Randstad buys Monster for $429M as recruitment consolidation continues

Random anecdote from the early days of LinkedIn: around 2004 or 2005, I remember reading a news story where a Monster.com exec was asked if they'd want to acquire LinkedIn. This is back when LinkedIn only had 1m or 2m members while Monster was the leader in the job postings space. The exec responded with something like, "LinkedIn is still very small and unproven, but I suspect that if they succeed, Monster wouldn't be able to afford them." Interesting to see that in 2016, Monster got purchased for ~1.5% of LinkedIn's acquisition value. (In 2004, LinkedIn was probably 1.5% of Monster's value -- if that.)

Does anyone actually have good experiences using recruitment firms for filling positions?<p>Tell Randstad that you&#x27;d like a Python&#x2F;Django developer and they&#x27;ll throw 20 people at you that all have one thing in common: They don&#x27;t know Python, nor Django.

Until the other day when I saw Monster mentioned in some random puff piece about local tech company interns competing in sack races, I had completely forgotten they existed. They&#x27;ve kind of fallen completely off the map, for a company that was at one point <i>the</i> jobs board on the internet.

Working as a Temp through Randstad was my first &quot;professional&quot; job back as a teen in the nineties. It paid marginally more than working in a restaurant and was drastically more mind numbing.<p>The work consisted of tasks like: format the text for every entry in an Access database manually, physically sort all of the files in hundreds of boxes, or the Sisyphean job of filing every sheet of paper that came through a fax machine.<p>That experience gave me a deep appreciation for Office Space. I&#x27;ve never had to work in an environment like that anytime since, and just as fortunately, I&#x27;ve never had to resort to a job search through commodity job sites like Monster.

This is such a deal for Randstad. Monster is the only brand which has presence in multiple countries with significant market share. But as aggregators(read Indeed) grew, the traditional job boards lost the value. Monster has infact blocked Indeed to index their jobs, but by then Indeed was so big and powerful.<p>Also, monster probably because of their size didn&#x27;t do any innovation in recruitment space, didn&#x27;t acquire any company which has new tech, so it was bound to go down.

I&#x27;m not sure where Monster fits nowadays. Indeed does a pretty good job of crawling job postings directly, and LinkedIn gets a lot of recruiters as well as principals. Are Monster&#x2F;Dice&#x2F;CareerBuilder just places where recruiters go when they don&#x27;t want to pay LinkedIn prices? My impression is that not very many companies use these sites directly any more.<p>Interestingly, my zombie monster resume from 10 years ago still gets me the occasional inquiry for things I used to do 10 years ago.

It is only me or is this a really good time to buy tech companies? We had so many acquisitions lately some of which don&#x27;t even make that much sense apart from the low price they where bought for.

This feels very cheap to me. Monster is a well established brand with many uses and the monetization path is clear. I suppose Monster is losing to LinkedIn for higher paid jobs.

I think we have to thank Monster for the current dismal state of recruitment... so I hope this acquisition along with the others causes some shake-up. I can understand the concerns of companies that are unsure about a market so they shop out to recruiters, but it simply doesn&#x27;t work for anyone. I&#x27;m just as tired as everyone else getting those emails like &quot;I noticed your skills in Visual Studio and thought you&#x27;d be a great fit!&quot;<p>Uploaded my resume last night. 10 emails + 12 calls so far(despite that I removed my phone number... but it&#x27;s cached somewhere =&#x2F;) and you guessed it, at least two thirds are terrible technology matches. I reiterate, thanks for creating this Monster of a recruitment process.

The article talks about around 50K employers registered on these job portals, as a metric. Bit surprised since I always thought the number of potential employees was a more valuable metric. Don&#x27;t see that number being mentioned in their comparison with other such portals.

Where does one go for a non-tech job nowadays. Part time low or unskilled. Or ft like a vet assistant, laborer (eg construction), medical biller, etc

I think it&#x27;s becoming clear that job boards have failed as model. Simplyhired, now Monster. I think employers are tired of posting jobs or scouring the resume databases have realized it might make sense to just outsource the whole recruiting thing. Which is why Indeed is now owned by Recruit a Japanese staffing firm and Monster by Randstad. That leaves Adecco to pick up Careerbuilder.

I&#x27;ve never advertised on Monster, but if you&#x27;re a recruiting agency, wouldn&#x27;t you think twice about doing so now that it&#x27;s owned by a competitor?<p>This is the same reason Pepsi spun off YUM brands. Coke converted Pepsi restaurant customers by asking how they felt about giving money to KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut.

I&#x27;m extremely surprised Monster is worth more than 50M max.

As an aside, I&#x27;m looking for a job at the moment and linked-in is fucking terrible at the moment. I can&#x27;t stand recruiters posting all their &quot;forwards from grandma&quot; memes flooding my news feed and I don&#x27;t know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Monster jobs, not monster energy.<p>I was very confused at first glance.