Inside Monster’s Journey: Lessons from a Recruitment Industry Pioneer

Lou Goodman joined Monster in 2018 and served in various senior marketing roles throughout some pivotal years in the company’s history. Following the recent closure of Monster Europe, Martin Lenz from Jobiqo sat down with Lou to discuss the challenges the company faced, which factors contributed to its difficulties, and what lessons the recruitment industry could take from Monster’s journey.

Martin: Before we start, a quick note on timing. This is a difficult time for a lot of people. I want to focus on Monster before the CareerBuilder joint venture; plenty has been written about what followed. I asked Lou to do this because the lessons matter.

Hi Lou, before we dive in, how does it feel talking about this, and what lens are you bringing? I know you’re approaching it with care.

Lou: Hi Martin, great to speak to you. Yes, it’s a tough time for many ex-colleagues, so I’m approaching this with a few nerves, care, and respect for all the hard work done by so many incredible people, especially for the product, tech and sales teams at the sharp end. If there is a theme, it’s that a comeback was possible for longer than many people think.

Martin: Lou, was Monster’s decline ever truly inevitable, or could the company have pulled itself back on track?

Lou: No, I don’t believe it was inevitable. We could have recovered in key markets, perhaps not in all EU markets, but certainly in Germany, the Netherlands, and possibly Italy and France. And we need to wait and see what happens in the US.

Martin: That’s interesting – you’re more optimistic than most. What makes you confident?

Lou: Three things. First, brand strength. UK brand trackers still picked up Monster for years after our last ATL campaigns in 2016 or 2017. Most brands would kill for brand recall after that long off air.

Lou: Second, enduring need. People need jobs, and companies need people, and I’d argue a genuinely fresh job board offering is more needed than ever.

Third, employer appetite. They wanted credible alternatives to Indeed. I saw this pattern working on big consumer brands, in monopolies/duopolies, customers quietly root for challengers.

Martin: So your view is that the brand had real staying power and the ingredients for a comeback were still there, at least in core markets.

Lou: Yes, that’s a great way of putting it, all the ingredients were there.

Martin: Monster once held more than half the online job market. What forces nudged the company off that perch and into today’s disrupted landscape?

Lou: I was chatting recently with an ex-colleague, Pietro Manenti, and he reminded me that Monster pre-dates Google by four years, LinkedIn by nine and Facebook by a full decade.

In 2001, when the Agile Manifesto was published, Monster dominated market share, hosted more than ten million CVs (massive for the time), had 100,000 customers, and was signing $460 million acquisitions while LinkedIn and Facebook didn’t yet exist. Early success dulled urgency though.

Martin: How so?

Lou: Our feedback loops with seekers, customers and local teams weakened, so hairline problems became large cracks.

Martin: So early wins bought success but took you further away from your users and customers. What about the external context?

Lou: Post-2008, the market softened, and the decline began before Covid. The pandemic rewired where and how people work, AI started reshaping search and selection, and employers and candidates diverged on speed, transparency and flexibility.

Once a business starts to shrink, halting the slide and rebuilding momentum is far harder than growing from strength.

Martin: So you were fighting broader market headwinds too. Let’s talk ownership now. After the acquisition, public LinkedIn descriptions from that period indicate Randstad was involved in leadership, platform and go-to-market. Did strategy sit at a Group level?

Lou: I joined after the acquisition, but Monster sat in Randstad’s Digital Ventures arm. The LinkedIn profile of the unit’s CEO from that time says that he was “responsible for rebuilding [Monster’s] entire leadership team, product platform and go-to-market model,” and that he “led $150 million in cost optimisation, organisational realignment and product overhaul.”

Martin: Taken at face value, it seems that Randstad saw itself as owning Monster’s strategy and direction.

Martin: Looking back, were there specific inflection points where a different choice might have altered Monster’s fate?

Lou: In my view, it was a drift rather than one dramatic wrong turn. Even so, the acquisition was the best moment to reset, and embed a singular focus on making Monster a category leader again through tech, culture and people transformation. In practice, Group priorities sometimes pulled us into wider initiatives.

Ultimately, we didn’t achieve durable product-market fit at the scale we needed. We delivered value for many customers, just not consistently enough to win the bigger share of budgets we needed.

Martin: Classic “caught in the middle”- good enough to survive, but struggling to thrive.

Lou: And as a public company we faced the innovator’s dilemma: we launched PPC in 2014, which was the right direction, but had a lower margin than duration-based ads. As a public firm, relinquishing higher-margin revenue for a new model is a hard sell when there are bills to pay.

Martin: Let’s dig into the specific factors, you’re describing a turnaround – IBM, Lego, Apple – rather than optimisation.

Lou: Turnarounds are about radical choices, not optimising a few things; IBM integrated around services, Lego cut to the core brick, Apple shrank the range and aligned design and engineering.

Martin: But Monster was part of a larger group. Did that make radical choices harder?

Lou: Being part of a very large group, and not at the centre of its strategic focus, can make radical choices difficult – especially when you need to balance with delivering against short-term targets and the reality of shared resources.

Martin: So there were structural constraints. What else held you back?

Lou: From inside a declining company you can list a hundred challenges, but my agency years working on big consumer brands taught me this: big firms can be dysfunctional and still make money. Plenty could have been improved; few of those fixes would have changed the trajectory on their own. There are two I’d call out though.

Product-led: We needed a shift to a product-led mindset earlier, 10-15 years ago. Long re-platforms and running two CRMs slowed us.

Over-reliance on Indeed: Like much of the industry, we relied heavily on revenue from Indeed’s traffic. Rented traffic masked product gaps while it flowed, then exposed them when terms changed. We should have built more owned demand.

Also, in Europe, we cut the B2C marketing that grows candidate awareness and applications, so new customer acquisition suffered. We focused on performance marketing to deliver applications, tying our marketing reach to existing customer’s jobs. Our media team did an amazing job and email drove organic applications, but SEO under-delivered on applications, so we leaned too hard on paid to drive volume.

Martin: Global consistency saves money and keeps the brand tidy. The cost can be speed and local nuance though. Did Monster’s global operating model help or hinder its ability to meet the very different needs of European markets?

Lou: At our height (before I joined) we ran global with local adaptations. That meant heavy local resourcing and a complex stack, so streamlining was inevitable. Tighter budgets made it faster and deeper.

Over time, the centre of gravity became more US-driven, and EU representation at ELT level was limited. Shared infrastructure lowered costs and boosted brand consistency, but EU nuance was easier to miss. When the EU product team was disbanded in 2019, the site experience began to feel less locally grounded across many European markets.

Martin: So, you lost EU voices in the room when ideas were shaped, and native speakers to make copy feel built‑here rather than translated. That shows up in trust, credibility, and eventually revenue.

Lou: Yes. And it wasn’t just Monster we had to align across, some platform choices aligned to Randstad’s standards. We implemented the search tech they used; around two years later we reverted because the change didn’t deliver a measurable uplift. The round-trip absorbed budget and engineering time that could have gone into candidate-facing work.

Martin: Hindsight always tempts us with ‘what ifs’. What practical steps would you have taken five years ago to turn Monster Europe around?

Lou: As I mentioned earlier, many talented people fought daily to make it work (and there’s a healthy list of things I’d do differently given the time again).

With hindsight (which, let’s face it, is always 20/20) I’d focus on a few things: win a bigger share of applications from SEO; keep some B2C brand marketing in Europe and retain local product capacity; and go earlier on AI, aligning onto one CRM and fixing our employer data.

None is a silver bullet, but together they buy time.

Martin: If you had to choose one thing?

Lou: SEO. Organic headroom buys the breathing space to make the changes needed with less dependence on paid channels. I’m not claiming to have a magic fix, visibility just never stuck in most markets.

Martin: Where does B2B marketing fit, given that was your area for your last few years at Monster?

Lou: It was, and I’m not letting myself off the hook. Unsurprisingly, I think B2B is essential, but when you have the historic scale Monster did, buyers set a higher bar. We were competing as much with our own past visibility, awareness and performance as with other job boards.

Product and B2C marketing create the performance and the candidate flow – owned and paid – you can monetise; B2B helps create and convert customer conversations. B2C also lifts B2B by building ‘mental availability’ (Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow) across both candidates and employers, warming up prospects or driving inbound sales, as well as applications.

Keep B2C on; fix the employer data so B2B can be surgical; run ABM for large/mid and always-on lead gen for small; then scale spend in line with what the site can convert.

Martin: From your vantage point, why did BOLD choose to wind down Monster Europe instead of mounting a turnaround effort?

Lou: Turning around a complex, multi-market operation while dealing with legacy technical challenges and fragmented systems would have required massive investment, time, and patience in a competitive market.

Martin: Now that Monster has stepped away from major European markets, which players are best positioned to step in and capture that space?

Lou: It’s likely to be a mix of established local leaders like StepStone and CV-Library, tech-driven companies like Welcome to the Jungle, and of course, the global platforms.

Martin: In Germany, Monster’s biggest EU market, Jobs.de, powered by Jobiqo, seems to be making a comeback. Can local job boards with modern tech and strong SEO outcompete global aggregators?

Lou: Local boards with strong SEO capabilities, who are preparing for LLMs, may be able to offer something global players find harder to match: agility, local trust, and rapid innovation for specific markets.

Martin: Interesting. What lets global giants like LinkedIn and Indeed walk into new countries and gain traction so quickly?

Lou: Mental availability explains, in large part, their initial traction. Large brands have advantages because they already exist in people’s minds before the first local ads go live.

Then deep localisation until the product feels built-here. In Japan, Indeed had high traffic but low applies; they adapted for commuter-time location and added culture-specific tags like “dyed hair OK.” The changes led to a big lift.

Martin: So mental availability, then meticulous localisation until the product feels native.

Martin: As AI reshapes recruitment, what headline lessons should today’s job-board operators take from Monster’s story?

Lou: For most job boards today, the battle is to make sure their traffic is owned rather than rented, while AI is reshaping the world in real time. Add all the economic uncertainty, and it’s easy to understand why protecting revenue trumps taking big swings, with all the risk that involves.

It’s not just job boards that are struggling: candidates are desperate for work and fed up with ghosting, ghost jobs and opaque pay; recruiters are drowning in noise and unqualified applications on tools that slow them down; hiring teams see costs rise while time to fill and quality stalls.

Martin: You mention candidates being desperate and fed up. LinkedIn is full of frustration – from all sides of the market. What’s your take on that?

Lou: The complaints on LinkedIn aren’t just noise; they are signals from a market ready for disruption.

Martin: That sounds almost like you’re suggesting LinkedIn’s, and Indeed’s, dominance could create vulnerability?

Lou: If candidates aren’t actively choosing you, your legacy revenue may keep you still while the market moves.

Martin: So, build around candidates, prove quality to employers and move while the numbers still look good – or risk being overtaken.

Lou: Yes, exactly. As the industry enters an AI-driven era of rapid change, I think there are a few areas they need to look at (some of which Monster did very well, by the way):

Stay candidate-first and locally relevant: Earn candidate loyalty and employers get what they value – quality applications , interviews and hires; that was central to Monster’s approach, and I still believe it. Prioritise transparency – salary information, verified employers – fast user support, and compliance.

Own, don’t rent, your audience: Don’t become over-reliant on any single traffic source you don’t control. A strong value proposition, SEO, email, alerts, partnerships, and community, all reduce gatekeeper risk.

Prioritise innovation: Listens intently to user and internal feedback and adapt quickly. Be willing to retire features before the revenue dries up if necessary.

Treat data like infrastructure: In an AI-driven market, clean, actionable data becomes the foundation for personalisation, effective matching, and, well, just about everything!

Define what quality looks like on your platform: Quality is very subjective, define what it means for your product, pick two or three metrics, and measure them publicly.

Balance short-term and long-term priorities: Recognise the healthy tension between sales’ drive for short-term success and the product roadmap’s push for future value; lean into it, make sales and marketing full partners in the conversation, and keep everyone focused on the bigger goal.

Martin: So your playbook for disruption readiness is to give candidates a reason to choose you on purpose.

Lou: Yes. Monster wasn’t just another job board, it proved the category could change how people find work. The world changed around it and we didn’t change quickly enough. Others may see it differently, but, for me, the most important lesson is that today’s success can mask tomorrow’s problems. Spot them early enough, and adapt.

Martin: Thanks Lou. There’s plenty to reflect on and learn from.

This interview reflects Lou Goodman’s personal perspective and experience during her time at Monster.

Thanks for this incredible conversation, Lou and Martin! I will be back next week with my regular weekly newsletter. 

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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