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Monster.com eyes China

Buys Job Pilot in Germany

Interview Monster.com, the US jobs site plans to expand its operations in China to cope with growing demand for online job listings, founder Jeff Taylor says.

"I'm going to China in July," Taylor told The Register during a visit to Amsterdam. "We already have a presence in Asia with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and India. Right now, there is only a handful of small players in China, but no established market leader yet."

Last week, Monster.com announced plans to acquire German job site Job Pilot for $105m. Job Pilot has an online presence in 11 European countries, including Poland and Austria. Last year the company generated $28 million in revenue. Job Pilot's customers include at least a dozen companies listed in Germany's Dax share index.

"So far we have built Monster mostly organically," Taylor said. "Occasionally we will buy a company that adds value to our service, and Job Pilot is definitely one of them. We are bullish on the fact that we are going to see recovery on the job market in Germany, where we are clearly number one now."

"Our main competitors are still the newspapers," Taylor said. "It is the place where companies tend to go if they look for jobs listings. It is a 14 billion dollar market, but it has shrunk dramatically because of the recession. It is important for Monster.com to capture some percentage of the recovery by getting these listings online. Newspapers do not like the idea of moving classifieds to the Web. The margins on these ads pay for the ink, the trucks and the union."

Monster.com was the first with job listings online. It still leads all other online recruitment sites in the total number of jobs posted in more than half of the top 50 employment markets in the United States, a recent survey showed. However, Monster face its fair share of competitors. Resumealley.com recently declared Monster.com virtually obsolete by introducing a service where job seekers have the opportunity to submit a two-minute audio file to their resume.

"That is not going to work," Taylor says. "A written resume is the standard, you're not going to replace that. The other thing about video is that most people are intimidated by a camera. People always tell me that the resume is going to disappear, but we have more than 35 million resumes online. Do you really want to replace them with a video file?" ®

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