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Articles tagged 'Monster'

Industry News

Report: One Of Monster’s Latest Suitors Is LinkedIn


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A report in Reuters has indicated that LinkedIn is among a handful of potential companies expressing interest in purchasing all or some of Monster Worldwide. According to sources close to the situation, LinkedIn and Silver Lake Partners are two of “a broad range of strategic and financial buyers” who are weighing Monster as a potential acquisition target.

According to the report, the company plans to send out more detailed financial information by the end of next week to potential buyers.

Monster Worldwide shares are up over 15% in late day trading in reaction to the report.

Industry News

Monster May Be For Sale


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The long-rumored sale of employment publisher Monster could become a reality following news today the company is seeking “strategic alternatives” to improving its shareholder performance.

Speaking at a business conference in Boston today, Monster Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi said the company is weighing “strategic alternatives to increasing shareholder value.” Although Iannuzzi did not specifically say a sale is being considered, he strongly hinted at it when he added that company leaders will “ensure that we extract the maximum amount of shareholder value in any way we can.”

Investors took the hint, bidding up the stock from this morning’s opening price of $6.89 a share to $8.01.

Reuters reported that a Monster spokeswoman declined to expand on Iannuzzi’s comments. Investors evidently anticipate that whatever alternative the board and management eventually come up with, it will be good for the stock price. Options volume on Monster’s stock increased 32 times over an average day.

Industry News

Could Monster Be a Takeover Target?


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Last week, Bloomberg reported that Monster Worldwide Inc. (MWW) is being removed from the S&P 500 after losing almost $5 billion in market value in the last five years. With a stock price low enough to force the world’s largest online-recruiting company out of the S&P 500, there’s some very public speculation that the global employment advertising company could be bought by a private equity fund. According to the Bloomberg article, the company has plunged 66 percent this year, the most in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, as American businesses remained reluctant to hire.

Rumors have periodically made the rounds of a potential or even pending sale — 20 of them since 2006, according to Bloomberg. All have proven false. But now, says the financial news service, financial analysts and some of Monster’s largest shareholders say the time and price may be right for a takeover.

“The valuation is absurdly cheap,” Eric Green, a Philadelphia-based fund manager at Penn Capital, told Bloomberg. With 3.2 million shares of Monster stock, Penn Capital is one of the company’s largest shareholders.

“The stock has been a clear disappointment,” Green is quoted as saying. He suggested a takeover price of $15 a share. That’s more than a 92 percent premium over Friday’s closing price of $7.71. “I would love to see someone buy it,” he said.

Monster’s stock price has declined steadily since hitting a 10-year high of $59.28 in May, 2006. In the last 12 months, the stock has been as high as $25.90, reaching there in January, when the economy seemed ready for a hiring surge. Since August, it has been under $10 a share. The market value of the company is now about $1 billion, $5 billion less than it was worth in 2006.

Social Media

Sourcing’s Facebook Foursome


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Have you noticed that Facebook now has four professional networking apps? First we were introduced to BranchOut, then BeKnown made a splash at SHRM, Talent.me snuck in at the end of the summer, and finally PoolDip has entered the scene to stir the pot. I’m sure there are more professional apps on Facebook, but four apps are extremely difficult to manage.

We are all aware of the reach and magnitude that Facebook empowers. With 800 million profiles and growing, it’s natural to have a professional networking presence on this site. However, is it necessary to be on all four?

The advantage of sourcing on Facebook is obvious, as it encompasses more profiles. Likewise, communication is free. While LinkedIn has been our sourcing alibi, Facebook does avert you from directly sourcing by profession. Additionally, with the vast number of profiles, identifying your direct contact with a common name is also a recurring challenge.

With the recent launch of Identified, advanced sourcing on Facebook is starting to become more of a reality. Identified pulls information directly from Facebook and allows recruiters to directly source candidates from its database. With the introduction to Identified, do we really need a habitation in all four apps?

This question has been a bit of an anomaly on my quest to source candidates directly on Facebook. I’ve decided to take a “deep dive” into all four apps. Perhaps you can determine the winner of the professional networking apps.

Industry News

SeeMore Takes Monster to the Cloud


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Monster is taking its branded, 6Sense semantic search into the cloud in a clever and innovative application that will not only make life simpler for recruiters, but suggests the company is thinking beyond the classic post-and-search job board business model.

SeeMore is Monster’s newest 6Sense product. Introduced late last week during a group demo for bloggers, consultants, and HR tech writers, SeeMore applies the 6Sense search power to candidate databases stored in the cloud, producing a ranked list of qualified prospects.

That brief description, however, hardly does it justice. More broadly, SeeMore makes sense of the thousands of resumes that lurk in every ATS. Instead of writing impossibly long Boolean strings, or entering a bunch of keywords and getting back hundreds of results, 6Sense knows, for instance, that an audit manager must have certain skills and experience.

Power Resume users already know that with that job title and a few other parameters — years of experience for instance — 6Sense will scour Monster’s database for qualifying candidates. You won’t get CFO resumes just because there’s a keyword match. (If you haven’t tried Power Search, you can read about it here.)

Industry News, Social Media

LinkedIn’s Response to Monster and BranchOut: Pay Up


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SourceCon’s parent company, ERE.net has learned more details about LinkedIn’s July 1 decision to cut off Monster’s BeKnown and BranchOut’s API access. We’ve also obtained copies of the emails that LinkedIn sent to both companies.

If there was any doubt that commercial reasons were behind the move, it’s gone now. Both emails end by proposing that the companies join LinkedIn’s “Partner Program for enterprise products.” A representative for LinkedIn has confirmed that the companies would pay for this access.

While BranchOut and BeKnown got all the attention, LinkedIn also cut off access to at least four other companies. Startup mixtent and resume parsing company Daxtra are two more companies that serve recruiters that were affected. As of this morning, the import function that is the core of mixtent’s service appears to be completely broken.

Industry News, Social Media

Game On! LinkedIn Fires Next Shot in War for the Career Social Graph


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Another shot has been fired in the war to own the social career networks — TechCrunch reported Friday that LinkedIn has cut off access to its data to both BranchOut and Monster’s BeKnown, among others, citing terms of service violations.

As our parent site, ERE.net has reported, both BranchOut and BeKnown services are designed to leverage Facebook’s social graph and more than 750 million users to help them find career opportunities through their friends. Until LinkedIn’s move, they had been able to use the API to give those Facebook users a shortcut in creating a resume on their own services, making them easier to set up.

As this conflict unfolds, we are going to hear a lot from each party about how they are acting in consumer’s best interests, while the other side is trampling their rights. Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric though — all three companies are simply following the money and acting for their own best interests.

Industry News, Social Media

Monster Launches a New Facebook App: BeKnown


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Monster launched a Facebook app over the weekend that will let the 700 million users of the popular social community build a professional network separate and apart from the one their friends get to see.

BeKnown, as it is called, borrows much from LinkedIn and BranchOut, but goes further than the latter and offers more versatility and flair than the former. It’s not a frontal attack on LinkedIn’s growing recruitment business, but a flanking maneuver, focusing on younger workers just beginning to build their business contacts.

While Monster is aiming at the 600 million-plus users worldwide who aren’t LinkedIn members, those who are can import their contacts from there as they build an independent network on BeKnown. The app also makes it possible to invite contacts from other sources, including Gmail, Yahoo, Twitter and, of course, Facebook.

Installing the app gives users a second Facebook profile that can be imported from LinkedIn or Monster if they are registered there. Pictures and other existing Facebook content can be managed to create a distinctly differently persona from the one social friends get to see. Otherwise, the visual appearance mimics the typical Facebook presence.

Industry News, Technology & Resources

HotJobs Joins Monster For $225 Million


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HotJobs officially became part of Monster on Tuesday, completing the $225 million purchase announced last February.

The acquisition — and arguably its most important part — makes Monster the exclusive provider of jobs and career services on Yahoo North America for the next three years, with a prime position in the portal’s navigation bar.

According to Monster, the traffic deal combined with its existing worldwide traffic gives it access to some 43 million unique visitors, “88 percent more than the next largest competitor.” That would be CareerBuilder.

Monster will pay Yahoo separately for traffic the portal sends it. The cost of that traffic arrangement wasn’t disclosed, though it may be part of a future filing with the Securities and Exchange. In a filing with the SEC today, Monster said it would be submitting financial statements in the near future.

Globally, however, Monster will have to negotiate traffic deals for Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The traffic arrangement gives it an exclusive right to negotiate with Yahoo for a portal presence outside North America “subject to certain (undisclosed) limitations.”

In the U.S., Monster gets a network of about 600 daily and weekly newspapers, which focus mostly on local and regional recruitment advertising. Put together several years ago, the newspaper network joins the 400 papers already aligned with Monster.

The company also says it “gains additional job posting strength in three important sectors: healthcare, finance/insurance, and retail…” Employers in these sectors tend to recruit locally, which is where newspapers are strongest.

Monster’s announcement says that it expects that with the addition of HotJobs customers it now will be doing business with 97 percent of the Fortune 1000.

Many of the largest employers were doing business with both Monster and HotJobs, so they’ll see some savings. Monster says that it will continue to operate HotJobs separately until at least the first quarter of 2011, when it expects to launch an integrated site.

It’s not clear what that means. A FAQ accompanying the announcement says, “We’re selecting the best products from both organizations to deliver effective solutions…” That suggests something more than just migrating customers to Monster may be in the works, though it’s hard to imagine what that might be. Yahoo hasn’t invested much in HotJobs in the last few years, so chances are the “best products” are probably job delivery and distribution tools.

reposted with permission from ERE.net