Monster.com Returns to Super Bowl

Friday, January 26th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

MAYNARD, Mass. (AP) â€” Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor had his Super Bowl party early, rolling out a big-screen TV during a company pep rally earlier this week and, like a giddy high school cheerleader, showing the top-secret ads he bought for Sunday's big game.

And why not? Taylor can already claim a victory of sorts just for showing up to his third straight Super Bowl. Of the 17 Internet companies that paid an average of $2.2 million for 30-second commercials last year, Monster.com is one of just three that are back.

And the ads, which cost $4 million, aren't just a Hail Mary pass from a desperate dot-com. They kick off a $250 million marketing campaign that shows the online career networking company has built a solid business that is flourishing despite â€” and perhaps in part because of â€” the dot.com downturn.

``They are so dominant in the employment area,'' said Charlene Li, a research director at Cambridge-based Forrester Research. ``They're twice as big as anybody else â€” twice as many resumes, twice as many employers â€” and they continue to grow.''

Still, the company isn't in entirely in the clear. Also returning, along with online broker E Trade, is Hotjobs.com Ltd., a rival online job company that claims it's gotten more bang for its bucks from its Super Bowl ads in 1999 and 2000, and is expecting more again this year.

``When the rubber hits the road, we are gaining in revenue against them, and we have crushed them in both of the last Super Bowls, and our customers are making more hires using Hotjobs than they are using Monster,'' said Hotjobs.com chef executive Richard Johnson.

Johnson said the ads that the New York-based company bought last year produced a 280 percent one-day jump in traffic to the site, and helped revenues grow from $20 million in 1999 to an expected $95 million last year.

Monster.com, which has had 20 percent quarterly revenue growth for three years, had $97.1 million in revenue for the third quarter alone in 2000, according to parent company TMP Worldwide.

Despite the competition, the return to the Super Bowl ad lineup comes on the heels of some monumental achievements for Monster.com, the Maynard-based Web clearinghouse that lets people post resumes for free and then sells access to the resumes to employers.

â€” The company set a one-day record in January when 38,346 resumes were posted, after running at about 14,000 per day late last year. Some of the growth is seasonal, but it has been consistent.

â€” About 7.5 million total resumes are posted, and 10 million are expected by the end of March, though people can post more than one resume. Hotjobs.com, which Johnson says only allows single resumes, has about 2.5 million resumes.

â€” Employers have posted nearly a half-million jobs on Monster.com, which now has sites for jobs in 14 countries.

Josh Rollins of Somerville was recently laid off from his job as a recruiter at the consulting firm Sapient Corp., a job he got through Monster.com. He returned to the site and posted his resume again last week.

``So far, I've probably gotten around 10 phone calls,'' Rollins said Wednesday.

Taylor admits some of the recent increase in interest may be coming from laid-off workers from high-tech companies, but he attributes it more to job insecurity.

``People are concerned about people doing the bare minimum to manage their career,'' he said in an interview this week. ``When times are good, it's like, 'Who cares if I get laid off?' What I see is a growing trepidation in the marketplace that says hey, 'I better go out and put my resume on Monster.'''

One high-tech recruiter says the site can be phenomenally effective.

``Go out there tonight and post your resume. Say you're a Java developer, and you'll have 35 voice mails by morning,'' said Jim Tomlin, a senior e-business recruiter at San Francisco-based recruiting company Hall Kinion & Associates who uses the site regularly. Monster.com, once almost exclusively a high-tech site, is growing rapidly into other fields. Taylor says only 38 percent of current job postings are for high-tech positions. Others include jobs for a construction worker in Houston, a roofing foreman in Allentown, Pa., and a baker at a Las Vegas doughnut shop.

But it will all dry up unless there's a steady stream of new resumes. And that's why the company is back at the Super Bowl, the ultimate mass media buy. Taylor says the four ads â€” two before and two during the game â€” are money well spent.

``I'm an absolute believer in the 'Ad Bowl' effect of the Super Bowl,'' he said, ``where you have about 40 percent of the actual watchers watching for the ads, not the football. You can have somebody saying, 'shhh shhh the game's on,' and somebody else is saying 'shhh shhh, the ads are on.'''

On this, Taylor and Hotjobs' Johnson are in agreement. ``Why are Monster and ETrade and Hotjobs back?'' Johnson asked. ``Because it worked.''

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On the Net:

http://www.monster.com

http://www.hotjobs.com