If you are not in the career biz, the fact that Monster just completed a huge upgrade to their site may have passed you by. This weekend the new Monster was launched with much hype and much fanfare. I have spent the last couple of days digging through the changes and user experience to report to you guys what works and what doesn’t.
The first thing that you will notice are a bunch of videos on the home page, did I click on Youtube, or Monster? Really, the videos are not needed and to me seem out of place. People are going there to find a job not be entertained. The job search functionality is pretty much the same with only a few minor changes. The one thing I noticed is that the search results were not displayed by cascading date, it seemed to be based on qulity of the match. I am not sure if this is good or bad, I don’t want to apply to a job that is 3 weeks old and probably already has a pool of candidates. I like the additional information that they add regarding salary information (powered by Salary.com) There was also a movie button, but I didn’t see any movies (maybe they are waiting for the next hyped launch to roll out that feature.)
Monster made a major effort to enhance the career resources section. They added a lot of tools but I personally find many of them useless and further more the way it is presented is overwhelming and confusing. You would need to devote hours to get something useful out of this section.
I also see that they are really promoting their resume writing service (which is not their company, it is CareerPerfect,) I would think that these resumes would be cookie cutter and mass produced. I would recommend a true professinal resume writer that would take a more personlized approach. With a monster writing service, I get the vision of a assembly line factory process. Anyway, sorry about that tangent…
In closing, the new Monster does not seem to be all that new and all the shiny new gloss is just that, superficial changes and not much substance. You can see that they were trying to move towards a web 2.0 feel, but in my opinion they came up short.
