Search and Employ

When Michael J. Ewing joined Monster as vice president of customer relationship marketing earlier this year, his son Alexander — who turns 4 in November — was very excited. Daddy, he thought, would have lots of fun by the water cooler chatting it up with Mike and Sulley, the creatures from Disney/Pixar’s “Monsters, Inc.” cartoon feature. While Alex may have thought it was a bit of a letdown that dad was instead working for the Maynard, MA-based job-search firm, Ewing did not. Previously with Epsilon for four years as an account director, Ewing was excited to be working the client side, or “on the home team,” as he put it. “Here, I get to feel like I own the success,” he said. Monster currently has about 1.3 million employer accounts that have posted jobs on the site. Couple that with the 37 million job seekers who have registered with Monster, and that’s a lot of potential relationships. Just under 10% of Monster’s approximately $100 million marketing budget is focused on CRM, not including technology investments. Direct talked with Ewing recently at the Massachusetts headquarters about the company’s CRM strategy, and how pinpointing when employers have hiring needs is becoming crucial to Monster’s success.

DIRECT: Who does Monster consider its customers?

EWING: We have two segments of our business. The seeker side, or consumers who are looking for jobs. We have a relationship with these people, but we don’t consider them our customers because there’s no fee to come to Monster. You can come and you can search for jobs, you can post your resume and there’s no [financial] barrier. Our customers are on the business-to-business side. They are the employers that sign a contract with us [to post jobs].

DIRECT: How do you communicate with job seekers? Are you trying to build a community for them?

EWING: Absolutely. There are a number of newsletters seekers can opt into, based on vertical industry preference. If you are looking for a job in healthcare [you can] opt in to the healthcare newsletter, which comes out weekly and gives tips on employers that are hiring. There’s also a ton of content on the site, [like] tips for interviewing or what is an appropriate salary to be seeking.

DIRECT: Do you track whether seekers who searched the site actually got a job through Monster?

EWING: We don’t require that anybody report back to us if they’ve had success. It’s not like a traditional agency where you’d pay on condition of hiring. We do hear a lot from job seekers, which is kind of exciting because people will send us an e-mail saying ‘Thank you very much. I interviewed for two positions and got offered a great job.’ We started posting some of that on the site earlier this year. It really speaks to the fact that job seekers are having some success. We don’t ask questions [about results] today, but we will in the future, mostly because we want to celebrate with our friends who make a match and continue the marketing once it happens.

DIRECT: How is the current economic environment for Monster? Is the fact a lot of people are unemployed a good environment for you, or is it more challenging?

EWING: I think it would be foolish or crazy to say it hasn’t been tough over the last couple of years. But the last two consecutive quarters have been very strong for us, both for Monster and Monster Worldwide, our parent company. We’ve met the Wall Street analyst estimates for profitability and we’re definitely starting to see the improving economy in terms of how employers are posting jobs and hiring our services.

DIRECT: What is your biggest economic hurdle? Is it just getting more companies to post on the site?

EWING: Honestly, the biggest hurdle right now is really determining when there’s a hiring need. For a long time, our company — and I think a lot of others — were really focused on ‘who.’ You talk to a lot of list people and they say, ‘We can give you all the people in retail,’ or ‘all the people in manufacturing.’ But what we determined was that that process wasn’t as much of a challenge anymore. We have identified over time the type of company and the type of person in that company who needs to buy Monster. We know ‘who.’ The question is when there is a hiring need. There just aren’t the lists [available]. I can get any list I want that’s all about ‘who.’ There’s a list of ‘CPAs who own Harley-Davidsons.’ What I’m looking for is when there’s a hiring need and what are the triggers that indicate that need. We’re getting some traction in that area.

DIRECT: What are some of the indicators you’re seeing?

EWING: The triggers aren’t surprising — [things like] rapid growth. But there are crazy things, too, like the type of office space they reside in.

DIRECT: How do you build relationships on the B-to-B side?

EWING: We have a life-cycle marketing program, so we can state an objective and put the right offer in front of the right customer at the right time. It’s really broken down strategically, based on products and what activity we want to motivate. It’s a series of newsletters that go out at different life stages, for example, with different messaging. We’re primarily using e-mail for new customers. Our objective is to get them to transact again, so there are a number of things that we’re doing to try and elicit that response, such as specific price promotions and tips and training e-mails.

DIRECT: How do you judge the ROI of your CRM efforts?

EWING: We look at response rate. As a marketing department, we are very data-driven, extremely results-oriented. Everything we do we measure. If we’re targeting seekers, we don’t charge seekers money, so we can’t say ‘How many sales did it drive?’ But we can to a certain extent know what it cost us, and we can exchange that seeker for X number of dollars on the employer side, so we’ve got a value associated with it. We can judge everything down to the return level, from sponsoring a NASCAR race car to things that are traditionally more measurable like telemarketing or direct mail [to prospects].

DIRECT: How does Monster use telemarketing?

EWING: We haven’t done a lot of outbound telemarketing, but we are in the exploration process. We’re [going to] try to use telemarketing to determine the ‘when.’ Up through the beginning of 2001, we were lucky. We were able to wait and people were coming to us, so we built a teleservices competency around the inbound call environment. Going forward, we’re using high-volume outbound telemarketing to seek companies that have a hiring need in the next period of time — 90 days, 120 days, whatever it is — and bringing those [prospects] to a place where the telesales people can take them through the sales cycle.

DIRECT: What type of prospecting direct mail does the company do?

EWING: [Mailings that are] pretty simple. We mail in the neighborhood of 6 million pieces annually. Our control is a three-panel self-mailer that includes a reply card. We’ve gone with a high-volume approach. That’s been Monster’s MO on direct mail: high volume with an expected low return. We’re beginning the process of layering into that, [looking into] doing a lower-volume, higher-cost approach to a specific target.

DIRECT: It must help your prospecting efforts that Monster has an extremely strong brand identity.

EWING: That’s really the primary driver. It’s like Coca-Cola. We’re the kind of brand that has [the level of] recognition where we can cut back on what we spend per unit and increase the number of units, and basically [get] the same sort of return and efficiencies.

DIRECT: Monster has invested money in very high-end brand advertising in the past, such as Super Bowl ads. Is that part of your strategy going forward?

EWING: Yes, Jeff Taylor, one of our founders, calls it the ‘super brand’ strategy. You see us on TV, you hear us on the radio, you see us in outdoor locations, in print. It’s a very significant investment in the brand. And all the things we do on the direct side lend to the brand as well. We have an executive team that’s committed to branding. Our sales teams can’t sell us to employers without that visibility.

DIRECT: Monster chose not to renew its placement agreement with America Online this summer. Is that because the brand is so strong at this point?

EWING: [People within Monster] have said that AOL and MSN were very important in the development of the company, but they were really like training wheels. Now we’re free of a large burden in terms of that fixed cost.

DIRECT: Who do you see as your major competitor? Are you concerned that CareerBuilders now has a placement agreement with AOL?

EWING: Honestly, I think our chief competition isn’t online. Our chief competition today — and for the foreseeable future — is newspapers. Monster has done a very good job of establishing a leadership position in the online marketplace, but newspapers still hold on to the blue collar and skilled worker [area]. We’re very proud of where the brand is today, and we want to extend that to include hourly workers and skilled workers, mechanics and retail clerks as well as mathematicians and CPAs.