Should Google buy Monster?

Monster.com could be takeover target, Barrons. $2 billion market capitalization, they might go for $3.5 at their 52 week high.

Hmmm.

Old media defending turf? Knight-Ridder, Dow Jones defending employment advertising?

How about a customer buyout? Agencies have been Monster's biggest customers for years. Do Manpower or Adecco have the cash flow and market cap for a merger?

New media consolidating? Yahoo already bought HotJobs. MSN needs an injection of something with energy and a brand with charisma. AOL continues to debate whether to continue outsourcing their career channels (flexibility, best of breed) or to buy/build their own for better integration with the rest of an AOL broadband experience.

And then there's Google.

What might you see out of Monster/Google?

Monster Blogged.

• Every job seeker gets a weblog.
• Tell your professional story.
• Narrate your job search.
• Keep it while you're employed, independent of your employer, building equity for your next search.
• Blogroll extras: employers you've visited, blogs of job seekers like you, jobs that might interest you.
• Your blogging reputation carries over to your job search.
• Links on a million weblogs to career profiles.
• Monster suggesting keywords and language from your weblogs.
• Every employer gets a weblog.
• Better branding, better user experience, fresh stuff.
• Job seekers can subscribe to their potential employers' RSS feeds.

Monster powered Orkut.

• Swarm job search. Forums around specific job searches, occupations, employers, industries. See what jobs your fellow chiropodists are looking at and what they're saying about them.
• Network candidate discovery. Find the candidate who's a friend of the fully employed candidate. Word of mouth in the social networking age.

Branded Gmail.

• Every job seeker gets free email. Hidden from your employer. Text job ads informed by your subscriptions and searches.

Monster Toolbar.

Screen real estate is precious. Google's toolbar is about as ubiquitous as Yahoo!'s. Enterprise's using a Google search appliance for their intranets get extra bang from using a Google toolbar that knows to check both the appliance and the global Google server for answers.

Add the Monster button right next to the Blogger button.

• Let your surfing behavior inform Monster's job recommendations.
• Visit a site? JobMark™ it as a place of potential career interest. Or as a place to avoid.
• Build in "tell-a-friend" about a job.
• Flag specific job listings.

Google Search.

A search on lexicography shows me relevant sites. Featured links might include lexicograper jobs.

"Show free job listings from your field on your web site." Every site gets context appropriate job listings, paid as adverts to Monster/Google, royalties to the niche webmasters. Google has the infrastructure in place, plus hundreds of thousands of sitemasters.

Job (Ad) Enrichment.

Monster can add context to a job posting.

• Local news, especially anything mentioning the employer or its competitors.
• Weather.
• Blog posts.
• People who've identified themselves as current employees or alumni.
• Photos and other graphics related to the firm.

Yahoo might be better at this than Google.

Employer Payoffs:

• Lower cost of candidate aquisition.
• Better targeting (blogs) of job ads.
• Higher quality of referral and word of mouth.

Google's Payoff:

• Cash flow. (not much, but growing)
• More advertising inventory (a quarter of all job searches flow through Monster).
• More parts of life served by Google.
• Relationships with big corporate ad and business buyers. (Google doesn't have strong enterprise products or strong distribution. Yet.)

Google says they want to help you find everything. Believe them.

And Why Not.

The cultures are literally a continent apart, even though search is at the heart of both.

• Google trusts in pagerank, the almost mystical results of emergent behavior when people link web pages to other pages.
• Monster believes in metadata, structured profiles, and filling out forms.
• Google: doing interesting and useful things leads to cash flow.
• Monster: cash up front.
• Google builds on common, everyday human behaviors, and makes them effortless. Horizontal applications.
• Monster aims hard at sucking value from the $60 billion labor market business. Verticalized market making.

Perhaps the clearest gap lies in how they think about people.

Google is humanistic. People are rich with complexity, always changing. They interact with one another and their cyberspaces in ways that serve them and that create meaning.

Contrast this with the HR model. In my experience (formerly global VP for strategy and technology of the world's largest staffing company), 98% of human resource organizations model people as widgets to be processed, inventory to be managed, cluttered incoherent masses to be manipulated. When HR systems work it is because of the systems and despite the humans. Monster strives to be different, but it is thoroughly infected - top to bottom - with the values and views of its paying customers, HR departments.

So Google and Monster should partner-up instead of merge.

Other notes on this subject:

1. Mail is part of Google's enterprise strategy. http://dijest.com/aka/2004/04/03.html#a2711
2. Monster enters the community business. Look out Ryze. http://dijest.com/aka/2003/10/20.html#a2659
3. My Web Services API Wishlist: .gov and Monster. http://dijest.com/aka/2002/07/20.html#a1849