The Homa Files

Punch line: Online job-search and headhunting is changing rapidly, and frontrunner Monster is losing ground to CareerBuilderLinkedIn, and even Twitter

* * * * *

Excerpted from: Business week, Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble, June 25, 2009

US Cellular used to spend up to $4 million a year to post jobs and screen résumés through the three heavyweights of online job search—Monster, CareerBuilder, and Yahoo! HotJobs.

But with the 2009 recruiting budget slashed to $1 million and 2,500 openings to fill, the wireless carrier’s director of talent acquisition ditched the big job boards and instead inked a deal with social networking site LinkedIn. For an annual fee of $60,000, US Cellular now has access to the network’s 42 million members, many of whom are employed—the so-called passive candidates that recruiters covet, since conventional wisdom is the best people already have jobs. Using LinkedIn, USC recruiters made a hire in 30 days for a position that typically takes six months to fill.

For Monster, the growing appeal of LinkedIn to recruiters is just one more headache to contend with. Other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are also becoming popular destinations for employers. And niche sites such as TheLadders and BlueSteps, both of which target high earners, are gaining followers among recruiters and job seekers alike.

While traffic to Monster is up because of the growing ranks of the newly unemployed, its share of job listings among the big three has declined from nearly 40% in December 2007 to 34% in May. Monster has lowered prices for some key customers and hired 130 salespeople—a 31% increase—to win back business. In January, Monster unveiled a cleaner site that, among other things, reduced the number of steps required to upload a résumé from 20 to 4. A career-mapping feature shows job hunters how they can transfer from one field to another.

Monster’s next step is to address the one-size-fits-all nature of Monster’s site, which gets about 12 million unique visitors a month. It’s rolling out “contextual search” technology that distinguishes between, say, someone who went to Harvard and someone who lives on Harvard Avenue.

Perhaps Monster’s biggest threat comes from LinkedIn, a six-year-old social networking site with a distinctly professional bent.  For $7,000 per user at a client company, hiring managers get a customized LinkedIn Web site, or “dashboard,” and souped-up search capability so they can reach out to qualified candidates

Twitter is also gaining traction in the realm of job search. Kara Nickels got an e-mail one morning from an insurance industry client that needed 40 lawyers immediately for a big document review. The legal recruiter quickly sent a message—or “tweet”—to her 150 followers, which was re-twittered by legal blogs that follow her. By the time she arrived at her Chicago office, Nickels had 10 replies and filled every post by lunch. “With job boards it takes a couple days before people look,” she says. “But Twitter is immediate. I’ll still use the job boards, but if you don’t use social media now, you’re behind the curve.”

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_27/b4138043180664.htm

This entry was posted on August 7, 2009 at 7:30 am and is filed under Social Media & Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.