This was emailed on to me by someone who thought it worthy of a little bit of coverage!
From: Paul [mailto:Paul.****@monster.co.uk]
Sent: 23 January 2009 14:36
To: *********
Subject: Monster.co.uk – IT / Telecommunications Team Contact Details
Luke
Thank you for your time earlier.
I specifically specialize in the recruitment for your industry and I have been extremely successful in assisting businesses to dramatically reduce there cost per hire. In the current economical climate this has been one of the top priorities for companies and it is a medium that Monster WILL offer your business as I have assisted many businesses in your area to reduce there recruitment spend and thus increasing profit.
If your business currently uses recruitment agencies, I would like to give you a heads up on what’s happening within the industry. The agencies are using Monster’s CV database to source for candidates for you and then charging you an inflated rate to fill the vacancy. I will be able to offer you exactly the same tools that your agencies are using for a fraction of the cost. I would be keen to demonstrate our CV database free of charge, in order to prove to you that Monster will dramatically reduce your business current cost per hire. In the current economical market, I’m sure this would be of something of interest to your business.
Please fell free to call me on the number below in order for us to discus reducing your current cost per hire in more detail.
Kind Regards
Paul
Frankly I’m amazed they would send an email like this and to describe agencies as charging “an inflated rate” is just biting the hand that feeds them. What also annoyed me was the document Paul attached. This was really amateurish. Saying things like “Average costs per hire are between 15% to 20% of annual salary. This can run into £1000’s”. Well unless the annual salary is less than about £13,000 it IS going to run into £1000’s. Doh. When comparing “speed” they say that the average time to hire using an agency is six weeks (which could well be true) however, “your advert can appear online in Monster in less than an hour”. Right, but does that decrease the “time to hire”?!
It has me annoyed on many levels (interesting that their poor comparisons is the one that’s winding me up the most right now). But to summarise, as another recruitment friend pointed out “I wonder what the 79% of the top 200 recruiters (their statistic) that use monster would think if they knew???”.
Well, what do you think?
GGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRR
Why are Monster so bloody hypocritical?
For a company that is supposed to understand recruitment, they (or rather Paul) obviously has very little knowledge!!
Yes they can get an advert posted for a company in a matter of hours, and yes they can generate lots of CV’s for them.
But, and it is a big BUT, is that most organisations simply don’t have the skill or the resources to deal with the level of (crap) traffic a Monster add will bring them!
They will get inundated with hopeful idiots (the same way agencies do)as well as, hopefully, some good candidates.
The time it will take them, and the effort required to feed back to every applicant, will make them wish that Paul had kept his mouth shut and his promises to himself!!
What people like Paul (and some companies I might add) fail to realise, are the skills needed and the amount of time it takes to read and assess loads of CV’s. So when people quote ‘cost per hire’ they need to understand what it actually means.
And Paul, for your next training session – which you obviously need – take note of some proper stats from the CIPD: ” The average recruitment cost of filling a vacancy per employee is £4,667, increasing to £5,800 when organisations are also calculating the associated labour turnover costs”
I understand that companies like Monster will be selling their services direct to companies, but to do it with false truths and mis-information just smacks of the usual crap we all see every day in this industry!!
Louise,
You have really hit a nerve with me on this one!
We have some clients that have been approached by Monster with similar tactics as the one in your post.
Another case of “biting the hand that feeds” with their sales tactics:
They are now selling their new “ATS” to clients direct and one of the USP’s we have heard is:
Companies can dramatically reduce agency spend…
The client is paying for the ATS & CV database.
Monster claim that they got there first because the CV is in the database. Subsequently, when the recruitment agency tries to submit an applicant that is in Monster database, through the Monster ATS, the system wont allow it!
I ask you?!
Paul needs to learn how to spell. Apart from that he is spot on; why let the agencies rip off clients when Monster can do it all for next to nothing.
Place an ad and all those fantastic applicants (and only good ones) send in perfectly formatted CV’s bang on target. Why pay an agency when Monster’s technology can do all this for you; and if you don’t like the applicant you’ll no doubt have their credit cards details courtesy of Monster so you can charge hem for your time.
I cannot see how Monster can survive with this approach and would hope the agencies will stop using them and indeed employers. This kind of approach by job boards (OK, Monster) is exactly why I stopped dealing with them!
Paul may want to check out Monster for a new job!!
Enjoy……
These are desperate times for sure – particularly if you’re a job board that was once the gorilla in the market, kinda lost your way because you couldn’t get your head out of thinking that you were always going to be that gorilla, and have just spent millions and millions on an upgrade that was supposed to be your saving but released it at a time when the whole market is shrinking.
I’ve always been critical and cynical or the Monster approach to sales – but with the new design and system I had high hopes (long post about it here: http://digitalrecruiting.typepad.co.uk/digital_recruiting/2008/12/whats-that-coming-over-the-hill.html), but still feared for what that may unleash in way of the Sales Beast. Seems that unfortunately that shortsighted dangerous Sales Monster, the one no-one appreciates and is of a bygone era (when choice was limited), is indeed rearing its ugly head again.
I’m afraid increasingly Monster is looking like a drowning man – lashing out at all and everything within reach to try and stay afloat rather than holding its breath and developing a steady stroke. Because if you’ve ever done lifeguard training you’ll know – when someone’s flailing like that you just keep back until they’ve expended all their energy then picking up what remains otherwise they’ll take you down with them. Is it now too late for a drowning Monster to learn to swim?
Maybe Monster are trying to reduce their ad revenue from agencies? No doubt part of their grand plan.
In Belgium they’ve made no secret of freezing the agencies out of their client list.
Knowing that agencies are the biggest users of their CV database, Monster Belgium “revised” their pricing upwards, implementing a cost-per-view model, and removing the previous “unlimited views for a hefty fee” option.
With the new pricing structure, Target Recruitment’s fee for 2009 would have increased by 600%. SIX HUNDRED PER CENT!!
The Monster rep told me that agencies’ use of Monster was diluting the effectiveness of their product to “corporate clients”.
So we dumped them. And have become more efficient as a result.
there seems to be a bit of confusion here between a pathetically constructed sales message from this chap and the bigger issue of the trend towards direct sourcing that UK Plcs are trying to embark on in order to reduce cost per hire.
Job Boards have constructed a pricing set up where rec agencies pay 90% less than direct businesses for similar products (counter argument is rec agencies built and continue to be their job marketplace). Monster is a global company and in most other siginificant territories the direct market is much much bigger than in UK.
So put this info in front of an analyst and he/she will say why the hell are we giving the farm to an agency for about £400 a month when if we can convert even 1 direct company for 10 we lose – we will make more money – have “better” brands on site, be able to sell 5 more products to these cutomers etc.
Any agency or ad agency who adds true value to the process has nothing to worry about by this approach – its the processors who can be replaced by excellent proprietary ATSs and candidate attraction methods (and good HR/recruiters). And even that is some distance away.
That sales letter is just awful and shows you how little there is to worry about about their direct sales operation.
Cheers
Dom
http://www.omexperts.co.uk
I wouldn’t take it too personally. If clients are directly putting up ads and still have no hope in filling the positions you’ve a) found a new job opening you might not have found before and b) might have saved the cost posting the job up yourself.
That being said, recruitment might look a whole lot different after this recession. Although I agree with Dom, I don’t think Monster are the ones leading the way.
Wouldn’t it be great if agencies all agreed to get together and boycott Monster? I know very few companies that use it anyway.
Their sales ability and spelling (!), as others have suggested, is utterly terrible. I certainly wouldn’t be overly concerned about them, but they are misleading clients with their ridiculous figures. Average time to hire 6 weeks! What a load of rubbish. In the market I’m in, it’s around 1-2 weeks with the amount of candidates who are available immediately. Most of my clients have already decided themselves that direct advertising will result in every Tom, Dick and Harry applying. They don’t want to sift through a load of crap. They want to put their trust in a consultant to find the right person for them, just like they always have.
You know, every time I hear of Monster it is a bad story, so this is no surprise. It’s a shame they can’t bother to recruit some more literate people for their sales team though.They can’t be trusted to support the industry that feeds them, they can’t be trusted to keep their systems (and job seekers personal information) safe from hackers – can they be trusted to do anything right (or ethical!) at all??
It’s time we slayed the Monster! I don’t know of any other situation in which a supplier could go to your end client and attempt to tarnish you, your business and your service (Without actually understanding any of these elements) and not have their contract terminated.
As Monster’s senior management are not commenting on this, perhaps this shows that they just don’t care.
As an in-house recruiter I agree with many of the comments made by other posters. I do not use Monster on principle because of their attitude, having had plenty of calls from their sales people telling me I should use them because they are “Monster”.
BUT Paul raises an issue that is particularly frustrating as an internal recruiter. That is the reliance of agencies on the job boards to source candidates. When I come to review the CVs or interview the candidates it is blatantly obvious that the agency has done very little in terms of meeting, filtering or preparing the candidate. The emphasis on building up a database of candidates and a network of contacts seems to be dying out. When I started as a recruitment consultant (many moons ago now – we still used faxes and posted CVs!), I was not allowed to advertise. I had to rely on other methods of candidate attraction but I knew my candidates and when I took a vacancy I could immediately either start going through my hot list of candidates or do a quick search of my database and give my client a quick response. Now I give agencies vacancies and have to wait days for a response whilst the role pops up on various job sites and candidates get a quick telephone interview. Last time I was looking for a job not one of the half a dozen agencies I spoke to asked to meet me face to face. So, particularly, at a time when all recruitment costs are being scrutinised (including the wages of in-house recruiters!!!) the invoices from agencies are being questioned about the value added to the recruitment process by the agencies.
we stopped using monster at the end of last year and switched to total jobs. Best move ever.
Perfect example of how you can damage a brand and business with a poor, rushed piece of communication.
Many far more knowledgeable than me have commented on the content – so I’ll simply add that I could never entrust them with my brand after seeing how they (mis)communicate theirs…
What Monster fail to realise is that if candidates find out that employers have access to the cv database, they won’t register.
If you were an employer and had access to the database, could you resist checking which of your current staff were registered?
Late last year, I sold a large sole supplier deal with a client in Belgium which included advertising on Monster. I lost the whole deal because Monster contacted the client directly and quoted the same adverting package at significantly less money than they had quoted me. I hadn’t even put a margin on package and at the time was promised by the Monster sales rep. that we would get a better deal than any direct client would.
As you can imagine I was, and still am, rather miffed. Especially when I complained and rather than apologise for lying to me, Monster pointed out that it was against terms of service to resell adverting.
As you can imagine, we are not extending the Monster contract, along with most of the Agents I know. (quite a number)
The Monster ATS system mentioned above causes me the most concern – The sell to the end-client is easy: let the recruiter do the hard work and filter the candidates, in the likely event the Candidate is registered with Monster the end-client doesn’t have to pay a fee! I find this move unbelievable!
Then again, what with another Monster data breach scandal recently and the fact the Monster business model is pissing off agencies and candidates (Monster allow clients to set up alerts when a candidates that registers who currently works at their organisation] – Monster’s days are seriously numbered.
Agents & Candidates alike should be aware of Monster’s aggressive and unethical business model, and candidates especially should be aware that if they apply for a job on monster, it is likely that their Cv will be sent to their current employer. I am sure this must infringe some sort of legislation.
BAC
Quick update…..
I have a call with Derek Jenkins, UK Sales Manager, this afternoon. Will feedback on the blog after that.
Louise – what happened with the call?
Sorry for the delay… will be writing about my call with Derek tomorrow.
I think this can be problematic as some learners may drift towards others that share similar views rather than those that challenge, and in doing so shift their thinking.