In a press release this morning Monster, says it is reaffirming its commitment to “advancing the lives of job seekers through meaningful enhancements and algorithm changes geared towards helping reduce the stress, anxiety, and time waste of job searching.”

What they found left them disappointed on both fronts. They discovered that Monster had been following the trend of an industry that commoditizes individuals—turning what should be a transformational experience into something that is purely transactional.

The new search experience follows what Google Jobs is doing with window panes that make it easier and faster to scan job postings.

“Let’s be honest—our industry has failed both the job seeker and the employer by not making the matching process easier,” said Beamer. “What everyone forgot is that on the other end of this equation are people—unique individuals who bring unique skills, personality and dedication to their work. At Monster, we’re committed to refocusing our efforts on the people we’re serving. We’re intent on taking this company back to its initial purpose of helping people advance their lives, and are working on new ways for people and companies to showcase the best versions of themselves. The changes we’ve made so far are just the beginning.”

Monster has begun to introduce improvements to the existing user experience that will reveal themselves over the next few months. Changes that are live include;

• Refining the Matching Process. As a first step, Monster updated search algorithms and results to ensure matching the right people to the right jobs is the priority. Among the changes was the decision to remove ads from job search results on the site and sent via emails, a practice that has become all too common in the industry and gets in the way of connecting people to relevant job listings. By making these changes, Monster is helping to reduce wasted time and the anxiety of not finding matches, the success of which is confirmed in an increase of nearly 20 percent in job applies during testing of the change.
• Improving the User Experience. Monster is actively working on ways that it can eliminate unnecessary time wasted in the job search process. The first of these was improving page speed. Understanding that 53 percent of people will leave a mobile web page if the load time is greater than three seconds, our teams have been aiming to get sitewide page speed below this benchmark. Currently, 97.5 percent of our job view pages load in less than one second. Monster has also implemented a two-panel combined job search and job view experience. This combined view allows the seeker to scroll search results and see—or even apply to—expanded job descriptions all in the same view. This eliminates the time wasted navigating back and forth between search results and job ads. This new experience first rolled out on www.monster.com and will soon be available on other entry points, such as email links, in the coming days and weeks.
• Helping People Create Their Best Resume. To help people improve their candidacy to potential employers, Monster relaunched its free resume assessment tool using a proprietary smart resume-scanning technology. The assessment, which relies on machine learning, provides detailed feedback on the appearance and content in a resume—including keyword optimization, as well as a prediction of a recruiter’s first impression.

These changes are long overdue if you ask most industry experts. But they should help stabilize the site traffic and perhaps improve it over time. We shall see.