Chaos Part 2 … LinkedIn, Monster and CareerBuilder and the future of Job Boards.
I continue to be impressed with the plethora of products CareerBuilder has launched in recent years. In fact, 44% of their revenue is not coming from the traditional job posting and resume search business. At HRTech and American Staffing Association, I spent some time on the supply and demand portal which provides the most insightful information I have recently seen in regards to labor demographics. It’s all the stuff LinkedIn talked about last year but failed to deliver in a scalable economically viable model where the end user can get access to the supply and demand of resources on demand.
In addition, CareerBuilder just acquired Economic Modeling Specialists International, which sold similar data to university and colleges for career planning and course development. CareerBuilder also launched a talent pipeline product which helps companies keep in touch via campaigns and social media to a pipeline of candidates. Last summer they also launched mobile career sites. To CareerBuilder, it’s all about the data, and they have a very crafty way of displaying this data in a meaningful way to help recruiters get their job done.
On the other side of the market, you have Monster where it is a hit and miss if you get someone who really understands the value of the data and value proposition they offer when you drop by their booth. I looked for the HRSmart offering but no rep (talked to 3) knew of the relationship. So please ask your Monster Rep about this product offering. If they could only penetrate the traditional levels of 10% of the business coming from Canada and 90% the U.S, they would be by far the largest Staffing Technology firm in the U.S. market., based on their current Canadian Market penetration. HRSmart is one of the few privately held firms playing in the Integrated Talent Management space and they offer a unified system ( all one platform / one code base) , with no VC funding, they have grown a nice niche business that is very focused on product development.
I was unable to get any information at HRTech that was meaningful at all from Monster at HRTech. I did hit the jackpot at ASA ( American Staffing Association) where I saw their search guru and spent time talking about the adoption of their 6 sense technology over third party databases, similar to the ones you find at smaller staffing firms. It seems that they have had great traction in this vertical market and they will continue to license this technology to others so you can integrate to your monster database or run this search system across you own database. The 6 sense technology can layer over any resume database which is what makes it very unique.
The above chart indicates Monsters value over the last 2 years.
With Monster’s continuing declining market value, the one time market darling is now worth less than 1 times sales, on sales of close to $1 billion, they are only worth $706M. Yet a fierce competitorwww.indeed.com, who has disrupted the entire market with free listings and a pay per lead model, was just purchased for $1.2B for Japanese giant Recruit on rumored sales of only $70M. Rumor has it Simplyhired is also about to be sold to someone not even in the marketing/advertisement/recruitment space. With Monster on the market, you wonder why these firms have not bought it yet. Is there too much baggage there? And after this week’s announcement about Glassdoor raising in an additional $20M plus, you wonder who is not after Monster’s piece of the pie these days.
So LinkedIn Talent Connect was kind of a bust this year for 2 reasons. For one, pass presses apparently were over allocated, so I tried to view some of the session from the Venetian in between ASA workshops. The quality of the streaming was pathetic and just not worth the time and effort. I did manage to see many friends and get updates ( as I was staying the MGM) and it seems that their big release was "the endorse me" option, which is LinkedIn’s idea of a reference check. It is clear that these guys do not want to label themselves as a job board, want to compete with Facebook but are lacking the engaged and committed audience that makes Facebook so special. But with their current activity feeds and follows and a broken relationship with Twitter, it is apparent that they are going to go it alone. Generally the largest show in the recruiting space, it was a well run event that helped many LinkedIn clients better learn how to do advanced Boolean searches and update their profile.
As many Linkedin profiles are incomplete, TalentBin offers a services that aggregates content across the web for profiles ( aka Zoominfo) including access to some patent databases for those of you looking for mad scientists.
