It was inevitable, but nevertheless it is a sign of the times that Monster will no longer be producing the monthly Monster Employment Index (MEI) reports.
The official announcement, released on 9th of Januari 2013, reads:
Starting this month, we will no longer be producing the monthly Monster Employment Index (MEI) reports. As Monster has grown, so too has our media-agnostic approach to sourcing and recruiting, including resume databases, media products targeting passive seekers, and social recruiting solutions. An index which measures only online job posting activity is no longer an accurate measure of our business, nor the market at large. Instead of publishing the MEI, we’ve decided to focus on releasing different types of surveys and research data on a broader range of topics we believe are relevant to both seekers and employers. We greatly value the interest you’ve shown in the MEI and we look forward to providing more data and research information with you in the future.
Launched in April 2004 with data collected since October 2003, the Monster Employment Index was based on a real-time review of employer job opportunities culled from a large, representative selection of corporate career sites and job boards, including Monster.
That Monster stops with the index, is understandable. When the index was started, Job Boards were growing and most vacancies were published on the (public) internet. Newspapers and magazines started to really feel the impact of online Job Boards and were hit hard when postings moved to the Internet.
Jobs move from Job Boards to Social Media
Now the global labor market collapses, Job Boards also suffer from lower sales. There are fewer vacancies posted publicly, the cost of internet vacancies decrease immense (freemium Job Boards are increasingly becoming popular), and recruiters and companies are now discovering the ease of social media such as LinkedIn.
Job Boards experience what print-media already experienced: their job postings move to walled-gardens such as LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. These social media platforms offer many benefits including free postings (using the network of employees, communities or Company Pages), social advertising (pay-per-click) and easy ways to find strong profiles, complete with entire networks of colleagues and other professionals. Job portals earned gold money in good times with their CV databases and online marketplaces, but this period is definitely over.
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