Making the most of a Monster idea; Darran Gardner speaks to the man

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Mar 2, 2003 | by Darran Gardner

SNEAKING into the office between eight and nine on a Tuesday morning, tens of thousands of dissatisfied workers furiously search the web for a dream job that will make their life complete.

That single hour is busiest period for virtually all the world's online recruitment websites - an hour that buoys up a sector which in just a few years has moved beyond serving tech heads desperate to find a new IT position to encompass all of the disgruntled working masses.

The profile of online recruitment companies has dropped over the last two years as the dotcom money spent on television advertising dried up, venture capitalists moved on and several high-profile internet failures were recorded.

However, stresses Joe Slavin, the managing director of Monster.co.uk, this is a sector which is still growing by 25% annually and has allowed parent Monster.com to become that rarest of things, a profitable internet company.

Even in tough economic conditions which have hurt many in the traditional recruitment industry, the world's number one recruitment site still operates out of 21 countries (from the US to Sweden and India) and sees 1000 jobseekers a second visit its portals.

"The big advertising budget of 2001 is gone," admits the New York- born Slavin.

"But Monster has now been profitable for four years and we have the advantage of an established site and a model we can easily replicate."

Monster is still growing in the UK, employing 70 people between London and Glasgow. In Scotland 500,000 job searches are made each month, and this figure, along with the 50,000 Scottish CVs Monster holds on file, perfectly illustrates the ubiquity of job hunting on the internet.

In Britain this maturing sector supports a number of players who all have to battle Monster's market dominance. These companies include GoJobsite.co.uk (the UK's longest-established site set up in 1995), Totaljobs, Topjobs.net and Fish4jobs.

In Scotland SMG's s1jobs (launched January 2001) and Scottish Appointments offer it the stiffest competition.

While the internet as a recruitment tool is still not as popular with corporate recruiters as newspapers, Slavin says that the economics of online recruitment make more sense when financial con- ditions are uncertain.

Companies hoping to recruit new staff can find themselves paying several thousand pounds to place display ads in a newspaper appointments section. Online the same ad could cost the company between (pounds) 200 and (pounds) 400.

This ability to reduce one element of the costs associated with recruitment, says Slavin, has ultimately been one of the reasons why Monster's UK site featured 10 times more jobs in the last quarter of 2002 than in the whole of 2000. Currently it has more than 40,000 job opportunities, nearly a million registered users and almost 500,000 CVs on its database.

"We don't see ourself as a publisher," says Slavin, "we view ourself as an entity that helps companies fill empty seats. Our service is broader than most and probably more pro-active. We can handle responses to adverts for clients and schedule appointments for interviews.

"Sites like s1jobs are often dealing with print jobs that are put online, which do not deliver revenues. Monster jobs are paid jobs, and that's why I don't think there's much overlap between us, s1jobs and The Scotsman website."

Founded in 1994 by Jeff Taylor under the name of 'The Monster Board' (Taylor en-visioned online recruitment as a "big idea, a monster idea"), the business was acquired by TMP Worldwide in 1995. Based in New York, TMP is one of the world's largest recruitment advertising agency networks operating in 33 countries.

After cushioning TMP against the effect of falling traditional revenues in 2002, Monster's ability to generate revenues ($60m last year) and profits has encouraged TMP to restructure its own business.

From April, the TMP divisions known as Monster, Monstermoving, Advertising & Communications and Directional Marketing, will be spun off to form a separate, publicly-traded company. It will trade on the Nasdaq as Monster.

Slavin argues that the growth of internet usage will also boost the site's reach. Not only are there sceptics to win over in the corporate comm-unity, he adds, but areas such as UK public sector recruitment could yet provide scope for further growth in 2003 and 2004.