Monster totally was the place and then Indeed became the defacto. At least in Canada.
brk · 3h ago
Monster.com literally owned this space, and had so much potential. I worked in a few startups at the Clocktower in Maynard, MA, where Monster was also based. Their offices had all the SV amenities and vibe, and for the longest time they were the default job search/resume database. Now, I can't recall hearing anyone mention Monster, or seeing anything about them online in over a decade. They're like the 3Com of job search.
ChrisMarshallNY · 2h ago
Monster.com is also the main driver for the decline of the old "talent agent"-style headhunter.
I guess the model was an anachronism, whose time had come, but I still miss it.
noitpmeder · 2h ago
This model is still alive and (trying to) thrive in the tech space adjacent to finance/hft. Not sure what it's like for other mid-to-senior engineers in non-finance-adjacent tech shops.
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.
Nextgrid · 1h ago
> This model is still alive and (trying to) thrive in the tech space adjacent to finance/hft
Any ones you can recommend? I seem to have exhausted the potential of my current network of recruiters.
noitpmeder · 1h ago
Heh I think we'd all looking for the mythical diamond in the haystack. I'm not sure any of them are worth recommending, really.
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.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
I got jobs in 1999,2012, 2018 and 2023 from outside recruiters.
The job I got in 2008 was via CareerBuilder.
My jobs in 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.
conception · 1h ago
I hire 100% through headhunters. If you find a good one the quality of applicants is night and day.
disgruntledphd2 · 1h ago
I do agree, but it's non-trivial to get a good one, and from the candidate side it's very hard to know if the headhunter is good before investing a bunch of time with them (I am OK talking on the phone so know a lot of recruiters).
busterarm · 2h ago
From what I can tell it never went away. I've worked with these types of recruiters and most of my friends have. That's how I landed my current job although I'm a decade in.
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.
ChrisMarshallNY · 1h ago
The quality of the headhunters has taken a steep nosedive, 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.
busterarm · 1h ago
The recruiter I worked with is ~50 and he's a former software engineer running his own agency employing several people all using tools he wrote. He specifically targets software engineers and NYC market. We still chat and I send him candidates and he's helped friends of mine find jobs.
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.
tessierashpool · 1h ago
Since I had to Google it, 3Com was the company behind Ethernet, a wired networking standard that revolutionized offices in the days before remote work. Like with GUIs, the work started at Xerox PARC.
riffic · 36m ago
Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC and was inspired by ALOHAnet. Metcalfe was however a co-founder at 3Com.
riffic · 39m ago
not one single mention of Dice in this thread.
Beestie · 2h ago
I'm actively seeking a new contract position so dusted off my accounts in both of these engines about a month ago. I also use a few other sites like Indeed, Flex Jobs, remote.io, etc.
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.
dylan604 · 1h ago
> 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.
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
pluc · 3h ago
Operating a failed job board is a lot like operating a failed casino. If you can't make it work in today's market, it's largely your fault. Especially when they were so dominant a few years ago. Monster.com was a pop culture icon, even featured on The Office! I'm guessing that they failed to keep up with the market and kept developing features nobody wanted, until competition overwhelmed them.
skeeter2020 · 2h ago
I don't know their particular journey, but based on my experience with other PE-owned companies any post-mortem should trace that path to look at how that unfolded.
lumost · 2h ago
As a Bostonian, I’d blame Bain capital and other east coast VC firms for the current state of the Boston tech scene. Firms largely lacked growth capital unless they adopted thesis driven strategies such as velocity sales. Chasing scale through cheap talent and cheap products doesn't really work in tech.
The winning employee strategy was to pivot into either SV based firms or biotech about a decade ago.
alephnerd · 2h ago
The non-competes don't help either, but that's more of a symptom of the observations you have (and I +1 them). There are a couple promising Boston area tech startups I've been following, but it is definetly a much weaker ecosystem compared to even 15 years 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.
lumost · 2h ago
You can add trip advisor, wayfair, kayak, and others to that list. There is probably a bias at this point that experienced employees who are good are unlikely to work for the prevailing wages at these companies unless they are unable to earn more at west coast firms.
busterarm · 2h ago
I know some very early hires at Akamai and they're all still there and effectively lifers.
And filthy rich.
alephnerd · 41m ago
I'm not denying that there are smart engineers and PMs at Akamai - especially those who were at the building stage of the company.
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.
busterarm · 27m ago
I feel like startup culture changed a lot after like 2011ish. Risk tolerance isn't really there among the employees anymore, but that's fine because early stage employees aren't getting compensated appropriately anymore anyway.
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.
boo-ga-ga · 2h ago
> If you can't make it work in today's market, it's largely your fault
I think it's exactly the opposite situation. In this market most money are made from companies and recruiters. If there is less demand and more supply for white collar jobs, companies don't need to spend their resources on all possible channels to reach candidates. That's why some "default" channel like LinkedIn will get a job posting, and all others won't, especially if these are paid.
bee_rider · 2h ago
Like anything else, the casino business is competitive, right? A casino might be a money printer, but as the years go by the tech to print money can get cheaper, and there isn’t a ton of incumbency advantage because it’s all straightforward.
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.
pluc · 2h ago
If you invest nothing in your casino upkeep, or focus on stupid ideas like daily themed coasters, the new casino next door will take all your business just by being new.
bee_rider · 2h ago
Or if your casino has debts, like employee pensions, that your competition doesn’t have. Or if the town over has decided they want a slice of the pie too, and has added tax incentives that you can’t take advantage of.
mschuster91 · 2h ago
> If you can't make it work in today's market, it's largely your fault.
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.
pluc · 2h ago
The job markets aren't dead, job boards are still full of opportunities. What's dead is the interaction between recruiters and candidates, and we can thank AI for that. For job boards, there's definitely opportunities to cut through the bullshit there, but it's a lot easier to get on the bandwagon than it is to say the train is headed for a wall.
kassner · 2h ago
> job boards are still full of opportunities
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).
jf22 · 1h ago
Idk about this. Every dev I know that has lost or left a job in the past year found another one without too much struggle.
Cycles take longer and are more annoying but companies are definitely hiring.
mschuster91 · 1h ago
> The job markets aren't dead, job boards are still full of opportunities.
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.
bhouston · 3h ago
I guess they got taken out primarily by LinkedIn Jobs?
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.
hardwaresofton · 3h ago
Don't forget Indeed -- they seem to be absolutely crushing it and have been for... over a decade? Even though they've been purchased, I think their operating team is mostly still the same.
notarobot123 · 3h ago
And which employer could resist using a social credit score system as the primary entry-point for new employees?
bbaron63 · 37m ago
I didn't know CareerBuilder still exists. They were the first job site I can recall in the late 90s. Then Monster emerged as the dominant place for job search.
purple_mugs · 2h ago
I worked in this space for the market leader for a good portion of my career. It was very interesting to see how jobs fluctuated across economic cycles. Interestingly, there were rumors that a certain job board allows hedge funds to read their data to gauge the economic outlook. I eventually left because of terrible leadership, nepotism, and selfishness.
daft_pink · 1h ago
How do you lose money as essentially running a classified ad site?
motohagiography · 1h ago
it's a bankruptcy so I would estimate revenues were insufficient to service both debt and operating expenses. ideally they have assets like real estate or something of value to liquidate, but regardless, it's likely that everyone except employees will have been paid.
imo there are three phases of a company: build, manage, liquidate. essentially seed/A-B, C-N rounds, PE debt rounds & asset stripping.
dzonga · 2h ago
monster is like trump. you would have to be horrible at operations to fail at running a casino.
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.
postalrat · 1h ago
Indeed is on the decline. They all have the same problem, they need job seekers to attract employers/recruiters/etc who pay them for access to job seekers. There are many conflicting interests.
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.
The job I got in 2008 was via CareerBuilder.
My jobs in 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
imo there are three phases of a company: build, manage, liquidate. essentially seed/A-B, C-N rounds, PE debt rounds & asset stripping.
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.