Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO of Monster Worldwide meets Manuel Francisci, president and founder of jobWings
Also present at the meeting: Gabrielle Bouchard, General Director of Monster.ca and Catherine Guhur, Director of business development for jobWings. The text below has been modified to suit your screen.
Manuel Francisi : To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit in Quebec ?
Jeff Taylor : We kind of have our headquarters for all of Canada based in Montreal and actually, had a kind of celebration with customers down in Toronto. This led to an opportunity to talk to the group and I told them that I wanted to come to Montreal. So the real reason for my visit is absolutely to see my people and make a connection with Gabriel and make a connection with Sales. And then, I tend do the same routine as I go. I have 21 countries to go to. So I do the loop and I start again.
M.F. : When you first started Monster , were you expecting that this new way of recruiting would spread all over the world that fast ?
J.T. : Think about your question. There is no such thing as electronic recruiting!
I started it as an idea in December of 1993. There was no electronic recruiting. None. Zero. In fact there was really no Internet. Monster was the 454th dot com. So, there was no guide. The part that I understood was that I could become the publisher. I had been paying publishers in an ad agency scenario where they got 85% and I would get 15%. Now I wanted to be the publisher because I could see the dynamics of being an agency versus being the publisher. And the publisher dynamics looked more interesting to me. And what I discovered was the amazing efficiency of being a publisher without the pulp and the ink, and the printing presses, and the unions, and the office space, and the distribution, and the trucks… So the gauntlet for me, early, was to become the publisher and I could see that. I didn’t realize, however, that Monster would end up in 21 countries and that we would end up with the brand spirit that Monster has.
M.F. : Do you still consider Quebec as part of the Canadian market or as a distinct market that requires specific penetration strategies ?
J.T. : I look at Canada as a market. Then within Canada I look at the provinces the way I would look at my major business centres in the United States, where I’ve got to be local language, local culture and local leadership in a way that I don’t have to delineate between Dallas and Chicago. We are leading in all of the provinces, I think, first of all because we have Canadian talent managing our Canadian operations. (…) There are some subtleties in every country and there are obviously subtleties in the way we manage our business between Toronto and Montreal and I really expect the team to help me see those subtleties.
M.F. : How would you go about measuring the effectiveness of your marketing programs in Quebec?
J.T. : When you start looking at a launch in 1997, you basically have a 6-year old brand and you have 75% of market awareness. And aided brand awareness is that much higher. For example, if you say ‘have you heard of Monster.ca’. People will say ‘oh, yeah. I forgot. I was there last week’. Aided brand awareness gets into the 90s percent range. So I look at that. That’s your engine.
You haven’t really started to do the business about your brand yet but you have brand awareness. We have that wonderful Internet price for jobseekers which is “free”. And we have the wonderful relationship with employers where we haven’t changed the way an employer buys the service. We’ve just changed the distribution method. They know how to post a job description because they’ve bought one in the newspaper. So, we didn’t change the fact that they buy a job description, we’ve just changed and really enhanced the distribution and the visibility of that job. As a result the employer has very little or no resistance to join this program. And Monster has been the innovator of basically educating the employer population about a new place that is actually more efficient. A place that is a centre or hub for buyers and sellers; in our case jobseekers and employers. And then we’ve innovated with the resume database which is not a newspaper-led product. So the resume database becomes Monster’s lead in the market. We have 1.45 million resumes across Canada and about 400,000 in Quebec.
Catherine Guhur : Could it be possible that the resume database become the first product?
J.T. : Yes. But I think it’s what I call a mirror. The employer makes an announcement and the job seekers bring their skills. And how they match is going to continue to evolve but I think there’s still going to be two sides. The public resume database is a fantastic and strong secondary product for us. It’s about 33% of our revenue; our job posting revenue is about 55%. You get the mix. But even as our job posting revenues have grown, the resume value has also grown. So, in a much bigger market you have a new product that is commanding a high percentage. Over time you might not have to make an announcement any longer. Or, instead of one-to-many posting, which is a job announcement , you might do one-to-one recruiting in a database. We have… 15.6 million people, about 1 out of 10 has a resume on Monster.ca. In the United States we have 1 out of 7 workers.…
M.F. : Is it true that Monster is getting ready for the explosion of “blue-collar” recruiting… I’ve seen the advertisements, for example, during the Super Bowl…
J.F. : Yes. Big time! Our Super Bowl commercial is about a runaway truck. And the idea that somewhere there’s a trucking company that needs a driver and the second part of that [advertising] copy is that somewhere, there’s a driver who needs a job. And the idea that now Monster works for everyone. 54% of the U.S. workforce is what we call Skilled and Hourly… workers in hourly jobs in retail, or in restaurants or as truck drivers where you have skills and you need a licence, but that 54% of the working population would never… — I don’t want to say we haven’t reached them, because they know our brand — … but we’ve never offered them the value that we’ve offered to “knowledge workers”. So now we’re beginning to offer the value and we’re actually calling on companies that have Skilled and Hourly opportunities.
In Canada, about 45% of the workforce falls into that same category, so it would make sense that we would mirror our efforts although we haven’t made any formal announcements yet.
M.F. : Will you make some changes in Monster’s layout for this population?
J.T. In fact we already have. But what we didn’t do is make a separate place where Skilled and Hourly people would go. Instead, we actually changed the core of Monster. So, now you have a choice of building a resumé or filling out an application. And that’s on the system. Basically, Hourly Workers are using application forms… So, the changes that we’ve made to Monster are much greater than only a couple of fixes on the true solution.
C.G. : : So, it should be in Canada too?
G.B. : Yes, it’s coming. I won’t tell you the date, but… I can tell you the night before, though! It’s a big marker!
M.F. : What kind of future do you see for narrowly focussed niche job sites?
J.T. Our business is like a crank. And having the most job seekers attracts the most employers. That attracts the most revenue which fuels the marketing dollars; which then attracts job seekers. It’s like a continuous crank, right? There are a couple of things about the “niche” sites. The first one is that they don’t have the core competency of sales and the infrastructure to basically deliver their product across a wide footprint. So, you’ll find that a niche site that starts in Montreal will have a much more difficult time moving to Toronto, or Calgary. So, [you’ll] find that a lot of niche sites tend to gain some popularity in one place, but don’t have the ability to distribute…
The second thing is that there’s a surprise factor. If you are a niche site, how do you define [yourself]? Are you [a] hospital recruiting [site] or are you [offering] allied help? Do you have nurses? [How about] programmer analysts that work in hospitals too? Do you take those or don’t you take those? And very quickly, the blend. or matrix ,frustrates the niche player because… How do you define your market? And then, you’re not a total solution for hospitals if you define that market in anyone of the three ways.
The other thing we have found is that the engine of Monster, despite our early to market first-mover advantage, is really our market share; and because of our high market share, our employer penetration and our sales force, we actually have more job seekers in niche markets than niche sites! And we have more employers advertising for those niche positions, than the niche sites have. We have legitimate revenues and we’re profitable in Canada. So we’re actually cash-flow positive so that we have the ability to invest in marketing dollars. So, what I’ve seen over the last 5 years is all the niche sites go out of business. Not all, but 90%.
M.F. : What was your initial intention when you bought FlipDog?
J.T. Great question! Disruptive technology. A crawler that could identify jobs in the marketplace by working out of Web sites. I actually bought it for a different reason that everyone thinks. Everyone thinks that I bought it for the disruptive technology, but I really bought it as a “lead” engine for my sales force. Because it became a way to identify, not only the companies out there, but also [a way to] get the jobs. And then I can redistribute those leads into my Siebel system and distribute them out to the desktops of my sales force.
M.F. : Are new initiatives from DirectEmployers scaring you? Customers that like to recruit themselves, without Monster.
J.T. The “flavour-of-the-month” scenario, I think, works here. Let’s move away from DirectEmployers for a minute. Let’s talk about a corporation developing their own Web site. there’s a core-competency that you would build all your jobs on your own Web site and then job seekers would just come to your own site, right? A big company here in Quebec, Bombardier for example. They have their own Web site and their own jobs, right?. And they decide ‘I don’t really need a sourcing engine. I’m just going to group my jobs with a few other company’s jobs’. But what happens with the job seeker is that, if I know that I want to work for Bombardier, I go there, right? But that’s not the way people look for jobs. And I know it. 90% the people who look for jobs search by job title. They don’t search by company names. They actually care less about which company. They want to be excited about the companies but they’re not being directional in going to a specific company. So, there’s a theory that a big employer like Bombardier would say ‘why would I need monster?’ because everybody knows Bombardier, right? But the reality is that Bombardier, proportionately hires a lot more people. And the other thing is that putting your job on your own Web site is kind of like taping your jobs on your front door. So, the fax machine repair person sees [your jobs], your “water guy” sees your jobs, the interns and other people who come in see the jobs but are those the right people for the jobs that you have?
Bombardier would have to drive its traffic off to this Web site which means that they’re sharing people that would have gone to Bombardier with the other ten partners. It’s almost a reverse model. Like you don’t want to take the candidates that come to you through your own branding and then go share them with those other companies! Or maybe you do, but obviously it would be a second to your strategy… [As] your primary strategy,
you want to get the talent that knows about you and comes to you and make it your own.
J.T. Tell me a little bit about your initiatives and your publication and who reads it and how it’s received?
M.F. : We just keep informed on a world-wide scale. We try to identify trends. We check on the European market to see what is going on. And the rest of the world at large. And with La Toile des Recruteurs we write about what happens in Quebec, with recruitment in general. And we also report on major events in the rest of the world.
J.T. So if you see Monster, during the Super Bowl, moving in a certain direction, you can say ‘hmm’…
M.F. : Yes. And see that Monster has the means to do market research and surveys that we don’t have. That’s why we look at everybody.. And all this information we share it with the rest of Quebec, but we also use it for our own site. For our own strategy and development.
J.T. Because you’re running niche sites, right now? You’ve got jobWings which is in Finance I think?
M.F. : We have jobWings. It’s a niche site for Finance and Accounting. I first started with jobWings two years ago, in February 2001…
J.T. And you own these?
M.F. : Yes.
J.T. And you launched the publication?
M.F. : Yes…
J.T. So, this is interesting because you’re getting a pretty direct and honest assessment from me, yet you’re in the same business…
M.F. : And at the same time, I’m wearing the hat of the journalist. But it’s a great tool for that. Because I can call anybody working on the recruiting market in Quebec and they will be happy to receive me and talk to me. Because I will share the information with all others.
So jobWings is specialized in finance and accounting from intermediate to senior level. So that’s like three specializations in here: geographical, professional and experience level. Jobs above 50,000$. And the second one is La Toile des Recruiteurs, one year ago. This one is split in two : one part of the site is for content and the other site is for job posting.
J.T. So, because you’re interviewing right now, when you have that hat on, I think your strategy is going to have a difficult time scaling. Because, not only do you have different niches, but you also have chosen different brands. And if you look at the hammer that I’ve used to build a business like ‘Monster, Monster, Monster, Monster’…
M.F. : I’ve taken a completely different trajectory. I don’t have a database for resumes… and I don’t want any. It’s a different philosophy of recruitment. And I just brand a specific site to reach a specific pool of candidates. And each site has its own identity. It’s the same tools behind, but it looks different because the candidates are different.
J.T. Let me give you an example. On Monster, I have a healthcare site. It’s called H-Monster. And for every thousand searches on health care titles in the Monster core database, there’s one search on H Monster. So, what that shows me is that the Monster brand drives a huge amounts of traffic into a central kind of a repository and even on the face of the place where they go, they have very little interest in going to another place. People don’t have the capacity to accept more than a few brands in their lives, in an effective way.
M.F. : I do agree with that, but the CA in Montreal needs [only] one brand: jobWings. The HR professional also has one brand in mind. So, I don’t want the CA going to La Toile des Recruteurs. He has nothing to do there. And especially, I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to receive too many non-pertinent resumes. In that way, I get rid of impulsive job applicants.
Because, someone may occasionally end up on jobWings and say ‘oh, there’s no job here for me here’ and he may never come back. And that’s great. He will never apply…
J.T. But how did he hear about jobWings?
M.F. : Well,… the strongest way is by word of mouth, because we just try to build a community. And it’s cheaper and easier to reach a small community. Through advertising in CA and CMA magazines. By buying keywords on search engines and through sponsorships of certain events. For instance, tomorrow evening we are the major partner for the Gala de la réussite of the Chartered Accountants. You know, during their diploma award ceremonies.
J.T. Are you in Toronto?
M.F. : Not yet. So far, we’re a self-financed company. We are actually three right now. The first year I was alone. And then, we hired a programmer, Catherine for development and me for everything else.
The last move that we did was three weeks ago when we launched Beljob.ca in Quebec… featuring indexed job titles with a search engine. And we intend to sell that by click-per-candidate. The idea is to get a piece of jobboom’s market, here in Quebec. After that, Workopolis in Canada, and then…
J.T. So, the difficulties you will have is your money will run out before your expansion opportunities.
M.F. : I’m aware of that. For now we’re managed to auto-finance our activities. But I know, though, that I will need more money for development in the rest of Canada. But I also know that if I need money, I can get it through risk capital. We are having good contacts in this field.
J.T. So, how do you look at Monster as a competitor?
M.F. : Well, to be honest with you, I don’t consider it as a competitor in Quebec. That’s not the market that I want to take. Jobboom has a bigger market share than Monster or Workopolis… In Quebec it’s Jobboom. In Canada, I would say that it’s Workopolis. Monster is probably well established in Canada too… I’m not aware of that…
Gabriel Bouchard : Why is that?
M.F. : Well… you’re in the market of resumé database access. Job postings is my market for my niche site… And Jobboom has, according to my feeling, close to 70% of the market in Quebec. Don’t you agree?
J.T. I totally disagree, but that’s fine.
G.B. :. What you really want to know is what jobpostings have been paid for. On a Web site where there are 30,000 thousand jobs, if only 2,000 jobs were actually paid for, then that’s the market share they have.
M.F. : But Jobboom doesn’t have the reputation of giving away their job postings…
G.B. : Let me ask you a question. Let’s say you pay 500$ to have a 30-day slot where you can post, let’s say, 60 jobs, one every 12 hours. So, you didn’t get 12 X 500$. You got 500$ for 12 jobs.
J.T. It’s a different business model…
M.F. : But it’s a tough one for us. Because the perception of the customer is ‘Okay, it costs me 12$ a day. I buy for 500$, I get 30 days’. These are days per job posting. So you can leave your posting for three days, then remove it… A bright move on their part. But what happens is a question of this perception that it costs me 12$ a day to have a job posted. And the problem I had on my niche site is that recruiters knew perfectly that I was going to give a better result, but for more money. But they would then have trouble selling that idea internally to their managers. So that’s why I decided, six months ago, to reduce my prices by half at jobWings. It was 500$ for a job posting. That has been split by two.
J.T. How do you write an objective article?
M.F. : (Laughs) I try to.
J.T. I’m really curious. Because if you don’t write an objective article, I will never interview with you again. And I’m just picking up some things… And I may be a little naïve in the market about who I’m interviewing with. But now I’m sort of watching the sort of questions you may have. You have total ulterior motive in your entire question base. So, be very careful, because if you can’t write an objective article then your credibility will be shot with me.
M.F. : I’m aware of that. And not only with you, but with everybody in the HR community… I care a lot about my credibility
J.T. I recognise that you do, but I care about the way I’ve shared information with you in this very room, right now, and your responsibility, as a journalist, to fairly translate. And I’m pushing you a little bit because you have no separation of ‘Church and State’.
M.F. : If I could I would, but it’s too expensive for us, for now.
J.T. But if I meet with the New York Times, I know that they own the Boston Globe and so they own Boston.com and Bostonworks. But there’s a separation of Church and State. I think it’s fair that it be stated. You are running businesses that are in competition with me, interviewing me about my strategies about when I’m going to come into marketplaces. And if I don’t have the ability to turn the table and say ‘what’s going on’ then it’s completely not fair. And I have less interest in the article than I do with building a fair rapport between your organization and my organization.
M.F. : You we’re aware at the beginning that we were [players] on both sides?
J.T. I’ve read the brief last night. But the bigger question for me is that there are a lot of dynamics in this market place and all the issues that we’ve talked about are real issues. They happen to be real issues between your business and my business, as opposed to [writing] an article. So, we’re painting a picture where it might be fun to do a point-counterpoint article; where I have the opportunity to sit down with Jeff, one-on-one, and it’s amazing if you look at the polar differences in the way we approach the market. You know: this is the way Monster approaches its market; this is the way I approach the market. This is what Jeff says about the strength and weaknesses of that approach and here’s what I say about the strengths and weaknesses of his approach. I would be fine with that, as long as it’s fairly represented.
M.F. : Gabriel, have you ever read an article [on La Toile de Recruteurs that was not objective?
G.B. : No. I have to say that you’ve created… I mean, I think that I’ve been well treated every time that I’ve spoken with you. And one time I wasn’t happy and I came back with a comment and it was posted the next time and I appreciate that. It’s still a sensitive position you’re placing yourself into…
M.F. : Yes, I’m aware that I’m walking on eggshells…
Our publication has to be objective otherwise we will stop it or give it away. At the beginning, before I started La Toile de Recruteurs I was looking to create a recruiters association. But, I found out that it was more expensive to create an association than it is to create a corporation. And it’s a headache to manage!
But I’m having fun. It’s the most important thing.
J.T. I would be interested in your market share evaluation. Do you go by the number of jobs as a value?
M.F. : The best way to evaluate a player is by the quality of the jobs posted. Not the quantity. And it’s the same thing for the traffic. I’m not running after traffic. I’m running after qualified candidates.
J.T. I have a business in Australia [where] a company called Seek is number one in the market. And I’m number two, and a pretty distant number two. My manager — the equivalent of Gabriel in Australia — just got on the soap box to say that it doesn’t matter how many candidates because they are quality candidates. It’s a crap number two strategy because you don’t have volume. And what we’ve had to do in Australia is say ‘we can’t beat a big site’ so I’ve got to be the niche site. And so, it’s not about the quality… I know, it’s not about the quantity of resumés but about the quality: ‘I send you princes not frogs’, right? It’s an interesting debate.
M.F. : My ambition is not to be the biggest one, but, the better one. I think that at least in Quebec jobWings is the better one for the kind of positions that we post. And that’s probably why the major employers in Quebec use jobWings for the CA, CMA and CGA recruitment.
J.T. So this is about a global model being executed fairly well, with always room for improvement, versus a local model that would like to be bigger. And there’s inherent conflict in my ability to speed the market and my flexibility that is hard to deliver on. Whereas there’s inherent conflict in your model [in that] you can’t be in too many places at the same time, picking niches very carefully. And I even think this [interview] was a distraction. But that’s another conversation. In the business school experience they tell you that if you’re not good at one business, don’t get into another one. And it’s not that you’re not good at the business… In your case, it’s innovative to have the publication, but you’re wasting time right now because you should be out selling financial partners on your Web site. Because that’s where the real money is.
G.B. : And that’s what TMP learned at the company too, and that’s what Jeff learned, and that’s what I’ve learned too, recently, is that we need to focus on the engine. And TMP is getting out of the search and selection and executive search business. Because we need to focus the organization.
M.F. : TMP has begun to prune by separating certain division… Is it in order to become an acquisition target ?
J.T. That’s the perception. I would say… my hesitation is not in whether we’re pruning ourselves. It’s in the choice of words. Because you prune a tree so that the right branches grow more. That’s absolutely accurate. But that’s not the question you asked. You said [is it] pruning itself for acquisition. And there’s probably a different word, and I’m trying figure out what the word is… You would probably pear back and focus on polishing… You would polish the apple for acquisition. You would prune for growth. I think that what you do is that you prune for focus, for trajectory and for recovery.
M.F. : Monster has the power to create a brand for a resumé tool certification world wide, have you ever think about doing this?
J.T. I believe in certification and there are certain things that might be done in a more commodity type business. [Questions] like, did you ever get arrested? Did you graduate when you said you did? You know those kind of things which are ‘non-emotional’ factual kind of things that could be Monster-certified through a third party…
M.F. : Like Dun & Bradstreet ?
J.T. Maybe. Yeah. But, in the end I may not need to promote the brand. But I would need to have the third party no-[…] engine that sits behind…. So maybe there’s a whole trump that sits right next to education? And as a job seeker you could buy that for 19.95$ But the deliverable in the background is a Dunn & Bradstreet service that actually has the “credentialing” and the check off. So, if there’s ever a question about that, then it’s actually Dunn & Bradstreet…
And now I’m curious within your decision, maybe not in today’s conversation, but… Resumes, no resumes?
M.F. : I think, that peer-to-peer technology will put the database concept towards some sort of challenge. Because the most up-to-date resume is on the hard drive of the candidate. And peer-to-peer technology allows candidates to share their resumes with the rest of the world. It could happen that some kind of Napster resumé service might appear on the market.
J.T. Yeah, the interesting thing is [that] you start to go to value just like on a job side. We really just evaluate the job side. But there, would be crawling services on the resumé side too. In fact, we’ve had resumé crawling capabilities for over five years. But the kind of crap that you get, [gets] a lot of mixed reviews. So the real question is what kind of play does a trusted brand have in the middle of that relationship? And I’m not being naïve to disruptive technologies, but I’m also telling you not to underestimate the power and the strength of the brand. Because there is some “credentialing” that goes along with… Generally speaking the reason why Google works better than WebCrawler is because there’s a trust in the meta-tagging taxonomy of the Google engine and they’ve got a brand that sits on top of this.
M.F. : Well, they built their brand from nothing. They never spend one dollar in advertising, only with word-of-mouth. And it’s not the brand that made them popular… That’s the results.
That’s probably the best thing I have learned… the best way not to lose money on the Internet is to not have any to lose
J.T. In fact that’s a smart strategy which is being used right now all over the world. the first Web sites raised 5 million dollars so they spend 5 million dollars before knowing what they were doing. Now, your typical Web initiatives have 10 to 20 thousand dollars invested and they are still trying to figure it out.
M.F. : So you see what we did with beljob. We built a search engine which took eight months of development. And while major risk capital companies in Montreal has invested 4 million dollars to develop such a search engine. Because we had no money so we tackled the problem in another way. And we have more accurate search results. And we are faster with two hours delay between updates.
G.B. : So, there’s probably somebody, somewhere, working in a basement that will come up with a better solution…
M.F. : Probably. But they have to get on the market to build the brand. And I’m coming out with the pay-per-click. It’s working tremendously well on Google. Jobboom is going with a day per post tariff, but you have to pay the same price for day one than day 15. This is not fair because the traffic goes at the beginning.
C.G. : What was your dreamjob when you were a kid ?
J.T. A professional troll fisher. It has evolved in fact…
Let’s talk in a year and see where we are…