Let’s face it. A lot of people hate Monster.

Threads like this one on Techdirt are not uncommon. When I solicited questions for Doug Klinger, then Monster’s President - yesterday, Monster announced that he had left the company in a reorganization – it surprised me that the questions that I got for him from recruiters were mostly related to the job-seeker’s experience. All of the questions were symptomatic of what I view as Monster’s main problem - they have shown themselves to be willing to sacrifice the job-seeker’s experience on the site in order to squeeze in a few more dollars from advertisers.

Monster has always had a sales and marketing culture – today, its sales force is over 1,100 strong (including the International division). This is not a bad thing. The emphasis on sales and the Monster brand has largely been responsible for Monster’s success, sending revenues soaring to over a billion dollars in 2006 and creating a ubiquitous brand in the United States that is rapidly growing on a global level.

Monster may never have been the most usable site, but in the beginning visitors to the site were delighted by the combination of the online job-hunting experience (compared to print classifieds) and the whimsy of the colorful characters. Today, that interface can be more frustrating than delightful.

The problem is that the pendulum has swung too far towards short-term revenue generation, and it is coming at the long-term expense of the Monster brand. Jobseekers who conduct a search first have to wade through interstitial advertisements, with hard to find “no thanks” links buried at the bottom, before getting to their search results. Once there, they need to contend with work-from-home scams that are laden with keywords so that they will appear in a variety of search results. (From that post: “You also will be able to order a decision package that normally costs $39.95, but for a limited time, you can review our decision package for 14 days for $9.95. Our decision package contains about 2 hours of information to help you decide if this opportunity is right for you. You are covered by a 90 day money back guarantee if you should decide that this is not for you. Although Monster has reference to job placements, this offering is for a Work at Home business opportunity and is in no way to be construed as a job offering.”)

At the Monster Executive Customer Forum, Sal Iannuzzi, Monster’s new CEO, made an announcement that convinced me that they are finally heading in the right direction. He said that Monster will begin curbing interstitial advertisements on their web site, and also that they will not be renewing the contracts of companies posting work-from-home opportunities.

It’s the right move.

In conversations with Monster executives they made it while the new direction has been set, it is not yet clear exactly how they will be implemented. There are existing contracts with many of the advertisers that mean that Monster won’t be able to simply “flip the switch” on the work-from-home ads, and exactly how many of the interstitials are on the chopping block is not clear. When these changes will be implemented is also not yet clear.

My understanding is that today Monster does not have an internal advocate for the customer experience (think Craig Newmark) on staff. They should, because any time that they put barriers in the way of the job-seeker for short-term profit, they are jeopardizing their future.