Traditional Job Sites Don't Get It

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When was the last time you thought about Monster.com or Careerbuilder?

Okay, you gave them both a passing thought last weekend when you saw their ads during the Superbowl. Monster went with the fiddle playing beaver, while Careerbuilder subjected us to guys in underwear who had no business "dropping trou" on national television.

Is it me or did those ads seem like Hail Mary passes?

With unemployement at roughly 10%, these should be boom times for the traditional job search sites; right? Wrong!

Consider this:

- Careerbuilder gets about 12 million unique visitors a month. Monster gets about seven and a half million people a month. In other words, both are generating traffic that is nothing to sneeze at.

- Here's the problem. Lots of people are still going to sites like these to cruise the postings. Employers, however, don't have as many jobs to post (thus, the high unemployement rate) and its the employers that actually pay for Careerbuilder and Monster's services.

- Bottomline: Monster, for example, is not exactly pulling down Monster profits. In fact, its parent company was down 27 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 versus the same quarter in just 2008.

In the meantime, everyone and their brother is turning to LinkedIn and Facebook to do both their career networking and recruiting.

Nielson categorizes these as "career development" sites. My question; how can you develop your career without social networking these days?

Renee Oricchio

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio