Monster Moves to Restore Faded Brand via Social Media, Challenge LinkedIn

The business of tech and web development is often  notably lacking in sentimentality. The ethos is generally that whatever is being supplanted probably deserved what it got and whoever is doing the supplanting is probably superior.

But there remains a poignancy about enterprises that 'got it' in the early days and then lost their way.

Monster.com was one such business. Before LinkedIn and the overarching move to mobile, Monster was the first aggregator of online job search opportunities. It was, in some respects, the Amazon of its time in that field since it was primarily responsible for driving local daily newspapers out of the job listings business.

It became famous for semi-outrageous ads, especially during the Super Bowl in the late 90s and early 00s that generated a lot of attention and helped solidify the notion that the web was going to change the way a lot of things were being done.

But then LinkedIn came along with an even more value-added appeal (don't just change jobs, think about your skills and expand your career options) so Monster faded though it still generates substantial revenues as the following article explains. The challenge now for Monster is to harness the power of social media to provide the level of service job seekers and hirers have come to expect in a far more competitive environment. JL

Vindu Goel reports in the New York Times:

Just as Monster rode the web to greatness in its early days, it must figure out how to stay on top of the social wave now if it is going to endure.
Remember Monster.com?

In the late 1990s, it capitalized on the rise of the web to put employment ads and workers’ résumés into vast searchable databases online, effectively killing off print newspapers’ Help Wanted sections. Pumped up by fast growth, witty Super Bowl ads and general dot-com mania, the stock of its parent company hit $92 a share in early 2000.

Then the disrupter was itself disrupted. Competing websites, as well as aggregators that scanned many sites for job listings and put them in one place, began to eat into Monster’s business. LinkedIn was born and became a global behemoth by positioning itself as an upscale matchmaker that helped people build careers, not just find the next job.

Today, the company that owns Monster.com, renamed Monster Worldwide, is a shadow of its former self, and its stock trades for less than $4 a share. It still earns substantial revenue, $194.4 million in the second quarter of this year, from its job board and various other services. But now it wants to recapture some of its past luster by offering new cutting-edge tools for employers.

Its latest products, both rooted in start-ups acquired by Monster this year, use big-data snooping and social-ad targeting to improve the process of matching job openings and potential applicants.

The more developed of the two new tools, called TalentBin, works by building profiles of individual workers. But unlike LinkedIn, it does so without their active participation or consent. Instead, TalentBin scans publicly posted information on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup and Twitter, as well as what people have put on industry-specific sites, such as GitHub for software engineers and Dribbble for visual designers, to craft the dossiers.

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A Monster social ad via Twitter. Monster bought two start-ups to help its next act.Credit

It then allows employers to run their job listings against the database to find people who meet certain criteria, such as “knows a lot about Java programming.”

Recruiters can also study the dossiers to craft personalized email pitches to top candidates, citing personal or professional details from their profiles — something like “I loved the shoe designs you posted on Coroflot.”

Creepy? Maybe a bit, acknowledged Pete Kazanjy, a vice president for product and technology at Monster and a co-founder of TalentBin. After all, most of the people receiving the job pitches do not know that these dossiers on them exist and probably are not even looking for a new job.

But he argued that people know they are being tracked by Facebook, Google, Yahoo and legions of unnamed data brokers. Receiving a thoughtful pitch about a new job that fits your talents and interests is a lot better than getting those generic emails and spam that recruiters so often send out. Someone might think, “You took the time to notice that I joined a Swift Meetup? I’m going to click on that,” he said.

For employers, Mr. Kazanjy said, TalentBin addresses a persistent problem with LinkedIn: Individuals’ profiles on that service are often outdated and incomplete, leading to bad search results for employers looking for candidates. (Two employers who use Monster’s services, UPS and Facebook, declined to discuss them, as did LinkedIn.)

For now, TalentBin is focused on tech and design workers, with health care coming next. So most of us have not yet been vacuumed into its files. (If you want to see any profile on you or to be deleted from the database, you can fill out a form on the website.)

The other new Monster tool, which will be rolled out for testing by employers this week, takes all the information that Monster has picked up about individuals — from TalentBin, Monster résumés, Twitter profiles and other sites it has scanned — and uses that to advertise specific jobs to them on Twitter.

Let’s say UPS, one of the first testers, is looking for truck drivers in Pittsburgh. Monster’s social-ads product will find everyone in its database who has mentioned a truck driving background and lives in that region, then send them an ad on Twitter about the UPS positions. Using Twitter’s card technology, Monster can attach much more information about the job than can fit in a 140-character message.

“If a user clicks on that job, we can say with a high degree of certainty that they feel they are good for that job,” said Joe Budzienski, a Monster vice president for product and technology and co-founder of Gozaik, the start-up that initially developed the technology. “We are trying to narrow it down so employers don’t have to sift through résumés.”

Mr. Budzienski sees the technology as particularly helpful for filling job categories with a lot of openings, such as temporary and customer service positions, in which the employer’s challenge is to find enough qualified applicants. In addition to UPS, early testers will include Blue Shield of California, eBay, Geico, Manpower and Target.

In Monster’s testing with its own job openings, he said, people who received the job ads on Twitter clicked on them as much as 8 percent of the time — a much higher response rate than for the typical social ad. Of those who clicked, more than 10 percent went on to apply.

Monster is so confident its technique will work that it is charging a flat rate of $75 to $115 per job posting and will guarantee that employers get at least one respondent for every one.

Tammy Caldwell, director of talent acquisition at UPS, declined to discuss Monster in particular but said about 30 percent of the company’s job applications came from social and mobile channels this year. “With social, we can get to a lot more people with a lot less spend,” Ms. Caldwell said.

Just as Monster rode the web to greatness in its early days, it must figure out how to stay on top of the social wave now if it is going to endure.

“What we are looking to do is expand beyond the job posting to make recruiting more effective and efficient,” said Mark Conway, Monster’s chief information officer.