In late June, the private equity firm that owns CareerBuilder and Monster.com announced it would be selling off the two job-board companies after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Last month, the two companies were auctioned for $28 million to Bold Holdings – founded by two former Monster.com employees – which also owns ResumeBuilder.com and Sonara.ai, an AI-powered job search platform.
So today, let’s talk about how the job hunting industry has changed so much that two of the most popular websites for job seekers ended up on the auction floor.
A rise and fall
CareerBuilder and Monster were both founded in the 1990s and were some of the very first online job boards. Both companies were able to boast name recognition and strong market share by the early 2000s. However, staying on top is difficult when more competitors enter the marketplace – and innovate faster. Indeed entered the marketplace in 2004 and offered a more streamlined website that made smart use of search engine optimization. The website was also completely free for job seekers to search and employers to post jobs, which disrupted the business models of CareerBuilder and Monster. It wasn’t long before Indeed overtook other companies in traffic and job postings.
Soon after, other companies such as LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Glassdoor entered the marketplace, making it even more difficult for the two companies to retain their stronghold on the industry. A private equity firm purchased Monster in 2016, and another one purchased CareerBuilder in 2017. Last year, the two firms created a joint venture to merge the two job boards. The CEO of CareerBuilder, Jeff Furman, made the following statement: “By uniting our innovative teams and leveraging our complementary capabilities, we are poised to help shape the future of the industry. Together we are stronger and better equipped to meet the evolving needs of the marketplace.”
Not even a year later, Furman stated the reason for Chapter 11 protection and the sell-off of the merged job boards was due to “a challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment.”
Weeding through the muck
In addition to sticking to outdated job-posting models, the two sites were also experiencing a reduction in quality postings and resumes. Employers are being flooded with spam applicants that make finding the right person for the job more difficult. As one expert noted, “Fake or mismatched resumes flooded the pipeline. In many cases, clients would post jobs and get swamped – but not with usable talent… it created more work, not less.”
The CEO of tech-career marketplace Dice told the Phoenix Business Journal that CareerBuilder and Monster’s “collapse signals that the old ‘post and pray’ job-board model, like putting a billboard in Iowa and hoping the right candidate drives by, is no longer effective in today’s talent-driven market.”
The current market is also difficult for job seekers, many of whom “believe that the current labor market is not conducive to landing a new employment opportunity.” For starters, scam job postings have flooded the job market, and the Better Business Bureau warned in March that the thousands of laid-off federal workers were likely to be met with an increase in scam job postings aimed at them. Employment scams made up 14% of reported scams last year, with a median dollar loss of $1500.
Job seekers have also found that as companies lean more into automation and AI to screen resumes – often filtering out qualified candidates – the job hunt process has become more strenuous and demoralizing. Additionally, a class-action lawsuit against Workday, the HR and finance platform, claims its AI-based applicant-recommendation system is discriminatory and has the potential to impact how AI is used in the hiring process, further impacting job boards, employers, and job seekers alike.
