As An Employer, How Much Would You Pay To Access My Resume? Monster vs. LinkedIn

For some reason, my old Careerbuilder resume mysteriously updated and I received quite a few recruiting calls last week.

Some of my staff  joked that I was considering closing down my business and getting back into the job market — umm, no. But, I do see that it does leave that impression when a resume is highly visible on Careerbuilder and Monster that one is “looking”. Many employers who uncover an employee’s updated resume on a job board, will pull that employee in to inquire about their motivation for recently updating their resume. Some employers see this as immediate grounds for dismissal!

Advice: If you have your resume attached to a flash drive / memory stick that you use for the company, get rid of it! The company will argue that you are using their resources to look for work since you had access to your resume!

LinkedIn seems to be more “sacred ground” for these types of things.

On LinkedIn, creating a “profile” shows that you understand the importance of building professional relationships and  use online networking as a resourceful tool in your arsenal. And it’s not seen as an aggressive act by an “active job seeker” — which does have an impact on recruiters who avoid pushy people.

Here’s the real question though. Did you know that companies like Monster and Careerbuilder charge companies close to $10,000 a year just for the privilege of accessing your online resume?

That’s a lot of money in this cash-strapped economy, isn’t it? Let’s talk about this!

Oh, Monster!

Monster charges $9,000 per company employee, per year, for access to YOUR resume! In fact, Monster makes something like $1 Billion annually from selling your resume to employers. LinkedIn does it for free! LinkedIn does have many paid upgrade options, but these are only optional and they are not required to get most of the functionality.

With millions of people unemployed, employers are getting hundreds of applicants for every job posting. Finding candidates isn’t a problem, like it used to be. As a result, fewer companies are buying resume database licenses. With tighter budgets, recruiters are being forced to use alternatives, like LinkedIn, that are free. When the economy starts turning around, employers and staffing firms are going to continue to use the most effective and least expensive tools to find candidates. LinkedIn will only get better.

How Do HR Professionals Feel About LinkedIn?

LinkedIn claims over 500,000 recruiting and HR members. From my estimates, that means that LinkedIn has 10 times more staffing and recruiting members actively engaging candidates than paying members of both the Monster and CareerBuilder resume databases, combined!

As a job seeker, if you want to research, or find, or contact a recruiter, there is no better place, they’re all on LinkedIn. They’re easy to find – do an “Advanced People Search”, with the word “recruiter” in the “title” field. You can even filter the results by your local region, and industry.

Recruiters are also very active in LinkedIn groups. So join some industry trade groups, as well as any of the large “job” and “career” oriented groups, and connect with them.

(Monster has given up on sub-categorizing its job roles, making hard-to-find skills very difficult to capture.)

Outside of Job Search, What Does Monster Have To Offer?

Good question. I’m not sure outside of conventional job search, there is anything, really.

LinkedIn, however has over 60 Million members, many of whom are actively involved in some of the largest and most active professional, trade, and alumni groups on the web. As more and more users come on board, LinkedIn only gets better. It’s a community, based on community built content.

Make no mistake about it, LinkedIn and Monster are not potential partners:

In June, Monster launched BeKnown, an application that turns Facebook into a recruiting platform. It has 760,000 active monthly users after just two months. Instead of joining forces with LinkedIn, Monster chose to bypass the professional site and ally itself with Facebook.

In Closing: Not So Fast! 

As a very active recruiter, I would not be so fast to abandon Monster. I personally prefer the conventional “job boards” as do a lot of my colleagues. While LinkedIn appears a very competitive resource for employers cost-wise, there is a significant portion of mature HR people and business people who do not participate in a social media platform like LinkedIn… or have the least desire to.

Just to give you some insight, as to say you were not warned, recruiters are accessing your LinkedIn information. Sinece LinkedIn does not charge employers, your information is out there for public scrutiny.  Trust me, your recommendations, links to blogs, and twitter applications are being examined quite carefully. (But, you didn’t hear that from me! *starts whistling innocently*)

Monster locks that info away from the passing, nosy user.

Finally, it is this blogger’s opinion that if Facebook ever developed anything that even closely matched what LinkedIn does, it could be devastating… although I’m not sure how you could bypass the plethora of personal info there.

I, for one, as a small business owner, struggle with the costs.  What are your thoughts on this?