- 2023
- May
- 16
Monster.com has become nothing but noise.
Some time ago, I changed my email address for job contacts to a domain-based email instead of a generic gmail account. This was mostly so I could track where all of the spam was coming from, since I tend to leave my profiles alone once I’ve found employment. I noticed something right away:
Almost all of the spam was coming from monster.com
During the boom in late 2021 and 2022, I would sometimes get 20-30 a day from offshore recruiters, multiple contacts from different people in the same company in regards to a job that wasn’t worth your time. This slowed somewhat to about 15-20 a week, but all of it was offshore recruiters that just matched a keyword and had no clue as to what they were recruiting for - or even that someone else from their company had contacted me.
I turned off the monster.com account, and… silence.
All of that junk, those $20/hr jobs in San Francisco, those 3 month contracts in North Dakota, those jobs that were completely mismatched to my skillset have all vanished. It’s both sad and interesting to see how one of the first big online career sites has fallen, but that’s their problem. They’re making money from all of these offshore recruiters pulling profiles. They’re not going to do a thing to disturb their golden goose even though it’s totally useless for the end user.
What’s worse, is that my state of residence uses monster as their backend for the unemployment system. Monster used to automagically connect the two, something it didn’t bother telling you about. I only found out this one day when someone told me they found my profile on ohiomeansjobs.com - I had never heard of the site but found that it was just monster.com with a red bird instead of a purple creature. Even better - if you’re unemployed, it used to not let you make changes to monster because you were a “protected jobseeker” due to the unwanted connection to the Ohio site. As soon as I left this status I made sure to disconnect the two by deleting and re-creating the monster account with a different email address, and filling the Ohio site with junk because it’s just monster, i.e. spam, with a different name. You can’t delete that one for years, even though it clearly used to say you could.
The moral of the story here is that things change, and what was once useful is no longer necessary. Monster is a zombie clone of itself, and by association, so is Ohio Means Jobs.
There’s nothing I can do about it except say “Sorry, it’s not me - it’s you. Bye.”