CareerBuilder and Monster job boards, file for bankruptcy
reuters.com
reuters.com
I guess the model was an anachronism, whose time had come, but I still miss it.
IMO the cold calls (or, these days, linkedin messages, god help you if you ever give any one of them your number, you'll never want to answer an unknown call again) are a bit insane.
They feel like used car salesmen. Incentives are definitely misaligned with the employee -- from what I understand they're usually paid a percentage of first year salary, so they just want to move as many people as possible for the most money.
Not that candidates don't also benefit from a drive to increase offers, but I get the feeling people are pushed into taking jobs they might otherwise would not have.
Any ones you can recommend? I seem to have exhausted the potential of my current network of recruiters.
Full disclosure, I haven't switched jobs in a while, but I got the impression I could "get to the interview" for any of these companies even just reaching out directly to the in-house recruiters listed on LinkedIn. At that point I'm not sure what a head hunter provides in terms of value-add (for me) -- maybe they know more secrets about salary negotiations or conducting bidding wars? But on the whole it seems my application would be less attractive coming through a head hunter since now the company is shelling out an extra 30% to the HH just for forwarding on my resume.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by "exhausted the potential" -- have you applied and not found a fit with any of the gamut your current LinkedIn recruiter spam would recommend?
I get the impression that 95% of external agency recruiters are all shopping some slice of the same openings from the same ~10-15~ firms.
In my case I feel like most big name companies I can find wouldn't be that great of a fit. Also, due to spam and fraud epidemic currently happening (on both sides of the process) I feel like even if the job ad wasn't fraudulent, it's unlikely a human would even see/consider my resume under all the spam.
Ideally I'm looking for headhunters who would bridge the gap towards an unknown, smaller company (that I wouldn't have heard of myself - and ideally also one that isn't spammed to death by fraudulent applicant), where I could have a lot more impact than at a big name.
> I'd be interested to know what you mean by "exhausted the potential"
My current network is mostly tech recruitment agencies operating around EU/UK slinging your average "staff augmentation" roles - often no different to an FTE software developer. While they've been paying the bills fine, I feel like I'm stagnating and no longer learning anything, so looking to go upmarket, with either a bit of management or a deeper technical role, and those recruiters just don't have anything in that area.
That's exactly what happened with me.
In my case, the name was quite big, but the company was very small, and quite exclusive.
It was a good fit.
A lot are spray and pray, and because of those bad eggs, these people overrepresent the field. Poor fit jobs throughout, they don't vet you until you reply. Gives the whole vocation a bad reputation.
I will entertain a very thoughtful, personal message that shows they chose ME specifically as a good fit. Generally these people are more honest matchmakers who will warn you, for example, if it's a rough work culture. Tough to say if a spray and pray recruiter will start using AI to emulate this, would be sad
I still get calls and emails from them regularly. That model is still working in NY.
I haven't even considered using Monster in at least two decades though.
Employers pay a lot less, these days, than they used to, so headhunters tend to be pretty young folks.
That makes a difference. My last job was one that I stayed at for almost 27 years. The guy that recruited me, was in his fifties.
I know younger recruiters working in the fintech space and yeah have some mostly negative impressions.
I actually think that a large part of the nosedive is that many tech companies have stopped working with external recruiters because they don't want to pay the extra costs. My company included. And hiring has suffered for it.
The job I got in 2008 was via CareerBuilder.
My jobs in 2014, 2020 and 2024 came from internal recruiters reaching out to me.
But in 2023 the first time I explicitly looked for a remote job:
Plan A: reach out to my network - 2 offers almost immediately
Plan B: targeted outreach based on my background and fit for a role: 2 interviews almost immediately and one offer
Plan C: randomly submitting resumes to job boards. I submitted hundreds of applications mostly to LinkedIn Easy Apply and my application wasn’t even looked at. LinkedIn shows you.
In other words, all job boards are a shit show every applications gets hundreds of submissions and in my niche, I’m objectively very qualified and credentialed. But it’s hard to cut through the noise without going through a recruiter or using your network.
Fun fact, he predicted in 1995 that the internet would collapse entirely within the following year, and said he would eat his words if it didn't. In 1997, at a web conference, he put a printed copy of the words into a blender and drank a smoothie made with that paper.
Couple things I have noticed. Indeed does the best job of recommending jobs based on the jobs I click on. Sort of like Amazon's "since you like that, you might also like this". Indeed is very good at it. Out of the six or so services I am now active in, Monster is dreadful at it. Their email recommendations and related job postings are so far off the mark, I gave up on them. Another interesting thing I've noticed is how some of the smaller boards like remote.io are using the same listings as the bigger boards - so much the same that I wonder if the bigger board also owns it.
Its been over a month so don't recall exactly which "niche" board was essentially a clone of the more mainstream board but when I'm paying for full access, I don't want to see the exact same listings. It was way beyond coincidence and no relationship was disclosed.
So I think Monster just got fat and happy and turned into the Blockbuster of job boards. Not sure about Careerbuilder.
One thing on my agenda for this afternoon is to completely remove/delete/truncate/smote my accounts with Monster and Careerbuilder.
Could they also just be scraping other sites? Scraping seems to be the way for startups to gain traction without having to do any of the hard work of beating the bushes
The job markets are dead, just look at the last few months of layoffs across the board. First the Russian invasion and the resulting inflation plus the end of ZIRP, then the Trump tariff wars.
That’s not a proxy anymore. In my corner, I keep seeing the same listings over and over again. Friends with hiring power have all sorts of stories, multiple reorganizations, budget cuts (and then a week later announcing record profits on earnings calls).
Companies are just not hiring. They need to say they are to keep investors on the hype (if you aren’t hiring you mustn’t be growing).
Cycles take longer and are more annoying but companies are definitely hiring.
Many of these "open positions" aren't really planned to be filled. They're just out there to gauge interest or wait for the one "rockstar" candidate.
Honestly, this kind of deception should be banned by law. So much time is wasted every year applying to jobs that practically aren't real.
Also with a job board, there seems to be a natural progression—the most valuable asset you can have is that the dummies and the useless resume-optimizers haven’t figured out how to game your system yet. So if anything there’s a huge incumbency disadvantage.
The winning employee strategy was to pivot into either SV based firms or biotech about a decade ago.
The decline of Dell+EMC, Akamai, and VMWare+CarbonBlack also seemed to have play a role.
That said, there are good Boston area VCs like General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Fidelity Ventures, but at this point they've all basically moved to concentrate on identifying talent at Harvard+MIT who were already going to move West or to NYC.
I hoped Klaviyo would have had a significant impact, but it seemed fairly muted for the size of exit it was. Same with it's ancestor Hubspot.
And filthy rich.
What I'm saying is you don't see the same kind of circulation between established companies, founding your own company, working for a startup, and/or becoming an Angel or VC like you would in the West Coast or increasingly in the NYC scene.
I felt like I got into this for the promise that coworkers would start new businesses and there would be all of this opportunity and none of that has materialized.
Granted, I worked with Tom Lehman before he founded Genius, but that's a pretty singular case. And another coworker from that job founded a chain of kickboxing gyms. I guess I have loads of ex coworkers who founded crypto scam shit over the years though, but the vast majority of people just moved up corporate ladders.
Maybe things would be different if I worked in SV, but my experience with tech in NY/DC has generally been that it's dominated by an extremely risk-averse group of the silver-spoon class on one side and get rich quick schemers on the other.
I'd agree to a certain extent with regards to the East Coast tech scene. It definetly feels much more immature than what you would see out West (Seattle and Austin have startup scenes similar in operational mindset to the Bay Area/SV scene).
If you contrast this with modern tech workers, while you can get the experience in multiple ways - you can only get the compensation at large firms. Few startups pay well enough to give employees financial freedom.
Add to this, many “startups” are simply small businesses that are pretending to grow and be tech focused.
LinkedIn is an online resume essentially with a lot of additional self-promotion, so it simplifies the job application process, and also allows for searching for potential recruits. Jobs postings/applications was always a perfect adjacent market for LinkedIn.
Not surprised. Just another revenue stream.
imo there are three phases of a company: build, manage, liquidate. essentially seed/A-B, C-N rounds, PE debt rounds & asset stripping.
I would expect that revenues could go down, but their gross margin should be so large that it would reduce profit and losing money should be impossible let along bankruptcy.
usually playbook for these things - company makes a lot of money, the owners get enticed by PE - PE guts out operations like gutting out fish. the company forgets what made them tick or special.
company declares bankruptcy. Even with indeed now dominating the space n to a lesser extent linkedIn - no reason for monster to fail. none at all.