When I was about 22 or so, I had a car with an 8-track tape player. I had a mini-suitcase full of 8 track tapes that held about 20 tapes. It rested on the console, all that music, pre-cassettes and certainly pre-CD’s. Steve Jobs was in high school and ITunes was decades away. Still, in the early 1970’s, my 8 track tapes were pretty cool.
Monster is selling 8 track tapes and hoping people don’t find about iTunes. In this case, LinkUp is iTunes.
Let me explain.
Monster came on the scene and converted all those Help Wanted newspaper ads to the internet ads. They spent zillions on TV advertising so that countless HR professionals and their bosses “made the jump” to Monster. The reasoning was simple, now everyone could find your job openings online, via Monster.
Instead of paying $300 per week for a paper ad, you now paid about the same amount for your internet ad. It was simple, fast, quick and easy.
Too much success spoils a good thing. Soon there was an online job board for every city, state and industry niche. I joke that there is even a site for Left Handed X-Ray technicians located at www.lefthandedtraytechnicians.com. Someone wrote me and said that the link must be bad. Can’t take a joke, I guess.
Soon everyone was going to the job boards and applying for jobs no matter what just because they can. “Can you tell me what a RN does again?” a hospital HR person was asked by a applicant. It is so easy to apply and to resume blast that Monster has resorted to other sexier revenue ideas. Bigger companies do this: they don’t fix core ideas, they add features and services, adding complexity, cost and commitment to the old model simply because they cannot do otherwise. It is a cultural thing, baked in deep and hard. Plus we all know what the Monster brand means, really.
Here is what is happening. The biggest growth area for advertising is pay per click. This is where companies pay only when a visitor or, in this case, the job seeker, clicks on your ad. Now, with LinkUp, this has the recruitment advertising business model going through a serious transformation. Recruitment agencies are fast converting their clients to this new method. And why not, companies only pay per click on a specific job. They do not pay for all those un-interested and un-qualified readers. It is a much more efficient model.
The company simply pays out of their account, much like Google Adwords, when the job is clicked. The job searcher is taken directly to the company’s own website and ATS. This is where the selling should take place, where the company can control its own branding. At LinkUp, we do not capture any job searcher information. We do not want any security breaches or issues, like Monster has had every few months.
But HR people are still using Monster. My prediction is that within a year or so, they will convert their help wanted advertising plans to LinkUp. After all, no one uses 8 track tapes any more.
