Job Board Giant Monster Completes Long-Awaited Takeover of HotJobs

Note: This post has been updated below.

Monster and HotJobs, betrothed last year, are now officially one. Fittingly, the integration of the two career sites was announced on Valentine’s Day.

The HotJobs address now goes to Monster.com, boosting its cumulative global job seeker traffic to over 46 million unique visitors monthly, reports the company. Every day in the U.S. some 25,000 resumes are added, says Monster.

Monster paid Yahoo! $225 million for HotJobs, a site it once thought it would own until Yahoo! swooped in and scooped it up for $436 million. Besides the business, it also got a traffic deal in which Monster becomes the featured career provider for Yahoo! U.S. It has crafted additional deals with other Yahoo! sites globally, just last week announcing a deal for much of Latin America.

According to Monster’s announcement, it now has the most job postings in 19 of the top 20 industries and in 45 out of the top 50 cities as compared to any leading online career site.

Update: The data, however, is from June 2009-May 201o. For most of that period, Monster didn’t own HotJobs, whose numbers are used in the calculation.

That term “leading” online career site, defined in the footnotes as including Dice, LinkedIns career pages, and several others, is really code for CareerBuilder, Monster’s biggest and toughest competitor in North America. The two companies are virtual blood enemies, with CareerBuilder doing most of the trash-talking over the years.

When the announcement of the acquisition was made by CEO Sal Iannuzzi a year ago, CareerBuilder issued a lengthy critique of the purchase. It boasted that despite the pending traffic deals, “CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future.”

We’ll have to wait until comScore releases a public report to see where the two stand now.

Update: But a private comScore report for January shows CareerBuilder with 25.1 million monthly uniques to 18.8 million for Monster and HotJobs combined.

Counting traffic is contentious and always debatable. So there’s no doubt someone will argue that the numbers presented here exclude traffic to one or another site that should be included. Or perhaps that some of the sites included in the CareerBuilder shouldn’t be included.

But in 2009, when comScore last released traffic counts of the top career websites, CareerBuilder was well ahead of Monster and HotJobs. Their combined traffic was well past the CB count. Don’t take that to the bank, because there is duplication there. It will be interesting to see what the new counts are when (if?) comScore offers a public report.

However, Monster can certainly boast about its advertising network.comScore says that in December, Monster’s Career Ad Network had 61.8 million uniques, ranking it 43rd on the list of the 50 ad groups it studies.

Also worth mentioning is the newspaper network that Monster got from HotJobs. It now has some 1,000 daily and weekly newspaper partners with a presence in all 50 states. The irony in this is that CareerBuilder is owned by three newspaper companies and Microsoft, with Gannett its largest shareholder, and Monster was once print’s enemy.