The problem with Monster
It's official. I don't like monster.com. Using that site makes me feel dirty.
First of all, they market stuff at you at every opportunity. They put marketing "offers" in their information questionnaires. They put up dumb ads for you to click through when you log in.
Moreover, their site is broken in text-based browsers, which is not that unusual except that the site pretends to work. You can log in, but if you actually try to enter a resume using w3m, the site blows up with ASP errors.
Most importantly, the site is deliberately unhelpful. Want to save a job description to your home computer? Don't try "e-mail this ad": all that will be sent is a URL to the Monster page. Similarly, the "mail home" "service" for their Job agents are useless. I got an e-mail stating that my job agent had received hits. Did the e-mail list the titles of the hits? Did the e-mail even tell me how many hits I got? Of course not. That would be useful information.
The interface is clunky in many ways. Say I want to look for jobs in the Northeastern US. Can I click regions (or states) on a map to select the search areas? Of course not. I get to scroll through their location list and search out those areas I want -- but I can't even select an entire state.
Some things are okay. The use of Google Maps to show job locations is not bad (but they only display a page of locations at a time, and again you cannot select the regions for jobs you are interested in). But these guys are supposed to be the market leaders. Maybe they should put more effort into making things less broken.
Oh. And let's not forget the most evil thing: their sidebar is full of timewasters, such as quizzes ("What job is right for you?") that take an hour to fill out and for which you can't get the answers without signing up for some other dorky service. It serves me right, I guess, but putting links to timewasters on a job hunting site is REALLY BAD, because job hunting is horrible, horrible work. I hate it so much, and I am rather bad at it. I don't need excuses to waste time.
The career counsellor I saw today also hinted that many of the ads are fake, put up by headhunting agencies. I don't know whether that is true, but if it is then then I'm even more unimpressed.
Livejournal URL: http://pnijjar.livejournal.com/9892.html
Mood: unemployed