As reported last week, Monster. co.uk has begun its yearlong roll-out of new tools and enhancements, with recruiters benefiting from a more simplified job posting process and improved candidate management facilities.

And new features, rolled out later in the year, look like bringing more radical improvements in areas such as search and match. Some forthcoming clever career management tools will also mean that Monster can offer recruiters access to passive as well as active jobseekers.

James Brian, director of product for the UK and Ireland, wouldn’t be drawn on a timetable for the introduction of further features, but told Recruiter that the rise of cross-border recruiting means Monster wants to ensure site structures are as uniform as possible.

So what does the revamped site offer recruiters already and what can they expect later this year?

Previously, Monster’s job posting process could run across several pages, but it has been streamlined into two, with expandable panels and a contextual tip box that follows the user around to offer on-the-spot advice.

Time-saving features
Brian said that one of the aims with the employer functions has been to ensure recruiters don’t have to create things more than once. “When you post your jobs they go into a hiring library and every time you post a job we give you a drop-down of the ones you’ve already created,” he said. Similarly, when putting together a screening questionnaire, recruiters can pick from previous ones they have created, and add and edit them.

Other time-saving features include being able to hover over CVs to read the first 100 characters, rather than having to click and load the full document, and the ability to select and drag multiple candidates. Brian added that a star rating system for candidates will be introduced, which will again be seen by hovering over the CV.

Monster claims to have made the search and match facility more intuitive but, more significant, will be the contextual search feature which arrives later this year. Among the benefits of this will be that when a recruiter or candidate starts to key in search terms, it will automatically start to make associations with other related terms and pull in relevant information.

“If you were looking for an object-orientated Web developer, for example, this could mean a whole bunch of things such as someone who codes in PHP, C++, Java or so forth,” explained Brian. “Using the contextual search, just putting in any of these terms will make the link with all the other terms you’re interested in.”

He explained that the contextual search will be powered by parsing technology, which can intelligently read and extract information submitted to the site. “So on a CV, for example, it can pick out skills just from the descriptions a candidate has written down and it will understand
what those skills relate to.”

Improved user experience
Jobseekers in the UK and Ireland benefit from an improved user experience (Monster claims it is more than 70% easier to upload a CV to the site) but they will have to wait for the suite of career management tools already available in the US.

While candidate-focused, the knock-on effect for recruiters is that these tools should give people new reasons to visit the site rather than jobseeking, and so expand Monster’s global talent pool. Career Mapping allows users to explore different career paths taken by those in a similar position, while Career Benchmarking allows them to assess themselves against others.

Providing the weight behind these tools is Monster’s global database of 80m CVs. An individual can key in their current position as a starting point and then receive the three most common next steps taken by others or scroll down the list to less trodden career paths.

Brian added that the next stage would be to go to a Career Snapshot on that profession, which details everything from a typical day to industry trends that will tell you whether that job is on the rise or in decline.

Further targeting of job ads takes place elsewhere on the site. Brian said a key component of the strategy was to encourage individuals to personalise their space, so content and ads were as relevant as possible.

He believed Monster provides an answer to the trend for niche sites. “It delivers the same service as any other niche would but allows
the seeker more control,” he said.



www.monster.co.uk