1.10.09. You couldn’t walk the floor of the Expo without seeing someone wearing the rectangular Monster button showing that date. They were part of the buzz the company is creating in advance of the launch of what it’s telling people is a new improved user experience.
Taking to heart the message CEO Sal Iannuzzi has been touting that users are as important as recruiters, the company is set to roll out a new look and new features on January 10th. Monster was previewing some of what’s coming at its well-trafficked booth, and what we saw suggested the kind of career and succession planning tools found in higher-end talent management systems.
“It’s a seeker-centric appoach,” Monster’s VP of Client Adoption, Eric Winegardner, told us during a tour of the features. There were no live demos because Monster’s development teams are still making tweaks.
But the slides showed tools that should appeal to passive candidates, as well as the traditional active seeker.
In three steps, a worker could learn what rungs others in the occupation have taken up as they worked their way up the ladder. Using the benchmarking tool, a candidate can learn how they stack up against others. Using the Career Snapshot, a worker could research related occupations by title, skills, and the like.
Just like a quality talent management system, Monster’s tools will help career-minded workers do a gap analysis and see what they need to do to ready themselves. The advantage Monster has over any single company is that it taps a database of millions of resumes to create aggregate pictures of career movement for nearly any occupation and industry that exists.
Where it doesn’t have the data, it reaches out to get it, pulling in things like average salary for a searched occupation in the specific geography. Every job, Winegardner tells us, will have salary data — if not from the employer, then salary ranges Monster will provide.
We asked Winegardner about the integration of the job-matching technology it bought when Monster acquired Trovix. Winegardner laughed. Almost everyone who he talked to asked the same question. “It’s coming,” he said. Some parts are there now, others will begin to appear in December, but the complete integration won’t happen for the Jan. 10th launch.
There are also some changes coming on the recruiter side. One of the more useful is the matching of candidates to job postings based on keyword. It won’t replace resume searching, but it will prove useful to smaller companies since they’ll be able to see resumes and then decide if they want to buy access to the candidate.
Winegardner said that 90 percent of the user experience — seeker, especially, but recruiter as well — will be changed. And Monster will get a new look. No previews there, since the design is still being developed. But he did give us a hint: What users get might very well be a personalized homepage.