Randstad buys Monster for $429M as recruitment consolidation continues | Hacker News Reader

Randstad buys Monster for $429M as recruitment consolidation continues

techcrunch.com

98 pointskenbaylor89 comments

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.)

As I was reading that I expected the quote to be dismissive and flip. At least the guy had a level head on and understood the market.

That is great. Random anecdote from the sort of early days (2008 or 2009): We had hit some membership milestone and Dan Nye who had taken over from Reid as CEO said something like: "Who's the Monster now?" This clip was actually filmed but never released as we were still tiny in comparison.

I'm not sure what the exec meant? It can be a failure or a huge success? This is such a generic statement

That sounds like exactly the type of thing you would want to/have to acquire, right?

I think a good example is Instagram. 1b sounded like a lot, but it now looks like a grand bargain.

Doesn't mean they had the capital to do it or that their business strategy / growth strategy at the time allowed them to do it. Just looking at the logistics of merging two companies it is completely reasonable that the experience and talent to make it work (like a few really good office managers) weren't there.

Does anyone actually have good experiences using recruitment firms for filling positions?

Tell Randstad that you'd like a Python/Django developer and they'll throw 20 people at you that all have one thing in common: They don't know Python, nor Django.

I regularly get cold-emailed by recruiters I've never dealt with for jobs I'm unqualified to do in locations I'm unwilling to move to. (No, I am not going to be a PHP dev for a betting outfit in Leeds.)

I bin them, but I suspect there are at least a few people who will go "hey, I can wing that" and respond depending on their level of desperation.

Skybet are still hiring I see

As a devops guy I get calls for there all the time, as well as some government agency there.

I always tell myself that if I were in this position, I'd go to the interview and tell the company that they're being ripped off by the recruiter.

Yes are good/useful recruiters are out there. It can be tough to see because there are so many companies, but some have ethics, professionalism, and good results.

One suggestion for you: When you write up a job description, break down the requirements into clearly labeled groups like "must have", "nice to have", etc. Makes it easier to hold them accountable for what candidates they bring you.

Look for a small recruitment agency, ideally a sole trader. Make sure they focus on the local market and the technologies you want. The best sales people (which is what recruitment is) work for themselves.

Some recruitment firms are good, but you have to be prepared to blacklist and phone-firewall the bad ones.

They do that because they are either not getting punished for sending bad applicants or sourcing good applicants is too time consuming to be worth it.

I know that there are companies which quickly blackball recruiters sending through mostly unsuitable CVs after a single warning. Strangely, still no shortage of people to work with.

> Tell Randstad that you'd like a Python/Django developer and they'll throw 20 people at you that all have one thing in common: They don't know Python, nor Django.

Sounds like regular job postings huh? We get people who don't know JavaScript (as in, never used it) all the time for JavaScript job posts.

I don't really see why this is a problem. It will probably take longer to learn your codebase than the language it's built in.

For something extremely common like JavaScript I think "never used it" is a valid concern. It implies someone that has never gone full stack on web.

For me personally, I do know Javascript a bit and have worked through some tutorials, built some toy stuff with it. But I think the idea of "full stack" is such a harmful concept to the profession of programming that I won't go anywhere near jobs like that, and would absolutely tell people that I know zero Javascript just to get them to leave me alone.

I think specialization of labor applied to the software stack is actually so much more critical now than it ever has been, and that in truth most places that seek to structure themselves around the idea of "full stack" only do it under some misguided belief that it's somehow cheaper or more efficient to employ people who can supposedly "do it all." It's further dysfunction when you see postings asking for very inexperienced recent grads who are also somehow gurus in 5 or 6 full-stack domains.

"Full stack" is generally an outgrowth of bad management ideas, and sends up red flags about companies and teams that believe it's super important, or that very competent engineers with experience wouldn't be able to pick up the skills they need quickly because they have "never gone full stack on web" ...

I see a few of these kinds of things that are somewhat tied together:

"Doing things at scale" -- but doesn't actually define the scope of their specific problem in the job listing or the interview. They seem to believe there is some singular platonic thing that is "at scale" for all problems and all situations.

"Full stack" -- but list conflicting skill sets for a position, or (worse) basically admit that they have no idea what you'll be doing for them. If you're trying to hire a machine learning Ph.D. with 6 years of experience in Javascript, then something up the hiring pipeline at your company is messed up. The drive to do a ML Ph.D. (generally speaking) is not really compatible with the drive to acquire 6 years of Javascript experience.

"Fast-paced" / "constantly-changing" environment -- The job of business developers and managers is to present a stable double-sided interface. One side faces customers and the stream of business problems that Nature creates. The other side faces the employees who then implement solutions to those things. Yes, you can't control the problems that nature throws at you. But you can control the way those problems are ingested, broken down, analyzed, and presented to the workers who will solve them. When a business punts on this and basically says anytime Nature throws us something tricky, management will just jerk you around under the infinite excuse of "fast-paced environment" then you should have serious, serious concerns about whether those business managers are actually going to be successful, or whether they will show respect to the intrinsic human need for adequate work/life balance and professional respect for your position within the company.

That's great, I think we're totally different types of engineers. I think we'd succeed in different types of environments. I think an environment promoting the principles in your post (specialization, business managers, disdain of "full stack") can be effective, especially in huge organizations.

But I am fully confident that a team of "full stack" generalists can be effective as well. I don't think the idea is "such a harmful concept to the profession of programming" at all.

When you're hiring for a web position, go ahead and hire the guy that has never used JavaScript in his life, and leave the "full stack" people that have actually built things in that domain for me :)

I think "full stack" is actually most harmful in start-ups, and that it's one of the primary inhibitors of growth because it fundamentally doesn't scale and doesn't, even conceptually, make sense once a project becomes large enough to have fractured sub-teams with competing and highly specialized needs. I can understand, but still with some skepticism, having 'full-stack' when you're just a team of 5-10 people still in "garage" mode. But anything at all larger, and especially if you're delivering to real clients and seeking to scale distribution, and it just falls down. Even all of the places that clamor about full-stack and have these big scale distribution problems don't actually do it that way. It's much more of a hiring buzzword / hoop to jump through, and then doesn't correspond to the way the work is actually partitioned or completed, except through lip service and verbal insistence.

When hiring for a web position, hire a web developer or a person whose engineering skill leads you to believe they will solve the web development problems. That's my whole point. Web developer != "full stack". Hire someone else for the database side, and have them work together. The two specialists, say, are worth much more than someone you venerate as "full stack" and make do both things.

I now ignore their calls.

Several years ago they sent me on 3 job interviews. The skill sets matched up nicely and the companies were nice, but none of the companies could meet my salary/benefits requirements (which weren't that extreme given my experience and other postings around). Randstad knew my requirements and sent me there anyway. I was able to find one of the company's public posting of the position (afterwards) with their offered salary range and it wasn't close.

They essentially wasted my time, and the company's time sending me on interviews that were highly unlikely to land an accepted job offer.

Add this to all of the contract or contract-to-hire positions they kept trying to push on me despite me being adamant that all I wanted was direct hire/full time.

We used a local firm that I had a personal relationship with (they sponsored the user group I chaired), and they got us a good developer (Rails dev, former Thoughtbotter)

However, even though I'm not actively on the market, I frequently get contacted for .NET gigs (even though that comprises 1% of my work experience, having spent most of my time in ColdFusion and Ruby). More often than not, they're out of state recruiters, and I suspect the actual recruiter is offshore, and they're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

Sorry to be opportunist but I'm a Python/Django developer who actually does know Python/Django if you're still looking.

haha, I have a couple of friend who are handy at that too. I wonder, there ought to be a more interactive HN thread on this than the monthly job postings from the Gods

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've kind of fallen completely off the map, for a company that was at one point the jobs board on the internet.

They have some kind of office off of I-95 in South Carolina or Georgia. I drove by it earlier this summer, and until I had, I had completely forgotten about that company as well, despite getting my first job out of college through them in aught six.

I think it is a call center in Florence, South Carolina.

I think the sign for Monster is still up in Maynard MA at the mill even though they haven't been there for several years. I used to work on a floor below them during the dot-com boom and I remember their company meetings would drown out ours (which were unfortunately always subdued since we were going out of business.)

I had the very same thought last week when I drove by their office in Weston, MA. Figured they must be making VCR's like Polaroid.

Working as a Temp through Randstad was my first "professional" job back as a teen in the nineties. It paid marginally more than working in a restaurant and was drastically more mind numbing.

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.

That experience gave me a deep appreciation for Office Space. I've never had to work in an environment like that anytime since, and just as fortunately, I'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.

Also, monster probably because of their size didn't do any innovation in recruitment space, didn't acquire any company which has new tech, so it was bound to go down.

Which is whey reed elsiver sold there recruitment arm a while back

I'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/Dice/CareerBuilder just places where recruiters go when they don't want to pay LinkedIn prices? My impression is that not very many companies use these sites directly any more.

Interestingly, my zombie monster resume from 10 years ago still gets me the occasional inquiry for things I used to do 10 years ago.

Sometimes those zombie resumes are hard to delete. Even with the advent of LinkedIn, recruiters will still use knowingly outdated information. I guess it is just a numbers game for recruiters.

http://blog.brusic.com/2012/07/how-private-is-your-online-jo...

I run a couple job boards and we tested doing some backfill from Monster at one time. The quality of the postings was horrible. Between them and CareerBuilder we mainly received "work from home", "avon", "mary kay" and "get rich quick" jobs. We could have filtered further, but then we were left with only a few valid results. We ended up not using either. It seems over the past few years they both went for quantity over quality.

Indeed's API sucks compared to some of the others, their payouts to partners are horrible, but at least they have a good array of jobs.

SimplyHired did a good job, but it seems over the last year they just gave up. Their partner help was non-existant, and their API was in bad need of an overhaul, although it was a well-rounded API and allowed some highly specific niche searches (i.e searching via O*NET codes). Now they are Indeed so that wiped them out of our arsenal.

We are left with ZipRecruiter, which in my opinion has one of the best teams to work with. They are not only easy to work with, but super friendly and knowledgable. Mainly they want to see their partners succeed which is a huge benefit for everyone involved.

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't even make that much sense apart from the low price they where bought for.

It's a good time to buy anything. Low interest rates across the board mean you can leverage cheap loans.

> apart from the low price they where bought for

It's not low for German (I'd even argue: for European) standards.

Last year they had $666.9M in revenue and $73.61M in profits.[1] I would say it is pretty low.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MWW/financials?p=MWW

Their multiple is probably low because it looks like the business is shrinking: $764m in 2013, $726m in 2014, and $667m in 2015. I might be overgeneralizing, but it even looks like revenue is shrinking at an accelerating pace.

> I might be overgeneralizing, but it even looks like revenue is shrinking at an accelerating pace.

German here; they have ads everywhere; maybe they just spend too much at the moment.

>they have ads everywhere; maybe they just spend too much at the moment.

But the parent commenter was worrying about shrinking revenue, not profit. If anything, an overly aggressive advertising campaign should grow revenue while shrinking profit.

Revenue it's not profit, and it's something that should be almost always positively correlated with advertising.

I don't know what Yahoo is smoking. Their FY15 statements say that GAAP net income was $13.2 million on $666m of revenue. 2014 had $725m of revenue with a loss of $293m. This is a company that is slashing and burning.

In German industry, there's plenty of angst that incumbents might be displaced by IT companies. E.g. Apple introduced their watch a bit more than a year ago and now they're dominating the smartwatch market, traditional swiss watchmakers can hardly get a foot in this space. So companies are trying to buy whatever they can afford in the hope of not ending up left behind. Porsche recently bought a stake in a parking app startup [1]. It all feels a bit like the dotcom era when so-called "old economy" companies frantically shelled out money to acquire "new economy" startups. Or like the stage shortly before the credit crunch in 2007 when dumb German Landesbanks piled subprime papers onto their balance sheet [2].

[1] http://www.intelligentmobilityinsight.com/news/ClB/Porsche-t...

[2] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...

To be fair, Swiss watchmakers have a long tradition of sticking their head in the sand when innovation happens. cough Quartz.

It's not just you. That's why there have been so much M&A.

Interests rates are low so getting loans to buy out your competition. In a time when VC money has (relatively) dried up and growth in many industries has slowed your competition are increasingly desperate to keep the lights on. A good few companies are pretty primed to sell right now.

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.

Monster's P/E ratio yesterday was around 65. Given that the company is far from a high-growth startup, that suggests that this deal isn't cheap. (That's not to say this is a bad deal -- the synergies between online and offline recruitment make sense.)

Pretty crazy that such a well know brand still, after all this time, is not making great profits.

I would have guessed that monster was a massive unicorn spinning out loads of cash in the fees they charge recruiters, turns out they're not at all.

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't work for anyone. I'm just as tired as everyone else getting those emails like "I noticed your skills in Visual Studio and thought you'd be a great fit!"

Uploaded my resume last night. 10 emails + 12 calls so far(despite that I removed my phone number... but it's cached somewhere =/) and you guessed it, at least two thirds are terrible technology matches. I reiterate, thanks for creating this Monster of a recruitment process.

> I can understand the concerns of companies that are unsure about a market so they shop out to recruiters, but it simply doesn't work for anyone.

I worked for an RPO (outsourced recruiting with access to internal systems and hiring managers). Maybe not work for everyone, but that's really dependent on the recruiter reaching out and the experience they initiate. Made plenty of hires, multiple teams did better than their internal recruiters.

>despite that I removed my phone number... but it's cached somewhere =/

What likely happened here is they are using a another product outside of Monster itself, like Avature CRM. They have your past info on file. As soon as you updated your resume you show up on their filter (ex. only resumes updated within last 7 days), they matched your email address and combine your profile so they have your phone number as well.

Also, if you're being messaged for experience that are years to decades old. You can just leave those as generic titles and only have details with most recent work. Say you'll provide more details if requested. This will limit search terms for what you come up for.

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't see that number being mentioned in their comparison with other such portals.

i used to work at Simply Hired; the employers are the customers of these job aggregators--eg, they give you access to a their database of current open positions often via an API, and we would load them into our ETL pipeline then put them on the SH Site, hopefully after intelligently indexing them so that a user (prospective employee) could retrieve the available jobs they are looking using just a handful of broad keywords.

Of course you're spot on that traffic to the Site, in the form of prospective employees, is just as important. But there's no agreed-upon, industry-wide KPI to express this and i suspect that might discourage public disclosure.

as you can imagine there are maybe a dozen different ways to express site traffic. So for instance, unique visitors per day gives you an optimistic figure but without any indication of traffic quality (ie, how many searches, how many jobs they clicked, and how many they applied for); and of course at the other end is something like "unique applicants per day".

and again, on the other hand, paying customers (employers) while not the whole story, is a metric subject to less reporting variance.

but the employers are the ones more likely to pay to get their advert promoted, featured etc.

I'd imagine job sites are like dating sites - churn is built in by definition as users achieve their goals.

Well, they're both marketplace businesses. Churn is built in for the non-revenue side, but for this kind of marketplace, chrun is only built in on one side. The goal is most likely for Employers to continue to provide revenue month after month.

Employers are where the revenue comes from. Number of available Employees is a metric they'd probably use in marketing or acquisition materials. I wonder how many of those employers provide MRR though.

It's a chicken and egg network effect, just like facebook or a dating site.

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

My company recruits heavily on college campuses via their career departments. We also use Indeed. We've tried out Craig's List, but haven't had much luck.

Indeed.com (or its national variants) seems to be the place a lot of these kinds of employer advertise.

TY. Stupid q. Searched my area and found lots of listings. 1 do employers know they are on indeed? And 2 how does indeed get listings? Sorry for the real basic level.

I don't know the answer to #1.

Regarding #2, indeed appears to be some kind of job site search engine, a la google, as most links I've clicked on there have sent me to some recruitment/agency/etc. website... but sometimes you find direct links.

In general indeed gets its listings by aggregating them from across the web. They also have a lot of people post directly on their site. They also have the Job Spotter app that gives rewards to people to find and upload pictures of "Help Wanted" signs.

https://jobspotter.indeed.com/

When my family business was looking for a bookkeeper, we listed on Indeed directly. It was really inexpensive and very effective; we received many qualified applicants.

Craigslist.

I thought Craigslist was only for jobs if you want to be in the... err.. adult services industy

I got my first office job, at a law firm, on Craigslist.

They nuked that portion of the site a while back.

I think it'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.

What's the going rate on recruiters these days though? 20% of first year salary? I'd rather use it for a 20% pay bump to get a particularly good candidate. Hell, real estate agents sell a HOUSE and only get 3%.

Recruiters make a series of phone calls and they're supposed to get 20-40k, while I go to work? It's a great business though, I would know, I've worked for/at/with a couple midsized recruiting firms, they make a lot of money.

Companies won't give you the 20% pay bump if you approached them yourself.

Its a good deal for the company because they outsource the risk of hiring a recruiter fulltime and not finding a candidate.

Some recruiting agencies make a lot of money but many go under. Companies pay a recruiting agency only if the agency found them the candidate. With lots of agencies competing, the fee is not certain. The good sourcers/recruiters definitely find it more profitable to work on their own.

I've never advertised on Monster, but if you're a recruiting agency, wouldn't you think twice about doing so now that it's owned by a competitor?

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'm extremely surprised Monster is worth more than 50M max.

As an aside, I'm looking for a job at the moment and linked-in is fucking terrible at the moment. I can't stand recruiters posting all their "forwards from grandma" memes flooding my news feed and I don't know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

One alternative: http://linkup.com is an aggregator / search engine that only indexes jobs from employer sites, no job boards or other noise sources.

For startups, try https://angel.co/jobs to connect directly with founders and hiring mgrs.

I deleted my account a long time ago. It simply isn't useful to most people any more.

LinkedIn is 1) a target for recruiters with a spray and pray strategy 2) a crm/lead gen tool for sales people

The amount of spam (I work in email marketing tech, I know these emails work, but let's call a spade a spade) in my inbox went down considerably as a result.

Odd that the amount of spam reduced. I've seen instances where individuals weren't even able to delete their accounts. Sounds funny, but it goes like: (1) you delete your account, (2) you receive a message from LinkedIn, (3) you think that the account isn't deleted and login to delete. Voila, you nullified what you did in (1)!

The following is true:

https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/590664399041519617

Oh it was definitely a "process" deleting the account. But the sheer amount of emails they send is a travesty. I honestly can't believe they haven't hit the point of diminishing returns yet. I suppose because people view linked in as a must there are virtually no consequences for them. Unless people start deleting their accounts. I highly recommend it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253690 and marked it off-topic.

As a recruiter (who is highly critical of most of the recruiting industry), I don't think the issue of off-topic LinkedIn memes and stupidity are solely a problem with recruiters. The top post on LinkedIn almost every time I log in is a notification that someone in my network "liked" a post featuring an attractive woman. After that, a mix of memes, those "only a genius can solve this" nonsense, etc.

You can unfollow people on LinkedIn just like Facebook. Upper-right hand corner of post should offer unfollow as a dropdown.

Monster jobs, not monster energy.

I was very confused at first glance.

Monster jobs was around wayyy before the energy drink

I thought this was about Monster cables!

I thought this was about Cookie Monster!

I honestly thought it was about Monster Cables at first, because I've never heard of Randstad & the name sounds like it could be a high-end audiophile brand.

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