ABSTRACT
In April, 1994, the 454th commercial website opened its virtual doors. It aimed to link jobseekers with employers. The Monster Board, as it was then called, was envisioned by Jeff Taylor, president of recruiting firm Adion. Starting with 20 clients and 200 job openings, it grew quickly. The business was sold in 1995 to the world’s largest recruitment and staffing organization, TMP Worldwide, and in 1999 was renamed Monster.coma and famously advertised on the Super Bowl with other dot-com stalwarts such as Pets.com. Today, Monster.com welcomes more than 12 million unique visitors per month (presumably most of them jobseekers), who search roughly one million job postings. Monster is one of a number of for-profit online sites (including CareerBuilder, owned by newspaper companies, and HotJobs. com, owned by Yahoo!), as well as more broad-based communities such as Craigslist, that have changed how many people find formal information about employment.b Such strategies are underscored by Careerbuilder.com, now the largest online job site in the US and also aggressively advertised during the Super Bowls in 2005, 2006, and 2007.
