies?
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