The Monster Bash

Following up on my previous topic about the woes of hiring web developers, we’ve decided to actually pay to post an opening on Monster.com. Thus far, I’m not impressed at all with Monster and I’m left to wonder how has Monster been able to retain dominance in the job search space.

Let’s begin with the job search system.

We’ve posted a job opening in the Denver, CO market under the keywords web developer. From the homepage, if you search on the phrase “web developer”, and “select category” is blank and “select job location” is Colorado-Denver, there we are numero uno!

Now here is where it makes zero sense. Under the “Job Search Results” instead of the homepage I want to change my search criteria. This time keywords “web developer” zip code “80301″ radius “100″. Hmmm, we don’t appear in the listings.

Let’s clarify the search C a bit more, keywords “web developer” city “Denver” state “co”. Considering I selected the region Denver-Colorado when I paid $500 for the posting we should appear there. Sorry, Monster doesn’t recognize our posting in the Denver area. Perhaps if I change the city to “Boulder” after all, our office is technically in Boulder; but no results for that either.

Bottomline, unless you search for us on the homepage, you won’t find our listing. Perhaps that feature is another $500 per listing.

Job Post Management

As of the time of this posting I can see there has been 68 views of our posting, 2 online application and 1 email.

The 2 postings are from outside of Colorado, even though I specified only local candidates. To Monster’s credit it did auto reject these applications. As for email, I’m not sure what they mean here since we haven’t received emails from the job posting.

Post Formating

Orignially I just posted our job listing as a text copy & paste into the job description field. Once I viewed the posting the text was about 10 pt or smaller. I tossed in some HTML, although no where in the editor does it say I can use HTML. If I can use HTML, give me a basic editor like WordPress or a UBB formatted system.

Mostly I’m just venting on the job search. For $500 I expect traffic to the posting. I expect the posting to be easily located in the region I’m looking for applications in. I guess from now on I’ll try Dice or 37Signals Job Board.