Review: monster.co.uk(Verdict: 5.5 out of 10) This review of Monster.co.uk was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We approached monster.co.uk with a "hypothetical" vacancy, an Admin/Office Manager role in a small financial services firm in north London on a salary of 22 to 26K. The job site did not know that this was a review call. See the Monster.co.uk profile on whatjobsite. Reviewed: October 2007.

The monster.co.uk website

Monster.co.uk is one of the busiest job sites in the United Kingdom. It's got plenty for the candidate and the employer. Job searching is straight-forward and candidates can upload their CVs for recruiters to view. There is also a good online offering for employers with buckets of guides and online demos.

How monster.co.uk works

In the first instance I called monster.co.uk. My call was answered by somebody who told me that if I had a job to advertise I was better off advertising via the site. I asked for some headline user stats, but the person couldn't help me. I, therefore, went to the site but could not find all of the user information I needed to make my decision.

I called again and asked how many people they had on the site (either CV or simple job seekers) who were looking for my admin/office manager role. The response from the customer service person was "no idea." After much pressing on my part I was told to send an email. I got an email in reply (very quickly too, so well done there) but unfortunately, the email did not answer my question. It simply reiterated the general statistics quoted on the site.

The monster.co.uk products & services

To be fair to Monster.co.uk, it does offer a very good outline of its products and services in the recruiter area of its website. For the one-off job posting that we wanted to advertise, the obvious option was the 1 Job Posting and CV search for £499. The job stays live for up to 60 days and comes with an online account where you can manage applications etc. Candidate applications can also be sent directly to your inbox. The CV database bolt-on includes one week's access to the monster.co.uk CV database (or 100 views) using its "smartfind" technology.

As one would expect from an established site like monster.co.uk, the job posting process is pretty straightfoward. Indeed, the site answers almost all of the questions anybody would have regarding the mechanics of vacancy advertising. There are very informative online demos on job posting, the account management tools as well as the CV search product.

Monster.co.uk user statistics and site demographics

The site does quote some very impressive general user statistics: over 2.6 million job seekers visit the site every day (though this would seem conflict with its ABCE audit which certifies 2.6 million unique users in a month)and over 3 million CVs on its database. There is no information on the CV database breakdown. On the day we reviewed the site there were over 74,000 jobs live with a very reassuring number of employer advertisers.

Monster.co.uk — the Pros and Cons

The Pros: The recruiter area offers a whole range of demos and guides to help you make a success of your advertising. And job posting and CV search seem pretty straightforward.

The Cons: Whatjobsite's advice on advertising a job on a job site is always to talk to the job site you are considering and find out whether the job site offers a relevant audience for that job. Unfortunately, no one at monster.co.uk could tell me anything specific about my hypothetical job. In our three attempts (two calls and one email) to find our whether the monster.co.uk audience was relevant for our job we got nowhere.

Most disappointing is that this information is available. Monster took part in the 2007 National Online Recruitment Audience Survey which gives a pretty detailed analysis of its user demographics. According to NORAS, admin/secretarial is the top job type on Monster.co.uk. It's unfortunate that the sales people at the site didn't know this. It might be just a case of bad luck on our part that we got a poor sales person. You might have more luck.

Overall Verdict: 5.5 out of 10

Monster.co.uk is a very popular and well-established job site. It's one of the top generalist sites in the United Kingdom. From our experience doing this review, however, it would seem that monster.co.uk wants to push low volume job advertisers like me to use the online job post. That's fine. Monster.co.uk offers a fairly good online recruiter area for these kind of employers and a straightforward online job advertising product. But the lack of a decent breakdown of the monster user audience makes deciding on whether to use it difficult. Go to the monster.co.uk whatjobsite profile.  

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