Monster (website)

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Monster.com
Type	Public (NASDAQ: MNST)
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Maynard, Massachusetts, United States
Key people	Sal Iannuzzi, CEO Jeff Taylor, founder
Industry	Job Search Engine
Website	www.monster.com

Monster.com (NASDAQ: MNST) is an employment website. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics (November 2006). It was created in 1999 by the merger of The Monster Board (TMB) and Online Career Center (OCC), which were two of the first and most popular career web sites on the Internet. Monster has a powerful job search engine which those seeking work can use to find job offers that match their skills and (present or preferred) locales.

Today, Monster is the largest job search engine in the World, claiming over a million job postings at any time and over 73 million resumes in the database (2Q07) and over 42 million job seekers per month. With approximately 5,000 employees in 26 countries, the company has a powerful global brand and unparalleled international reach. Monster is the only pan-European employment website and is growing fast in developing markets such as India.

Monster also maintains the Monster Employment Index.

Jeff Taylor founded The Monster Board and served as CEO and "Chief Monster" for many years.

1 History
- 1.1 Irregular Stock Option Grants Backdating Scandal
2 Criticism
3 Lawsuits
4 References
5 External links
- 5.1 News and media

[edit] History

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Jeff Taylor contracted Christopher Caldwell of Net Daemons Associates to develop a facility in an NDA lab on a Sun Microsystems Sparc 5 where job seekers could search a job database with a web browser. The machine was moved to sit under a router in a phone closet in Adion (a human resources company owned by Taylor) when the site went live in April 1994.

Initially, the site was populated with job descriptions from the newspaper segment of Adion's business with the permissions of the companies advertising the jobs.

Later in 1994, The Monster Board issued a press release that was picked up and provided needed exposure to drive people to the web site. Monster was the first public job search on the Internet; first public resume database in the world and the first to have job search agents or job alerts.

When TMP acquired Adion, the site was moved into BBN Planet's web hosting facility where it grew from 3 SPARC-1000s to become the centerpiece of the globally distributed network it is today.

TMP went public in December 1996, with its shares traded on Nasdaq under the symbol “TMPW”. In 1998, TMP acquisitions expanded the Recruitment Advertising network. TMP became one of the largest recruitment advertising agencies in the world.

In June 1998, The Monster Board moved its corporate headquarters out of a small office above a Chinese restaurant in downtown Framingham, Massachusetts to an old textile mill in Maynard, Massachusetts that formerly housed Digital Equipment Corporation.

In January 1999, The Monster Board became known as Monster.com after merging with Online Career Center, another of TMP Worldwide's properties. The first post-merger president of the new Monster.com business was Bill Warren, the founder of Online Career Center. Bill Warren received the 1997 Employment Management Association's prestigious Pericles Pro Meritus Award, an honor presented by EMA/SHRM in recognition of being the founder of online recruiting on the Internet.

Recognizing that job hunting often leads to relocation, Monster launched Monstermoving.com in 2000 to provide consumers with the comprehensive resources necessary for a successful move. In 2000, Monster acquired Jobtrak and created Monstertrak.com. Jobtrak was founded in 1987. Monstertrak.com is geared towards college students and alumni seeking a job.

TMP Worldwide was added to S&P 500 Index in 2001. TMP Worldwide changed its corporate name to Monster Worldwide, Inc. and began trading under the new Nasdaq ticker symbol "MNST" in 2003.

Monster.com advertised on the Super Bowl starting in 1999 and every year through Super Bowl XXXVIII. Monster's first-ever Super Bowl ad, "When I Grow Up," (created by Mullen) asking job seekers, "What did you want to be?" It is the only commercial named to Time magazine's list of the "Best Television of 1999." As the official online career management services sponsor of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games and 2002 U.S. Olympic Team, Monster had a strong presence at the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

In August 2005, founder Jeff Taylor left Monster to create Eons, Inc..

In May 2007^[1] Monster launched their first (NA and EU) Mobile services offering Mobile job search and career advice.

[edit] Irregular Stock Option Grants Backdating Scandal

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Backdating an option means retroactively setting the option's strike price to a day when the stock traded at a lower price. An option with a lower strike price is more valuable because it's less expensive to exercise. The practice is not necessarily illegal, but must be disclosed to shareholders.^[2] In July 2006, the company said it might restate financial results for the year that ended December 31, 2005, and previous years to record additional noncash charges for stock-based compensation expenses relating to various stock option grants.^[3]

In September 2006, Monster suspended Myron Olesnyckyj pending the internal review irregular stock option grants.^[4] He had held the titles of senior vice president, general counsel and secretary.^[5]

On October 9, 2006 Monster named William M. Pastore, 58, chief executive after Andrew J. McKelvey resigned his posts as chairman and chief executive. McKelvey retained his seat on the board as chairman emeritus.^[6] The company said on October 25 that it found pricing problems in a "substantial number" of its past option grants, and as a result it expected to restate its results from 1997 through 2005.^[7]

On October 30 2006, Andrew J. McKelvey, resigned from its board after refusing to be interviewed for the company’s internal stock options investigation.^[8] McKelvey also stepped down as chairman emeritus, a position he assumed after giving up the chief executive and chairman jobs earlier in month during a scandal involving options backdating.^[9]

On November 22, 2006 Monster terminated Myron Olesnyckyj, the company's lead lawyer, as part of its investigation into past stock-option grant practices. In a statement, the company said Olesnyckyj was terminated "for cause."^[10]

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has issued a subpoena to the company over options backdating, and a special committee of company directors has said it wants to complete its own investigation by the end of the year. The company has delayed filing its earnings results for the second and third quarters. Second-quarter results are expected December 13th. Third-quarter numbers would be issued "as soon as practicable," according to a November 7th statement from the company.^[11]

Monster Worldwide Inc. stated that it has received a notice from Nasdaq about a possible delisting of its shares due to the company's failure to file its third-quarter earnings report.^[12]

In April 2007 Monster named Sal Iannuzzi as chairman and CEO.^[13]

[edit] Criticism

Monster has recently been to blame in several instances of personal information theft. In less than two weeks, in August 2007, Monster had numerous leaks that resulted in the loss of millions of customers' data to identity theft.^[14]^[15] Although Monster waited several days to announce this leak (drawing heavy criticism), they have recently announced new security measures to prevent this happening again.^[16]

[edit] Lawsuits

In 2007, Monster filed a lawsuit against the respective owners of the domain, "jobs.com", for infringing on its intellectual properties and rights^{[citation needed]}. The site [jobs.com] was, and as of this day, still is, utilizing the "Monster" logo on its domain. The case is yet to be heard in a court of law.