Monster Jobs - "The Worlds leading career network"

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Monster Jobs - "The Worlds leading career network"

Hmmm. Monster Jobs. I don't like Monster Jobs. I don't recall ever getting a job through them either.

Monster Jobs banned me from their site today (8/10/02). :) So this is my side of the story.

Disclaimer: This is totally one sided and you really should not believe anything you read - not here - not anywhere. Make up your own mind!

Background

I've spent over three years posting on the Monster Jobs discussion forum (and as a registered user - ie had my CV online and was just waiting for the jobs to role in).

I spent my time, firstly learning by asking questions on the Monster Jobs board (I was 20 and had just graduated).

Then I kept going back, to begin with because I was stuck in crappy temp jobs and wanted something to do with my time! :)

Monster Jobs regular

But, I found myself more and more being able to help people out with queries that I had faced myself.

So I kept going back and I, along with a few others (notably, but not exclusively, Rich Wooten who contributes to this site and is a moderator in our forum) and we tried our best to help people out, by either reflecting on our own experience or pointing people to another site.

Myself, I have had perhaps over a dozen temp jobs in the space of three years (and spent most of that time surfing the web!), so I found it pretty easy to find information online that I could pass on to others (by posting a link).

I should note that the Information Management part of my degree helped a little as well! Gotta give credit where credit's due (and my lecturers deserve some of it)!

So that was the point of Monsters Jobs board for me.

Web Design

About 6 months ago I set up my other website, Wee Boab and on a few occasions I posted the URL when replying to people's requests for help - usually because they were looking for work in Scotland (and that's the area Wee Boab covers).

After I while I wrote a few articles for Wee Boab (which are now all on this site) and referred people to them (all general stuff, like finding jobs, etc). I thought myself it was a good way to increase the traffic to my site and to be quite honest I was getting tired of answering the same questions again and again on the Monster Jobs board (it wasn't moderated so we were the only people making any effort to help out - although in all fairness to them, they did have other specialist boards with experts posting advice on them).

JobseekersAdvice.com

I want to run my own businesses one day, I am a web designer and I had developed a knack for recruitment advice.

So along came this site. It was a natural progression in my career.

I built it in about a week and as I write this article, it's only a couple of weeks old.

Two weeks or so that we (Rich and I) have been referring people to this site from the Monster Jobs board. Not just at random though. I feel that there is a lot of good quality content here, and hope it will continue to grow and the discussion forum certainly is more functional than the Monster Jobs Board.

There is definite benefit to all whom we referred to here (and if any of you think otherwise, then please let me know because I'll do all I can to make improvements to the site).

And yet there was no input from Monster Jobs on the board.

So I started baiting Monster Jobs with blatant attempts at self promotion (self promotion being the promotion of this site), but still no response.

Until Yesterday

So yesterday degraded into a tit for tat posting session (with both sides repeating themselves more than was necessary!).

The gist of what was said is this:

(now some of these points may have been repeated several times!)

My (basic) standpoints:

I agreed that I had been going over the top with my URL posting.
I maintained that linking to this site from Monster is of benefit to jobseekers as a whole.
I suggested that a compromise could be reached between moderating the board and allowing users an amount of freedom in sharing information.
I suggested that I limit my URL posting to responding to specific requests and if my own site should be relevant to someone then it should be OK to give them the URL.

Monster's (basic) standpoints:

Now, some of their responses were signed off with a name (after I repeatedly requested it), some were anonymous and some were accredited to more than one Monster Jobs employee, so to avoid misquoting someone, I'm going to summarise the points made and not make any suggestions as to who posted the comments.

However, if anyone from Monster Jobs would like to take claim for a point or adjust a piece of information, I will quite happily do so.

They said:

I shouldn't have been promoting my sites (and defined promoting as "Commercial Promotion is where you would be openly promoting structures and services that don't fall under the remit of Monster.co.uk. I.E sites that are NOT alliances, business partners").
If I wanted to reply to messages on the forum, then I had to first check to see if the information was available on Monster, and if it wasn't then I had to send the user to the Job Help Expert, who would deal with it. (You know, instead of me doing a quick Google search and finding the information in about 2 seconds like I had done a hundred times).
They insinuated that I posted on Monster for the sole reason of promoting my site (due the hugely popular nature of Monster).

In general, their responses were long overdue and in places extremely patronising. I personally took offence at their suggestion that I've spent 2 years assisting the users of their site on my own time for the sole benefit of increasing traffic to my own sites (both of which are less than 6 months old).

My Final Response:

Ah well, this page is too long already! Click here.

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