Job Search Tips: Give Monster Another Power Look

From the New England Job Show | May 26th, 2010 by Jacqueline SimmondsLeave a reply »

By Jackie Simmonds, NEJS Blog Editor

In 2008 Monster purchased a company called Trovix with the idea to leap frog current job search capabilities on their site.  The Trovix approach is different; it built its job-matching capability around context and concepts.  Monster has launched this functionality, PowerSearch, on their web site in beta mode.

PowerSearch appears on the Monster site under the normal search information.  It generally looks the same as the standard search, but it is different in that it is able to find more results because it's not limited to the words you enter.  PowerSearch will find relevant jobs by matching your search criteria and related words expanding the search results returned.

When you enter a position in PowerSearch it will not only return exact matches but related positions as well.  With this tool you can also search for more than one job title at a time.  Examples provided by Monster illustrate the functionality:

• If you search for "QA," PowerSearch will find jobs that have "QA" in the title, as well as jobs for test engineers, because the search engine recognizes that QA and test engineer are closely related.


• If you search for a software engineer PowerSearch also will include results for software developer.

You can hone your search by using keywords, your skills, the industry you want to work in, specific company, years of work, or experience required. Play around with this, you willfind a difference in the jobs being returned to you.  Results are more relevant, a lot of the "other stuff" that usually shows up is weeded out.

This is not only a job seeker enhancement but an enhancement for employers/recruiters.  Monster's PowerSearch shows all relevant candidates based on their qualifications including how closely they match the job requirements, the recency of their experience, and it allows for side-by-side comparison of candidates.

User Experience

In an ere.net article on the new PowerSearch feature there was a link for hiring managers to test out the new functionality.  I ran a test query to see how I looked to hiring managers and how I compared to other job seekers.  It might be something you want to do as well, to access the HR version click here.

My PowerSearch results listed my current title and the previous title, top skills, and experience.  It pulls the top skills from your resume and then calculates the years of experience.  This calculation is somewhat misleading, as it appears to calculate based on that particular skill word, which may or may not represent your total experience with any particular skill, it all depends on how you worded things in each job position that you have held.

Other information provided in the candidate summary includes:  when your resume was last updated, experience (calculates total years), authorization, desired salary (careful here - Monster allows you to enter a range but it only shows the high end), and relocation.  When clicking on the candidates name it pulls a full profile based on your resume and the information you filled out in your Monster profile

I found that the last used and total years of experience did not accurately reflect what has happened in my career.  Which leads me to wonder, do I need to rewrite my resume to provide an accurate resume for employers/recruiters who use Monster?  To do this I would have to have the same information repeated at each position to accurately total experience.  It would be an interesting exercise to see how that would end up changing the design of your resume.  That info aside, I have switched to using the beta search to pull my job searches.