Why Monster and CareerBuilder Are Failing

In my humble opinion and experience, Monster and Careerbuilder are failing also because of “quality” employers that are on those boards. Never got a job from either of them. Don’t know a single person who had a job they held for more than couple of months who got it from there. Yes, I keep my resume on it, but it seems to only attract scamers and recruiters who need to stuff their queues with interviews to pretend they are working.
Good ol’ networking is still king (especially in my profession where they need to trust you first to hire you) and I stick to my trusty few recruiters who are true professionals.

I also had experience with both boards as an employer. I tried them, was disappointed, and never renewed.

But this is just my experience, yours may differ.

Monster and Careerbuilder fail on so many levels it’s ridiculous, they’ve become parodies of the newspaper ads they’ve replaced: inflexible, attrocious service, and unable to conceptualize new ways of doing business. Has anyone seen Brightfuse.com? Way to go on that Careerbuilder, how you can take an existing idea (LinkedIn) and instead of improving on it, make it wors, then Kudo’s to you!

We are working a plan to be job board free in the very near future, because aren’t just failing, but they suck worse than random unwelcome fungus on food.

@Apolinaras I don’t disagree with you. I wish there were a way that CB and Monster could use networking as a vehicle to attract both quality employees and employers.

@Jimmy You know what sucks wore than CB and Monster? Most employer websites. They are awful. StandOut Jobs is helping to fix that — but not soon enough.

@Tracy Holy crap, I looked at @thehiringsite is following me, too. I had no idea that was part of CB. One brand, one landing page, multiple & interesting destinations. How hard is this for big job boards?

My single biggest issue with CareerBuilder as a job seeker during my period of unemployment a couple years ago is the sheer amount of junk e-mail they send.

Almost immediately after removing my listings after finding gainful employment, I began receiving 1-5 e-mails *per day* about the site. I don’t recall any single one of them being useful. And this was after specifically opting OUT of receiving e-mail from them. I had to contact their support team to have my account completely deleted to stop the stream.

My other primary issue with Monster and CB (with apologies for a slight derail of the topic) are that they’re havens for recruiters which on the face of it isn’t a bad thing, but in my experience at entry-level, I always found that they’d send me for rather bogus job opportunities or they’d bring me in to interview, say nothing but good things about my prospects and then cease all contact with me.

I’m always amused when I get calls from recruiters I haven’t spoken to in several years asking how my job search is going. Networking is a far more powerful tool than someone paid on commission.

I can agree with the majority of the comments here. Both Career Builder and Monster is a tool used by recruiters to just mine through resumes in effort to find passive candidates. Also, there are so many boggus and unverified jobs that are posted out there, most of it is just another scam in which you have to invest another $200 – $500 out of pocket plus training time in order to get signed on with these companies.

Both of these job boards have taken over the local newspaper websites as their main search engine, making it difficult to pull up the local jobs. Often times you can pull up different jobs when you are not logged in versus being logged into the large job boards. Which really doesn’t add up.

Also what’s extremely irritating about these boards is the lack of information on the companies who advertise. I think there should be an archive of how many times that organization has posted that particular position. There are so many jobs that are reposted because obviously that company has a high turnover rate. So you know these are companies in which you want to avoid working for. To me it’s not fair for them to research candidates, but the candidates can’t research the company. There are so many hoops you have to jump through in order to apply for a job. Having to jump from one site to another and re-entering your data is absolutely rediculous. And for the most part, employers need to step from behind these job boards and fancy softwares and start interacting with the candidates instead of asking for everying short of a blood sample.

My CB rep stalks me. I mean really stalks me. Like he’ll call me five times in one day unless I pick up, and then call again the next week. Someone must have decided that customer service was how they’d differentiate themselves from Monster, but OMG that guy annoys the HELL out of me. He will NOT take NO for an answer, as in “NO I don’t need to post a job, I’ll call you when I do, or hey, just post it myself.”
What a waste of that guy’s time, and mine. He sounds so desperate when he calls, there’s got to be some unrealistic metric they’re held to and he must be missing it.

I disagree. I think that Monster and CareerBuilder are just fine as transactional sites. They are the go to brands when people need a job, and that’s enough. Most job seekers don’t want to be part of an open community. They’re competing for jobs and don’t want to share information with others.

The real issue is quality – quality of jobs, quality of user experience, and quality of information.

For most employers Monster and CB are like a college town bar at last call – they’re desperate to find someone. They try everything else before they have to post on these sites.

Monster and CB will continue to fail until the refocus on user experience, require employers to meet a minimum threshold of quality in their job postings, and stop trying to lock people into applying through their site. Instead of trying to own the conversation, they need to enable it.

There’s nothing wrong with offering a transactional service when you have a brand as big as these two. The problem is with offering a crap quality transactional service.

I just have to add to Jen’s frustration with the “new” Monster. Before our net was up and I was at the mercy of the public library, I could not even use the site because of the way the new bubbles pop up and the way the library has their monitors set. I get more junk e-mail than job search hits from them anyway, same as with CareerBuilder.

Additionally there are so many ads for the military, “work at home” deals (and I use that term loosely) and once you get to the actual job advertisements you’re already burned out. Then you get to wade through misspellings, things that don’t even make sense, and links that lead nowhere. It’s a challenge to find an actual person to contact for either a resume or a follow-up. I’d say eight times out of ten, I feel like my resume is just going in this black hole of information.

Granted, that’s the same problem with many corporate HR sites. There are big bold warnings to not try and contact anyone, and they won’t contact you unless they’re interested, and by the way don’t contact us, in case you didn’t read the first big bold thing on our page. In Texas it’s even more frustrating, because employers use WorkInTexas.com and that forces you to go through the Workforce offices to get basic information, or to even be told they can’t tell you the employer but give us your resume anyway.

I do administrative support, and finding alternative networking sites that are really focused on that is difficult (our “professional organization” feels more like the supper club than anything else and don’t get me started on the “presentations” they have.) I’ve felt from time to time that I would be better off just throwing a pile of resumes into the wind — I would know just as much about who winds up with a copy, and the ability to follow up would be as simple as most job sites and advertisements make it.

Sorry for the long comment, it’s just a subject that hits close to home for me.

They could both spend some $$ and resources smartening up their search and reco tools, too. Both are nearly worthless.

And I have to agree with many of the commenters in that I’ve never found a strong opportunity via either of those sites. LinkedIn has been extremely effective — even Craigslist has proven itself more valuable.

I usually work with recruiters directly as I usually am in a firm “on contract” through some house.

But I have to dive in here having spent some time on both boards.

First, too many recruiters just “sweeping” for resumes. Too many recruiters who know nothing of the field – spend some time on Wiki at least.
Go find me a job.

We are now wrestling with vast unemployment; so recruiters and HR people are using anything they can to discriminate applicants.

I saw a post a few days ago for a direct employee “must have DOORS”. It takes maybe two hours to teach DOORS from a user perspective. More significant, it is highly configurable, so the last DOORS I used will not look like your DOORS. Yet to use this as a discriminator tells me the employer will not invest two hours training in an employee – no wonder I contract.

Again Labview Matlab Perl Python Visual – folks, these are all tools to do the job. I have worked with most, and if you know the job the tool really doesn’t matter. This is equivalent to telling carpenters “Must have experience with Black and Decker hammers.” Any contractor work his salt – meaning any contractor who has been on more than a few gigs, changes tools like underwear. Again, this was a direct position! So I can have stock options ’cause those come from corporate – but two hours training is out of the question – can’t say I really want to work for you.

Lastly, I had a recruiter tell me “the principle doesn’t want direct applicants with too much contracting.”
Yeah, I’ll remember who you are when times are better again.