Monster.Com - Acquisitions And Partnerships Enhance Leadership Position

ACQUISITIONS AND PARTNERSHIPS ENHANCE LEADERSHIP POSITION

Jeff Taylor started The Monster Board in 1994 with three employees in Maynard, Massachusetts. The company's interactive Web site allowed people to post resumes and look for job openings, primarily in the Northeast. Recruiters also used the site to fill open positions. A year after it was founded, The Monster Board was acquired by TMP Worldwide for $900,000. In 1996 TMP Worldwide went public and raised about $54 million through its initial public offering. For the next two years Monster developed nearly 100 co-branded career sites with partners such as Lycos and USA Today . When traffic coming to Monster from those sites flattened out, the company shifted its focus to developing the Monster.com brand, starting in 1999.

At the end of 1998, just before merging with Indianapolis-based Online Career Center to form Monster.com, The Monster Board was receiving about 5 million visitors a month and listed jobs from about 50,000 employers. Anticipating increased traffic in 1999, the company invested about $1 million in new servers to allow it to scale up its business. By mid-1999 Monster.com had a database of 1 million resumes—none of them more than a year old—and an estimated 180,000 job postings—none of them more than 2 months old. Under one package recruiters paid $7,900 to Monster.com for up to 30 job postings for 60 days, access to the resume database for one year, a company profile on Monster.com, and 5 skill screens per job. PC Magazine rated Monster.com the best online job search site, writing "None can beat Monster.com 's impressive combination of ease of use and power for both job seekers and employers."

In mid-1999 Monster.com launched Monster Talent Market 1.0, an auction service for independent contractors and other free agents. Monster.com charged freelancers a small fee and also received a percentage from companies that signed them to a contract. Under the service independent contractors could post their experience, fees, and projects they were interested in, while employers would use the service to locate and hire temporary worker on a contract basis.

At the beginning of 2000 Monster.com had 2 million resumes posted at its site and an average of 260,000 job openings. According to PC Week, 1.3 million of the resumes posted at Monster.com were in the information technology (IT) field. For its 2000 Super Bowl ad, the company adapted the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken." After the ad was shown, Monster.com reported more than 4.4 million job searches on the day after, compared to 1.7 million on a day prior to the Super Bowl.

Internationally, the company also committed $20 million for a pan-European advertising campaign, where Monster.com operated sites in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ireland. Although the company considered expanding into Eastern Europe, it eventually decided to focus on key countries in Western Europe. Its best results were obtained in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A Spanish site was launched in September 2000, followed by one in Italy in October. For 2001 the company planned to spend $70 to $75 million building its brand in Europe. In 2001 it also announced it would acquire Europe's largest online professional search company, Jobline International, for about $115 million, and gain sites in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, and Finland. Monster.com 's Asia-Pacific strategy began with sites in Australia and New Zealand, a small presence in Singapore and Hong Kong, and the launch of a site in India in March 2001.

Monster.com announced its executive search service in September 2000 and launched it in January 2001. Called ChiefMonster, it targeted executive positions at the vice president level and above. Candidates could post their resumes for free, but they had to pass a screening test. Companies could post an unlimited number of executive positions for about $1,000 per year. Employers and recruiters also had to pay a fee to search the resume database.

Other initiatives for 2001 included an alliance with ESPN to create a Web site for sports jobs. The agreement gave Monster.com advertising time on ABC Sports' college football Bowl Championship Series and access to ESPN's audience of 18-to-34-year-old males. Through another agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor, Monster.com began to share listings and information with the federally run America's Job Bank.

Monster.com and its parent TMP Worldwide became more aggressive about acquiring competing firms and new technologies in 2001. Monster.com also added new services, including a moving and relocation site called Monstermoving.com. Among the technology companies acquired in 2001 were Hiring-Tools, which made Web-based human resources software, and Simpatix, which produced a Web-user interface desktop for recruiters. Career sites acquired in 2001, in addition to the European company Jobline International, included Utah-based FlipDog, which used a Web crawler to find jobs at internal employer postings. The firm's largest acquisition of 2001—if it passed regulatory approval—was a $460 million bid for HotJobs.com, which parent company TMP Worldwide said would continue to operate as a standalone brand. HotJobs.com and FlipDog were considered the number two and three online job search sites, respectively. That left Career Builder, a joint venture owned by Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Co., as Monster.com 's principal competitor. In spite of Career Builder's $200 million bid for Headhunter.net, analysts believed that Monster.com was so far ahead of its competition that it would remain the top online recruiter for the foreseeable future.