Monster is getting into schmoozespace. Ryze, LinkedIn, et al are in for some competition. A gang of Monster execs tried Ryze in July: CIO Brian Farrey, VP Dan Miller, SVP Danielle McCabe, VP Douglas Hardy, software engineer John Hayward, VP Michele Pearl, Director Sean Luitjens, and Creative Director Sue Duro. Michael Schutzler too, SVP responsible for Monster Networking. Schutzler stopped by LinkedIn too.  

Why does Monster care? Two problems:

Monster spams employers.

Monster makes it easy for job seekers to apply for a job. So they do. To lots of jobs. Multiply the number of job seekers times the number of jobs to which they apply, divide by the few jobs offered. Monster spews a supersonic torrent.

Employers are treating Monster-generated job applications like spam. The bigger ones spend heavily on applicant tracking systems that filter, blacklist, and screen, typically less effective than your average bayesian filter.

Monster needs to show employers the handful of needles in the career pool haystack. But how? 

Monster needs to improve on the 4% Relationship with Workers.

The average job search lasts around two months. The average person gets a new job every 3.5 to 4 years, about once per presidential election. So you need Monster 2 of 48 months, between 4 and 5% of your career. What about the other 95%?

Monster has to advertise to you for four years so you return. That's expensive.  

And your profile becomes stale the week after you post it. So employers won't pay to mine Monster's résumé bank.

Can Monster bribe you to keep your profile current? To share your professional network? To write about your work life?

If so,

• Your continuously fresh profile will be at least 20 times more useful to employers.
• The record of your electronic relationships with others in the community helps employers find clusters of like-minded people, the better to recruit.
• And you'll already be in the house the next time you launch your career campaign. Monster won't need to advertise to you again.

Monster's head start, challenges, and opportunities:

Monster's lead:

• Traffic. 40 million job seekers have visited Monster sites. If even some of those email addresses still work, they might be able to draw a million people to try the community. Compare that to
• Motivation. Job seekers have an economic interest in making it work.
• Conditioning. They are trained to fill out forms.

Monster has real challenges.

• Resumequity. Their current policies are hostile to user privacy. They claim ownership of all data you write when on their site, or any data they infer from your behavior. This runs counter to a strong cultural and political trend moving power and control of information to individuals.
• Pay to Play. They want to charge for membership. It's not clear that anyone has made a go of that in schmoozespace.
• Tone. Executive and contractor experiments failed in the past, not least because of the tone of the places Monster created. Time and staff have passed. Can they create a place that is safe, fun, social, purposeful, casual? 
• Friar's Fallacy. Groucho Marx wrote in a letter to the Hollywood Friar's, "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." I don't feel any particular connection to other people in the phone book. Monster needs to foster feelings of affiliation and membership beyond a credit card transaction.
• Big Walls. Monster doesn't open its databases to the world's programmers. Amazon and Google have, and thousands of experiments helped these giants discover new ways to create value.
• All Work. Many other communities created for business find that people want to explore and band together about non-work things. Can Monster aggressively follow and support their users?

Opportunities:

Nodespace Neighborhoods. BostonWorks' Jason Butler describes "nodespaces" as those data intersections that connect people with each other. Monster can create just-in-time community around specific job postings, employers, occupations, and interests. And there is no reason some of those spaces can't be branded.

Fellowship. Cynthia Typaldos addresses professional and personal workplace isolation with her professional guilds. If Monster can match and beat that, it's scale will have a chance to work.

Built in Word of Mouth. More jobs are filled by referral. By helping you form tribes, Monster multiplies the effectiveness of your job search. And increases the chance that you'll refer a Monster employer to a Monster networker.

Cross-Property Inolvement. Monster operates relocation, training, testing, and other businesses. An active and lively social network can be used to improve customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction in many of their properties.

Hosted Blogspaces. There's no reason Monster can't host weblogs for every user, both on the job seeker and employer side. Most people won't try blogging, many will try and leave, but millions will try and stick. Monster could become one of the top blog hosts, along with Google, AOL, and Yahoo!

Humanization of Candidates. Job seekers are people. But you wouldn't know it from datafied personas job boards pass to employer databases. Social networks offer employers a chance to understand more of people than their résumés.

Will Monster execute well and fast enough for employers to defer to Monster's network instead of rolling their own?

It all comes down to social capital. The more you help your customers harness it, the stronger your competitive advantage.

# # #

From the Monster PR site:

Monster Redefines Career Management By Harnessing Professional Networking; Network Available to 40 Million Job Seeker Members. excerpts, bulleting and empahsis mine:

Monster ... today announced plans to launch Monster Networking, a professional networking service.

Monster Networking is an online community where professionals across all industries and levels can exchange information about jobs, offer expertise and help others achieve their goals.

• Monster will serve as the host in this community,
• fostering introductions between members and
• encouraging them to:
• share career advice,
• cultivate long-term professional relationships, and
• support each other's goals.
• Proprietary matching technology will allow Monster to
• proactively initiate introductions between participating members as well as
• promote relevant career opportunities based on criteria in a member's professional profile.
• Member profiles will include skills, occupation, employment history, schools attended, titles, interests, and geographic location.

"In addition to leveraging the Internet as a powerful recruiting tool, consumers continue to rely on their network of friends, colleagues and peers when seeking professional guidance or advice about how to best achieve career goals. Today, we embark on a new Monster - one that serves all professionals who are looking to manage their careers, not just those seeking work."

Monster Networking is a subscription-based service that is expected to be available in Q1 of 2004.

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