Monster Conquers Philadelphia

We Found this article at the Philadelphia Daily News

By Will Bunch 

The new owners of the Daily News, Inquirer and Philly.com had said that their No. 1 priority was to grow revenues after more than a decade of cutbacks under former owner Knight Ridder Corp., and yesterday they began making good on part of that promise. 

Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC, the newspapers’ owner since last month, announced that it had struck a deal with the leading Internet job-search site, Monster.com, to launch “a strategic alliance” on new employment ads in the nation’s fourth-largest media market. 

Officials with PMH and with Monster.com, owned by the publicly traded Monster Worldwide, said that when the deal takes effect next month, they would launch a joint Web site at Philly.com/Monster as part of an effort to give both employers and job seekers an array of options online and in print. 

The deal will replace an existing arrangement with CareerBuilder, an online job site that was one-third owned by Knight Ridder, which was purchased by the California-based McClatchy Co. earlier this year. 

The new arrangement is significant in several ways. For New York-based Monster, it is the company’s first alliance with a traditional newspaper, long considered its rival, and a vote of confidence in the Philadelphia media market and the new local ownership group. 

For PMH’s chief executive, Brian Tierney, such a significant deal in the company’s first month is a sign that the local group can move more nimbly to seize new growth opportunities than was the case under the ownership of a large, publicly traded firm such as Knight Ridder. 

“In the new post-Knight Ridder era, we can take a look at all our relationships to see what makes the most sense,” Tierney said during an interview session with PMH and Monster officials. 

In fact, Tierney said, the new owners did look at other options, including the possibility of partnering with Yahoo! – the pioneering Internet giant – or launching their own unique job-search site, which the Boston newspapers have done. In the end, the lure of working with Monster, which has advertised extensively and which also offers some employers a chance to review some 40,000 new resumes daily, was too great to pass up. 

Any financial terms of the partnership were not immediately revealed. 

Douglas Klinger, president of Monster North America, called the chance to partner with the Philadelphia newspapers and Philly.com “a unique opportunity.” 

While the perception of the Philadelphia job market has tended to be one of lower growth, Klinger noted that the region’s economic strengths – including health care and hourly jobs – are key areas for Monster. 

Joe Natoli, publisher of the Daily News and Inquirer, said one of the opportunities created by the alliance with Monster would be to include articles and other content that might be of interest to employers or job-seekers on the shared Web site. 

Natoli said that could include data about nearby school districts or related information. 

He added that he did not expect that editorial content would be written solely for the site. 

  

We found this article most interesting as Monster.com is making inroads as the representative employment searching service for major publications. While Monster.com has always been considered a robust, user friendly and very popular job site, their presence in such publications as Philly.com should only raise their branding awareness and give them added credibility. 

At Corra we find it interesting that many job candidate will call us and actually order pre-employment background checks on themselves while waitng for an answer from the employers advertising on job sites like Monster’s. Some of these candidates will call and admit to past transgressions and, usually, minor felonies or misdemeanor they committed in their younger and, presumably, wilder years. Now as responsible citizens, they fear their pasts may come back to haunt them. 

Rather than leave it to the fates, they will order a crimininal background search to see what criminal infractions might come up under their names. While County Criminal Searches only go back about seven years, some of the nationwide criminal database searches and statewide criminal database searches can go back for much longer. 

So if you are a candidate for a job, especially a career makring job, we suggest that you may want to check yourself out to see what you are facing. Remember, most businesses will accept you with past misdemeanors and modest felonies. However, they will not tolerate you lying about your past criminal records. Usually, lying about your background will cause an immediate rejection of your candidacy. 

As for you Human Resource Managers who use Monster.com or other jobs sites to recruit job candidates, we always recommend you conduct pre-employment screening checks on any serious candidate. For the relatively few bucks it is always the primary protection against liability in the work place. Fortunately, more and more are doing so. It’s smart business. 

Check Them Out Before You Hire