Monster Trimming Some Positions While Adding Other Jobs

Job board giant Monster Worldwide is creating new jobs and eliminating others as it struggles financially and retools for the future.

Monster said Wednesday, July 8, that it was opening a new technology center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and recruiting for about 80 technical positions there. But it is also eliminating about 160 jobs within its product and technology group globally, including roughly 50 positions in Maynard, Massachusetts.

The news comes in the wake of a first-quarter loss of $10.3 million at Monster. The New York-based firm posted revenue of $254 million, down 31 percent year-over-year.

Monster is part of a job board industry suffering from the economic downturn—which means fewer paid job postings from employers—and wrestling with a shift to alternative online recruiting methods such as the use of social networking sites.

In recent years, Monster has been reshaping itself to become something akin to an Internet hub for career matters.

“We’ve broadened our lens to be more than just a marketplace for jobs,” Monster says on its Web site. “At Monster, we don’t just sell better jobs, we help promote better lives.”

On Wednesday, Monster also announced the creation of a new leadership position focused on long-term strategic planning and customer engagement, the consolidation of its employer and job-seeker product development teams and several related promotions.

“Over the past two years we have successfully relaunched our employer and seeker sites on a global basis and we have made substantial progress on the consolidation of our various operating platforms which has resulted in a need for different skills and expertise as we pursue our next generation of product and search technologies,” Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi said in a statement. “We believe that our new technology center will provide the physical and personnel resources to help us successfully execute on our strategic investments. We are making what we believe are the right moves to create the new products and services our customers need.”

Monster has global innovation and development sites in Maynard; Mountain View, California; Prague; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and New Delhi.

—Ed Frauenheim

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