After the announcement of the acquisition of Monster, expert forums started discussions about why it took so long for someone to buy Monster. Many recruiters, however, were rather surprised that Monster still existed.
The online advertising pioneer was routed by social networks
Monster (formerly The Monster Board) began as an advertising agency whose new project in the mid-1990s was offering jobs on the Internet. Monster was the first online job-search engine, even including automated job searching agents, and the first online database of resumes in the world. It became the most popular job portal and a synonym of both supply and demand for work on the Internet.
At the time of its greatest success in 2000, Monster reached market capitalization of $ 8.4 billion. Then the company started to decline. What happened to the job searching legend that was shaping the development of the entire recruitment industry at the beginning of the new millennium? Analysts agree that job portals generally underestimated the importance of collecting user data and using it to make job offers as individual as possible. Job portals still exist and fill millions of jobs but they all look relatively the same and are only able to compete on price. They were routed by social networks.
After being acquired by Randstad, Monster will continue to operate as a separate business unit under the same brand. Experts see the greatest value gained by Randstad, which is the second largest staffing agency in the world after the Swiss company Adecco, is the user data owned by Monster. The acquisition should help Randstad better compete with the social network LinkedIn.
What is happening in the market?
Randstad and Monster highlighted three major strategic and financial benefits of the acquisition in a joint press release. The first benefit is a common vision of the transformation of the global recruitment market in the light of current rapid technological changes. The second benefit is an extension of the company's technologically advanced HR services. The third benefit is an immediate rise to Randstad's earnings per share.
Following the acquisition of the LinkedIn social network by Microsoft, announced in June this year, experts are now once again talking about strategic changes that started to take place in the recruitment services market. According to ERE.net, the most important trends include:
- the shift of recruitment marketing into the role of the main driver of corporate recruitment strategies
- more low-level activities focused on employee sourcing done by automatic tools instead of people
- the potential to generate large volumes of people data quickly and transform it into products to be successfully sold in the market.
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