Monster (profile; site) has signed a Chicagoland newspaper group to its burgeoning alliance and in so doing has wounded, if not killed, a regional job board that was created, in part, as a response to Monster itself.
The Sun-Times News Group, whose largest property is Chicago’s second daily, the Sun-Times, launched the co-branded Monster job boards today on all of its 70, mostly small, suburban newspaper sites. The additions bring to about 250 Monster’s newspaper partner sites. In addition it has co-branded sites with some 100 television stations.
Until today’s launch, Sun-Times papers were in a regional job board founded in January 2004 by Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications (profile; site).
Of the 11 papers participating in ChicagoJobs.com, 10 are owned by the Sun-Times News Group and are now Monster affiliates. A Sun-Times spokeswoman said the company is no longer working with the Shaker-sponsored job board.
What that means for the future of ChicagoJobs.com is not known. Joseph G. Shaker, company president, couldn’t be reached. However, the loss of the papers will undoubtedly hit hard on traffic to the site. Many of the estimated 160,000 unique visitors come from the newspaper sites, although Chicagojobs.com does rank first on Google’s organic search results. It will also cut the number of listed jobs, since many of them came from the participating papers.
Since launching the Chicagoland job board, Shaker has gone on to found at least four more sites: IllinoisCareers.com, FloridianJobs.com, BostonJobs.com, and GetCTJobs.com. Neither Floridianjobs.com nor Bostonjobs.com list any affiliates.
Shaker got into the job board business as a way of assisting newspapers, especially smaller papers, increase the reach of their recruitment advertising. That helped them become more competitive with the national job boards and the emerging regional newspaper networks pioneered by Adicio and CareerSite.
Today, most newspapers, including all the largest papers in the U.S., are affiliated with either Yahoo, Monster, or CareerBuilder. Typically, it’s only the small, rural dailies and weeklies that remain independent. Even there, however, many are part of a network because of the job board platform they use.