Monster.com is probably the worst place for a job seeker to look for a job. And that goes for CareerBuilder as well. What turns out to be a great opportunity for employers, is by the same token a crap shoot for job seekers. This is true when the economy is good and especially true when the economy is bad.
When I was a hiring manager at Microsoft, Microsoft’s HR department would pay for job postings on Monster. And hiring managers were assigned a HR specialist to help you out. It all sounded good at the onset, but you quickly found out this arrangement was the mother of all time-suck black holes ever.
The problem is that it didn’t work. As much as it is an honor to be in a position to hiring new people at Microsoft, the process is arduous. When you get 500 resumes back from a Monster job posting, you barely have 10 seconds to look at each one. Ten seconds times 500 resumes is about a half a day’s worth of work. If you think that is productive, it ain’t.
And your HR specialist is working with 20 other managers. While they are supposed to screen the resumes for you, they did a crappy job of it. They probably did this on purpose because they were as overworked as anyone else.
It is great for employers. Microsoft can say to its hiring mangers here are the resources you can tap, if you can’t find a great employee who will impress your 8 person interview squad and get a thumbs up from all of them, you can bet it’ll reflect poorly on your annual review.
Meanwhile your manager has been told by their manager that unless you hire someone soon, you will loose the headcount to another department or to another division.
At Monster, there is nothing wonderful or efficient for job seekers to be able to push a few button and submit their resume to an open job. It lulls job seekers into a false sense of accomplishment. A job seeker can say to themselves, I applied for 50 jobs today. You and 1,000 other people did the same thing. Your 50 jobs got 50,000 resumes sent out. Hiring managers across the country were inundated with candidates, half of them applied for anything that seemed remotely close to being a fit. At the same time, the hiring manager is looking at resume after resume and thinking half of these candidates aren’t even a fit. “There has to be a better way.”
It just goes into a black hole. Job seekers might think they are accomplishing something, but they are just decreasing their chances to be noticed. You are one of 500 or 1,000. These are not good numbers. Not when your hiring manger is already overworked and needs to find a great employee and has pressure from above, from member of his team and from himself. Because the only reason you are getting more head count is because you already have more work then you can handle, you have new projects that need to get manned and there are a hundred different dependencies that go into the project and your new employee is just one of them. If you don’t find a candidate, you’ll have to give the job to someone else on your team, or take it on yourself.
Believe it or not, Monster hosts about, and I’m guessing now, about 5% of all the advertised job openings on the Internet. With so many job seekers going to Monster which hosts so few jobs, it is like a school of piranha’s after a 8 ounce porterhouse. A job seeker’s odds are against them and for the employer. Five percent is probably high. The point is Monster is not the Google for job search as so many job seekers think it is. Monster is a tool for employers and deception for job seekers.
The first thing a job seeker needs to do is never, never express your interest for an open job through an automated system like the one Monster offers. You resume will be lucky to even printed and put into a stack of candidates on a hiring manager’s desk. HR is not going to know what to look for, more so in a large company.
If you want to make it as a hiring manger at Microsoft, you have to get creative. And the first thing you do is never, never look at the stack of resumes from any job board.