Monster's New Resume Search Is a Winner

From ERE Net | by John Zappe Nov 19, 2009, 7:15 pm ET

When Monster bought Trovix in the summer of 2008, the blogosphere popped with wonder at how the job board would make use of Trovix' job matching technology.

Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested
that, "By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis
on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the
competition." Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing
Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that
its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned
Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was
also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of
recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home
run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster's new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning
in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to
intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting
candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide
important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board
business.

If you haven't tried it for yourself, go here and test it out.
What you'll discover is that you can source candidates (if you really
want) simply by entering a job title. Look at the results. Add a
specific skill or a degree or some other parameter and the ranking
changes.

What makes Power Resume Search different - and better - than the
typical keyword resume search is that it has the intelligence to cut
through the duff. The examples the Monster folks used in the demo were
searches for bankers and lawyers. But try your own search, for, say a
bookkeeper. Instead of getting a list of hundreds of resumes with
bookkeeper in the text, you get a few dozen candidates who are
bookkeepers and are most likely to be looking for that kind of work.

Trovix built its job-matching capability around context and
concepts. A bookkeeper doesn't need an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley;
a CFO does. You know that. But unless you exclude candidates with that
term in their resume in a standard keyword search, you're going to get
CFO candidates with bookkeeping in their backgrounds along with
accountants and ... you get the idea.

It's "the world's best search engine," said Monster's Javid
Muhammedali at the beginning of the demo. Google might take issue with
the boast, but he is certainly on the mark when he says one of the
virtues of Power Resume Search is that it is a search engine "that
really helps you stop searching."

One incidental, yet valuable feature is how a search can unearth
skills not listed in the job req, which could or should be. It helps
drive the recruiting process forward by arming recruiters with
information they can take back to the hiring manager, Muhammedali
explained.

It has some other nice touches, including how it presents candidate information and the side-by-side comparison of candidates.

Power Resume Search has a counterpart for job seekers in Power Job Search.

I ran a few job searches on a variety of different titles and got
great results, which, in my case, meant fewer, but more accurate
results. Monster showed this off during the demo using "business
development manager" for the search with the result that all nine
listings were specific to the title.

Monster points out that this search has benefits for the employer:
the ad visibility improves, as does the likelihood that the applicants
will be of higher quality since an ad won't just turn up in a search
because it happens to contain the seeker's keywords.

Before you go away thinking all your sourcing problems are solved,
know that this is a premium service, for which Monster will charge $845
for a two-week access. Right now, it's a bargain at $260 for three days
of searching in an area.

It's also better at sourcing some types of jobs than others. New job
terminology has to be added by Monster, though you can search for a
specific keyword in a resume. And it won't store search histories for
OFCCP auditing until early next year.

Even so, it's a big step. For Monster, it's a $100 million-plus
step. The company spent $72.5 million to acquire Trovix and $30-$35
million more integrating it into the job board. Monster intends to get
back its investment and then some.

Muhammedali and Louis Gagnon, SVP Global Products, said the new
search opens the door to differential pricing for resume sourcing. It
probably won't be long before Monster puts a higher price on CFOs than
on bookkeepers.

Why can't they do that now? They probably could, but the technical
management is a challenge, since the resumes of CFOs and bookkeepers
may well be part of the search results in a standard keyword search.
But the Trovix powered search is smart enough to know that when you're
looking for a CFO, you don't want a bookkeeper who reports to a CFO.

Narrowing down results with high precision saves time. Lots of time. And gets better results. That's worth something.

tags: jobboards, resumes, screening, sourcing