Đoàn Trang
(Ms_Independent)
Điều hành viên
A Monster success
THE words “jobless recovery” irk Jeff Taylor. Scrunching himself into his chair, his long legs and enormous feet tucked up under him, he lists all the evidence that the American economy, at least, is at last creating jobs again. January and February were better months for the world's biggest online job-search site, Monster.com, which Mr Taylor launched ten years ago this April.
Sales jobs, always in Monster's top five, both by postings of job-seekers' résumés and by prospective employers' searches, are now the top category, after picking up gradually over the past year along with American consumer confidence. Accounting and finance jobs are now the second category, thanks to stronger demand from companies in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and other corporate frauds. More tellingly, entry-level jobs began to pick up last autumn. And jobs in information technology were 16% higher in February than a year earlier.
Mr Taylor is also relentlessly cheerful about the long-term prospects of the job market—at least from the employee's point of view. “By 2010 we will see the worst labour shortages in our lifetime,” he says happily. “As 70m baby-boomers go and only 35m entry-level workers come on to the market in the next 15 years, the economy won't suffer skill shortages; it will suffer body shortages.” And demand will grow for “knowledge workers”, and for people to fill new management posts with such ghastly-yet-fashionable names as “chief learning officer” and “chief knowledge officer”. Offshore workers may ease the shortage. But there will be opportunities galore, he clearly thinks, for folk who trawl Monster's vast electronic “help wanted” pages.
Quite so. And as one of the dotcom boom's great survivors, Monster shows how electronic marketplaces can offer a reach and efficiency that physical markets cannot rival. It also shows that money can be made in such markets: Monster has been profitable now for 22 successive quarters.
Monster was one of the first dotcoms to be launched. But, unlike many dotcom entrepreneurs, Mr Taylor already knew the business he was entering. He came to online recruitment from the offline sort, having set up an agency, Adion, in 1989, not long after leaving the University of Massachusetts—where he managed to spend five and a half years without collecting a degree. He seems to have used the time to develop other talents and interests, including becoming a successful disc jockey in Boston's night clubs and building a vast collection of dance music.
Like Britain's Richard Branson, he has since used that student flair to instil a sense of youthful fun and anti-establishment zest in what is basically a boring business. Like Mr Branson, he easily makes an audience love him: some years ago, he persuaded attendees at a conference organised by America's Department of Labour to yell “We rock!” at every mention in his speech of human resources, and “To the Batmobile!” at every mention of the new economy. Mr Branson goes ballooning; Mr Taylor water-skis behind blimps. Mr Branson's success is built on the ubiquitous Virgin brand; when, in 1995, Adion was bought by TMP Worldwide, an advertising group, Mr Taylor insisted on keeping the Monster.com name. It is, he says, the firm's “single most important success factor”. Supporting the brand is a big advertising budget, accounting for a quarter of the firm's costs and including, since 1999, expensive ads during the Super Bowl.
Like another great online success, eBay, Monster has flourished thanks to a mixture of scale and free content. The company claims to have a 50% share of its online segment, ahead of its two main rivals, HotJobs (owned by Yahoo!) and CareerBuilder (owned by three big newspaper groups). Job-seekers work for long hours to supply eye-catching résumés, whereas employers pay to scan them or to post help-wanted ads. The scanning accounts for 32% of Monster.com's revenues, the posting for 53%. Most of the services that job-seekers get are free, but Mr Taylor hopes they will pay to join a new service that he has just launched to allow them to contact each other for advice, mentoring and career management. He hopes that they will ask each other questions about, say, what it is like to work for a firm that a job-seeker is thinking of joining, or what it is like to work as a nurse in a large teaching hospital in another part of the country.
But the main contribution of Monster has been to speed up hiring and vastly increase the accuracy of the job-search process. “You can post a job at 2pm and get your first response at 2.01,” Mr Taylor boasts. And an employer who knows exactly what he wants can use Monster's filters to search vast numbers of résumés with pinpoint accuracy. Just as the rise of online travel sites has devastated traditional travel agents, Monster, with its low costs and wide reach, has eaten the lunch of old-economy market intermediaries. Monster is posing a serious threat to newspapers, which historically made 40% of their revenues from carrying ads, up to half of which were for staff. Headhunting firms have also suffered, as demand has slumped for their help in filling lower-level jobs at client firms.
Kiss me, I'm a frog
But not every job can be filled online. This is a mass-market enterprise: top people still seem to need to be wooed in person, so there will be some work left for headhunters. And, though the online job market works well for workers and employers who know what they want, it works badly for the vague or tentative. If your résumé says clearly that you want to be a pool cleaner or an aerospace technician, the filters will ensure that it reaches the right human-resource departments. If it is unclear, they will confine you to electronic darkness. The old saying amonghuman-resources folk was that “you kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince,” says Mr Taylor. On the internet, you kiss fewer, but only those frogs who really know what they want will find themselves on the end of their princess's puckered lips.
Economist.com
THE words “jobless recovery” irk Jeff Taylor. Scrunching himself into his chair, his long legs and enormous feet tucked up under him, he lists all the evidence that the American economy, at least, is at last creating jobs again. January and February were better months for the world's biggest online job-search site, Monster.com, which Mr Taylor launched ten years ago this April.
Sales jobs, always in Monster's top five, both by postings of job-seekers' résumés and by prospective employers' searches, are now the top category, after picking up gradually over the past year along with American consumer confidence. Accounting and finance jobs are now the second category, thanks to stronger demand from companies in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and other corporate frauds. More tellingly, entry-level jobs began to pick up last autumn. And jobs in information technology were 16% higher in February than a year earlier.
Mr Taylor is also relentlessly cheerful about the long-term prospects of the job market—at least from the employee's point of view. “By 2010 we will see the worst labour shortages in our lifetime,” he says happily. “As 70m baby-boomers go and only 35m entry-level workers come on to the market in the next 15 years, the economy won't suffer skill shortages; it will suffer body shortages.” And demand will grow for “knowledge workers”, and for people to fill new management posts with such ghastly-yet-fashionable names as “chief learning officer” and “chief knowledge officer”. Offshore workers may ease the shortage. But there will be opportunities galore, he clearly thinks, for folk who trawl Monster's vast electronic “help wanted” pages.
Quite so. And as one of the dotcom boom's great survivors, Monster shows how electronic marketplaces can offer a reach and efficiency that physical markets cannot rival. It also shows that money can be made in such markets: Monster has been profitable now for 22 successive quarters.
Monster was one of the first dotcoms to be launched. But, unlike many dotcom entrepreneurs, Mr Taylor already knew the business he was entering. He came to online recruitment from the offline sort, having set up an agency, Adion, in 1989, not long after leaving the University of Massachusetts—where he managed to spend five and a half years without collecting a degree. He seems to have used the time to develop other talents and interests, including becoming a successful disc jockey in Boston's night clubs and building a vast collection of dance music.
Like Britain's Richard Branson, he has since used that student flair to instil a sense of youthful fun and anti-establishment zest in what is basically a boring business. Like Mr Branson, he easily makes an audience love him: some years ago, he persuaded attendees at a conference organised by America's Department of Labour to yell “We rock!” at every mention in his speech of human resources, and “To the Batmobile!” at every mention of the new economy. Mr Branson goes ballooning; Mr Taylor water-skis behind blimps. Mr Branson's success is built on the ubiquitous Virgin brand; when, in 1995, Adion was bought by TMP Worldwide, an advertising group, Mr Taylor insisted on keeping the Monster.com name. It is, he says, the firm's “single most important success factor”. Supporting the brand is a big advertising budget, accounting for a quarter of the firm's costs and including, since 1999, expensive ads during the Super Bowl.
Like another great online success, eBay, Monster has flourished thanks to a mixture of scale and free content. The company claims to have a 50% share of its online segment, ahead of its two main rivals, HotJobs (owned by Yahoo!) and CareerBuilder (owned by three big newspaper groups). Job-seekers work for long hours to supply eye-catching résumés, whereas employers pay to scan them or to post help-wanted ads. The scanning accounts for 32% of Monster.com's revenues, the posting for 53%. Most of the services that job-seekers get are free, but Mr Taylor hopes they will pay to join a new service that he has just launched to allow them to contact each other for advice, mentoring and career management. He hopes that they will ask each other questions about, say, what it is like to work for a firm that a job-seeker is thinking of joining, or what it is like to work as a nurse in a large teaching hospital in another part of the country.
But the main contribution of Monster has been to speed up hiring and vastly increase the accuracy of the job-search process. “You can post a job at 2pm and get your first response at 2.01,” Mr Taylor boasts. And an employer who knows exactly what he wants can use Monster's filters to search vast numbers of résumés with pinpoint accuracy. Just as the rise of online travel sites has devastated traditional travel agents, Monster, with its low costs and wide reach, has eaten the lunch of old-economy market intermediaries. Monster is posing a serious threat to newspapers, which historically made 40% of their revenues from carrying ads, up to half of which were for staff. Headhunting firms have also suffered, as demand has slumped for their help in filling lower-level jobs at client firms.
Kiss me, I'm a frog
But not every job can be filled online. This is a mass-market enterprise: top people still seem to need to be wooed in person, so there will be some work left for headhunters. And, though the online job market works well for workers and employers who know what they want, it works badly for the vague or tentative. If your résumé says clearly that you want to be a pool cleaner or an aerospace technician, the filters will ensure that it reaches the right human-resource departments. If it is unclear, they will confine you to electronic darkness. The old saying amonghuman-resources folk was that “you kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince,” says Mr Taylor. On the internet, you kiss fewer, but only those frogs who really know what they want will find themselves on the end of their princess's puckered lips.
Economist.com