| URL | www.monster.com |
|---|---|
| Slogan | "Your calling is calling" |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Job search engine |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | Multilingual |
| Owner | Monster Worldwide |
| Created by | Monster Worldwide, Inc. |
| Launched | 1999 |
| Alexa rank | 643 (January 2012[update])[1] |
| Revenue | Banner ads, referral marketing |
| Current status | Active |
Monster.com (NYSE: MWW) is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. 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 is primarily used to help those seeking work to find job openings that match their skills and location.
Today, Monster is the largest job search engine in the world,[2][3][4][5] with over a million job postings at any time and over 150 million resumes,[6] in the database (2008) and over 63 million job seekers per month. The company employs approximately 5,000 employees in 36 countries. Its headquarters are in Maynard, Massachusetts, United States. In October, 2010, Indeed.com slipped past Monster.com to become the largest job site in U.S.A.[7][8]
Monster also maintains the Monster Employment Index.
Jeff Taylor founded The Monster Board and served as CEO and "Chief Monster" for many years.
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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.
In November 2000, seeking to capture the entry-level job market, Monster acquired JOBTRAK, which at the time had partnerships with more than 1,500 college and university career centers. JOBTRAK was founded in 1987 by Jeff Wohlwend, Connie Ramberg, Ken Ramberg and David Franey. Monster rebranded JOBTRAK as MonsterTRAK and continues to operate the site to target college students and alumni seeking jobs and career advice.
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.
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 April 2002 Monster purchased the Jobs.com URL and Trademark for $800,000.[9] Then Founder and Chairman Jeff Taylor was quoted as saying "Jobs.com is a desirable URL."
In August 2005, founder Jeff Taylor left Monster to create Eons.com.
In April 2007, Monster named Sal Iannuzzi as chairman and CEO.[10]
In May 2007[11] Monster launched their first (NA and EU) Mobile services offering Mobile job search and career advice.
In July 2008[12] Monster acquired Trovix, a semantic job search engine, for USD $72.5 million. Monster has indicated that it plans to replace their job search and candidate matching with Trovix's technology.
In February 2010, it was announced that Monster would acquire its rival, HotJobs, from Yahoo! for $225 million dollars. As part of the deal, Yahoo will promote Monster's services on its web sites as part of a traffic sharing agreement with the company.[13]
Yahoo! HotJobs, formerly known as hotjobs.com, was an online job search engine. hotjobs.com provided tools and advice for job seekers, employers, and staffing firms. It was acquired by Yahoo! in 2002, but was then acquired by Monster Worldwide, owner of its major competitor Monster.com in 2010. HotJobs was later shut down and merged into Monster.com.
hotjobs.com was founded by Richard Johnson and was based at 24 West 40th Street, 12th floor in New York City, just across from Bryant Park. Johnson had previously founded the RBL Agency with Ben Carroccio and Liz Johnson (RBL), a boutique employment agency for technologists. The initial website was launched in early 1996 as RBL Agency which evolved in to the Online Technical Employment Center (OTEC) in 1999, and only featured technical jobs. Founding employees Christopher G. Stach II, Earle Ady, and Allen Murabayashi designed and coded the first iterations of the site on Silicon Graphics Indy workstations for C application development, Apple Macs for content creation, and the site ran on Sun and SGI hardware.
The company's first advertising effort was as a Yahoo! site of the week, which at the time could be purchased for $1000.
hotjobs participated in one of Jupiter Communications' first conferences at the New York Sheraton in February 1996. It was here that Johnson spotted Ginna Basinger, who was working for the Sheraton at the time, and offered her a position as the first hotjobs sales person. The product was given away to the first 100+ clients to gain employment content to attract job seekers.
Thomas Chin joined the organization in October 1996 while attending Columbia University, and eventually became the organization's chief scientist.
In the summer of 1997, Johnson decided to expand the operations, and brought a number of recruiters over from the RBL Agency to join the salesforce. Dimitri Boylan joined at this time heading up the sales and marketing effort. Over Labor Day weekend in 1997, the first remote sales office was opened in Burlingame, CA by Earle, Kelly Michaelian & Michael Tjoa. This was a joint venture between hotjobs & otec. Ginna Basinger moved from New York to California to manage the office, hiring the company's first non-New York employee, Michael Johnson, in August 1997 as an Account Executive. Quickly outgrowing the space, the Burlingame office was moved to downtown San Francisco in the Summer of 1999 where it remained through the disposition of the company in 2002.
hotjobs developed "softshoe" a private label job board and applicant tracking system in 1997. Lucent Technologies was the first client of this product.
In September 1997, hotjobs shed the technology-only focus by adding job categories for "Finance/Accounting" and "Sales/Marketing." The first hotjobs newsletter followed in October 1997. During this time the name was also officially changed from "HotJobs, Inc." to "HotJobs.com, Ltd" on the suggestion of Peter Connors, who had been hired as the first marketing manager.
The company startled the advertising world in 1999 when it bought a $1.6 million commercial during Super Bowl XXXIII, considering that its total revenues were approximately $2.5 million. McCann-Erickson Detroit was hired for the production. It proved to be a very savvy investment, as over $25 million in publicity was generated as a consequence. Immediately following the playing of the commercial, hotjobs' servers were overwhelmed with requests, and this incident later served as the basis for a commercial for IBM. The company went public in late 1999.
In 2000, the company had grown to $100 million dollars in revenue and moved its headquarters to 406 West 31st Street. The company expanded into the enterprise market by purchasing the distressed resume processing company Resumix, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Ca. As part of this effort, the company hired Tim Villanueva, formerly a leading developer at Intuit, as its Chief Technology Officer, and Chuck Price, formerly Chief Architect at Broadvision, as its Senior VP of Engineering. Allen and Thomas left shortly after this leadership expansion to pursue new interests.
In March 2001, Richard Johnson resigned as Chief Executive Officer and President. The board appointed COO Dimitri Boylan to fill those positions. In 2001 the company became profitable and cash flow positive.
Yahoo! purchased the company through an unsolicited bid in 2002, for $436 million, undercutting efforts by Monster Worldwide, owners of Monster.com, to acquire the company. However, Monster announced in February 2010 that it would acquire HotJobs from Yahoo for $225 million dollars. As part of the deal, Yahoo! will maintain a three-year profit sharing arrangement with the new owners in exchange for promoting Monster.com on its web properties post-acquisition.[13] After the acquisition, HotJobs began to offer users a chance to migrate their job postings and information to a Monster.com account.
Yahoo! HotJobs' services are free to job seeking users and include posting up to ten versions of a resume. Once signed on, job searches can be saved, allowing ongoing results to be emailed to the user. Job seekers have the ability to pull up statistics that feature the number of times an employer/recruiter reviewed their resume and a complete history of sent cover letters and resumes. Various tools within the site allow users to calculate ideal salaries, research plans and employee stock options as well as have a "Job Tip of the Day" emailed to them. The Career Tools tab lists other items they offer, like resume building, interviewing advice and an education center. Additionally, using the “HotBlock” feature,[14] applicants can block some or all of HotJobs' companies from viewing their resumes.
Yahoo! HotJobs provides employers access to their resume search engine and the ability to post, edit and delete job ads at anytime and as often as they like at no additional cost. Employers are given access to a variety of communication devices, including letter templates and notes, as well as the ability to track their postings.
Job seekers voted Yahoo! Hotjobs the (2002, 2003) "Best General Purpose Job Board for Job Seekers," and recruiters voted Yahoo! HotJobs the (2003) "Most Recruiter-Friendly General Purpose Site" in a survey conducted by WEDDLE's.
Monster has 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.[15][16] Although Monster waited several days to announce this leak (drawing heavy criticism), they subsequently announced new security measures to prevent this from happening again.
However, in January 2009, there was another large scale leak at its UK based site monster.co.uk, in which demographic information of up to 4.5 million people was obtained by hackers.[17]
Backdating an option means retroactively setting the option's strike price to a day when the stock traded at a different price. A call (buy) option with a lower strike price is more valuable because it's less expensive to exercise, while the inverse is true for a put (sell) option. The practice is not necessarily illegal, but must be disclosed to shareholders.[18] 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.[19]
In September 2006, Monster suspended Myron Olesnyckyj pending the internal review irregular stock option grants.[19] He had held the titles of senior vice president, general counsel and secretary.[18]
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.[18] 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.[18]
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."[18]
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 for 2006. Second-quarter results are expected December 13. Third-quarter numbers would be issued "as soon as practicable," according to a November 7 statement from the company.[18]
In 2006 Monster Worldwide Inc. 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.[20] The delisting did not happen.