by Mandatory Marcus

Created on: June 18, 2009

Anybody who says Monster is not useful in a job search would, with some questioning, almost certainly amend that statement to say that Monster isn't as useful as they would like it be.

I certainly agree that at times is seems as though Monster is utterly useless. But the fact is that buried in the mess that is Monster.com, there are a handful of good jobs from good companies; which makes it impossible to say that it is completely useless.

Of course "useful" and "efficient" are completely different concepts, and while Monster can be useful...it is the furthest thing from efficient imaginable.

First, jobs are presented to job seekers (and vice-versa) based on "key word" and/or "Boolean" search methods. What that means to you and me is that if the word "accounting" is in my resume and the word "accounting" is in a job description, then the job is presented to me as a possible fit. Sounds logical...but then again if I have a degree in Accounting but have spent my career selling telecom equipment, I doubt that I am going to be gung-ho to apply to that senior accounting position. And if I do...my application is going straight to the "no" pile.

Secondly, jobs are presented to job seekers according to a "last in first out" algorithm. In other words, the job you see first is the job that was posted most recently. The order and presentation of the jobs has nothing to do with whether the job at the top of the list is a good fit for me or not. So what you end up with are the same jobs over and over again from all the usual suspects...with deep advertising pockets. This means the odds of a job seeker finding a unique position at a small company are very slim indeed. Since 70+% of new job growth comes from small companies; this is a big problem for a job seeker.

The third problem is the fact that Monster sells job postings to anyone posting for anything. It might be good for Monster's balance sheet to sell to anyone who can fog a mirror, but it makes the job seeker experience a nightmare. At any given time you can log in, do a job search and immediately start digging through pages and pages of "mystery" jobs posted by large national staffing firms (CyberCoders, Robert Half, etc.), work-at-home schemes and multi-level marketing programs.

So the bottom line is this. If you are a job seeker, it is possible to find a job via Monster.com; and therefore it has to be defined as "useful". You just need to know that getting anything of value from Monster.com is going to be a tedious, inefficient, cumbersome and largely frustrating process.

In fact, Monster should change it's slogan from "You're Calling is Calling" to "No Pain, No Gain".

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