Does Monster.com Help Job Seekers Manage Their Careers?

In our current economic downturn, job seekers have been flocking to sites like Monster to vie with one another for the few jobs that are available. HR professionals and hiring managers now have a lot of screening and filtering tools at their command that helps them decide which candidates to consider. I fondly remember the customer co-design session we did with Monster back in 2001, and the discovery that one of the critical measures of success for hiring managers was employee retention: Did the person they hired actually become a long-term, valuable employee? These customers indicated that the most important determinant of both desirability and retention was “cultural fit”—how well would the prospective employee mesh with the culture of the firm? After perusing the tools on the current Monster.com site (now 11 years later!), I didn’t see anything that would help either a job seeker or a prospective employer filter by cultural fit—apart from the size of the company you choose. And, yet, what prospective employees and hiring managers agreed upon over a decade ago was that whether the company had a centralized or decentralized/ top down autocratic or bottoms up consensus-driven decision-making culture was a big factor in determining cultural fit. I suppose that in today’s much more competitive climate, job seekers feel lucky to get any job—particularly one with reasonable benefits. And cultural fit may be best determined during the interviewing process.

Monster has come a long way since its inception in 1994 and since our consulting engagement in 2001. Today, Monster.com is part of a $1.1 billion global firm with many different web sites and employment services and advertising revenues—targeting many different vertical markets all over the globe. Its online tools and services are embedded into many companies’ internal job posting sites. Its BeKnown Facebook application helps job-seekers strut their stuff appropriately on Facebook. Monster has partnered with newspapers and with online publications like Ars Technica and Wired to provide interactive tools for those advertising jobs and those seeking jobs. Yet, the company is facing pressure—pressure from a soft global job market, pressure to innovate, and pressure from competitors and has “announced that it is exploring strategic alternatives with respect to maximizing shareholder value and retained Stone Key Partners LLC and BofA Merrill Lynch as financial advisors in connection with this review.”

Trying to Use Monster.com to Help with a Career Change

Ronni Marshak proposed doing a Customer Experience Test Drive of Monster.com for a critical customer scenario: “Help me decide what job(s) I should apply for.” I found this intriguing. Particularly so, since I knew that Monster’s original founder, Jeff Taylor, wanted Monster.com to be the first place people would come to when they wanted to think about changing their career paths. Over a decade ago, Taylor articulated the vision for Monster.com of offering all the services a job seeker might need, including training and education.

The scenario we tried to execute on the current Monster.com web site was not “find me a job.” It was the scenario many job seekers need to do before they’re ready to find a job: “figure out what kind of job/career I actually want to move to next.” Doing a great job at helping prospective job seekers zero in on the right career is a customer-critical scenario. According to one of Monster’s latest press releases, “55% of global workers are considering a career change in response to economic climate.”

So, Ronni and I were both surprised and a bit dismayed that Monster.com doesn’t do a great job on this critical scenario. Sure, there are a lot of tools and a lot of advice. But there’s no easy path to navigate. And many of the tools are confusing. There is a spiffy and easy-to-use “find me a job that fits my skills” tool that you encounter right at the top of the Monster.com home page. But there’s no equivalent tool or path to address the needs of the 55% of workers who want to think about what career might be better for them than the one they’re in now. The moral of the story, as Ronni summarizes: “Make sure that when you offer tools and information, you also provide clear guidelines about how to best use these tools and info to achieve your customer’s desired result.”

Here’s Ronni’s article:

Career and Job Hunting Advice
How Well Does Monster.com Help Prepare You for Your Job Hunt?
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, April 26, 2012