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See Full StoryIt was only a matter of time. One of the first questions posed by analysts during a
conference call to discuss the takeover of HotJobs by Monster.com parent company TMP
Worldwide was the antitrust question.
The answer came swiftly and without qualification: TMP expects its takeover to sail
through regulatory approval without any hitches. That might be the case, but it doesn't
mean that Monster isn't a monster in the making.
In both cases I find it beneficial that there are a relatively large number of sites with different sets of expertise, geographic coverage, clients and philosophy. It makes searching more efficient and reduces the amount of non-relevant data that one has to wade through.
I have been watching Monster's buying spree with some consternation, as more and more of my favourite sites are gobbled up by TMP. While Monster was a favourite as well at one time, the fact that they are now becoming a huge homogenous lump of job data has made them far less appealing.
Perhaps Monster should consider splitting its site into different distinct sub-sites and separating the database into smaller ones containing data from only a sub-set of the whole market, both for jobs and candidates. While the answer may seem to lie in simply improving the database search functionality, the truth is that CVs and Job Specs are so vastly complex that in order for each to stay unique, you have to give the user the freedom of expression that makes accurate searching very difficult.
I for one will be working with smaller specialist sites in future, hoping that they don't fall prey to the big M.
Just my words. As someone looking for an intern, I don't want to wade through a gazillion CVs. Instead I would want to go to interns.com, click on my area and find exactly those that I want, and not all the "bright" ones that live in Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia and checked the box "worldwide" for availability.
BTW $13 jobs are more likely to be filled through a note in the window than through monster.com
