[Author]
Current strategies
After its fast expansion in the earlier years, Monster Worldwide incurred costly mistakes in their selection of markets where to open physical offices. Deteriorating revenues forced it to regulate its own expansion programs and rationalize market selection strategies. It realized that certain markets failed to live up to their expectations in withstanding deteriorating market conditions. As a result, it cut down on non-profitable regional offices as part of its current strategies of rationalization and cost-cutting. It sold its Careers-China and similar operations in Latin American and Turkey in 2012. It cut down its workforce in North America and Europe in 2013. In the same year, it also sold its minority interest in JobKorea Ltd. It also decided to concentrate its resources in its largest markets and to partner with firms that provide more opportunities.
Currently, the Company strategies revolve around a leaner global organization, more customized products, and expansion via joint ventures particularly in the Eastern Europe and the Baltics. It mentioned no specific market data to back up this decision, leaving the shareholders a vague sense of hope that the top management identified these markets correctly this time, unlike the errors they made with its operations and partner selections in Asia (China and Korea), Latin America and Turkey. The current strategies reflect the three-pronged objectives that Iannuzzi (2013) indicated in the 2013 Annual Report, addressing three stakeholders: the corporate customers, the individual jobseekers, and the shareholders. If the strategies work, these objectives so far serve three important stakeholders in the business, except the employees. This silence about objectives relating to employees indicates a less-defined approach in setting up the limits of its workforce size and perhaps its compensation packages, all being dependent upon the performance of various offices as bases for employees to stay in their current jobs. It tends to be “coordinators” currently pursuing expansion with defensive lessons in their belt (Engaue & Hoffmann, 2011).
Past strategies
Monster Worldwide followed a long-term business strategy of capitalizing on the numerous opportunities it finds in the online recruitment marketplace and related markets (“Business,” 2013). It had exhibited aggressiveness in pursuing markets in Asia, Middle East, and Latin America to take advantage of the booming online recruitment market worldwide and maximize its presence in regions that showed increasing membership in its 200 million-strong member database. It claimed its use of the “world’s most advanced technology,” reaching out to potential clients via digital, social and mobile solutions. For its job-seeker directed services, it expanded its services to job seeking, career management, recruitment and talent management, searchable job advertising, resume database, professional networking, and related services. For employers, it accommodates job ads, resume database search, and other career-related services. In its past fast-expansion strategies, the Company behaved like a “daredevil” (Engaue & Hoffmann, 2011), pursuing offensive strategies without adequate defensive ones (particularly, in the employee costs side), which resulted to its costly errors when market forces turned against it.
Corporate strategies
After the disaster it endured in 2012, Monster Worldwide appeared to have learned the lessons of balancing growth with cost control, particularly in hiring personnel in its subsidiaries worldwide. As of 31 January 2014, its workforce worldwide decreased by approximately 1,000 employees, and now around 4,000-strong (“Business,” 2013). However, the Company maintains various sales resources covering field sales, telesales, and a self-service e-Commerce channel.
Currently, the Company continued its expansion efforts through joint ventures with local companies within their target markets worldwide. Right now, it expanded its business relationship with Alma Media Corporation in Finland, through the creation of more subsidiaries, and with H&Q Korea to maintain its presence in Asia after the closure of Career-China and JobKorea Ltd. Its corporate strategies strategy appears to be within its core business reinforced with related diversification (Parola, Satta & Panayides, 2014), which is a conservative approach at face value. It limited risks to areas where its competency is highest, increasing the chances for success both in managing core businesses and its joint ventures.
The Company continued its focus at increasing the recognition of the Monster brand globally. Xiao, O’Neill and Mattila (2012) noted that brand recognition continued to show larger impact on revenue and profit than other corporate strategies, making continued evaluation of brand potentials imperative.
However, it appeared highly dependent on its current executives and senior managers, and had no plan in handling cases of resignations in key positions, making it highly vulnerable to such eventualities. This no-plan approach, based on current disclosures, creates serious uncertainty, particularly in the eyes of shareholders, despite the assurances of Iannuzzi. This partly explained the depressed market sentiments over Monster Worldwide since 2010 (“Market,” 2013).
Business strategies
The long-term business strategy of Monster Worldwide involves an active search for opportunities in the global market for online recruitment (“Business,” 2013) resulting to its presence in more than 40 countries today (Iannuzzi, 2013). Due to the relatively low barriers of entry into the Internet business, new competitors continue to appear in the global landscape, challenging the Company market share. Moreover, Monster members do not necessarily remained exclusive members but may also be simultaneous members with the competitors. Professional networking websites, niche career websites, job aggregators, and websites offering low-cost to free classified ads continued to significantly threaten its markets. In response to these threats, the Company continued to develop innovative products that would satisfy the demands of both corporates customers and jobseekers, as well as streamline the handling of data throughout the various electronic products offered (Yen, Idrus & Yusof, 2011).
Its priority sales targets include enterprises, small and medium businesses, government agencies, advertising agencies and educational institutions, particularly those considered among the 1,500 largest organizations worldwide. Within its sales organization, it subspecialized into vertical markets such as governments; healthcare; staffing; and newspapers. Its marketing approach includes alliances with a varied selection of regional traditional offline adverting such as television; radio; and trade publications (business, consumer and trade) to promote the Monster brand and its innovative products and services.
In 2014, the Company agreed to venture into more entities and businesses with Alma Media Corporation, a leading digital and publishing company in Finland, in the Eastern European and Baltic region, and contributed its wholly owned subsidiaries located in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. It disclosed no information on the rationale of this new entities to be created and businesses to be pursued, leaving the shareholders only a vague idea and a hope that these may be related and synergistic pursuits. The entities supposedly will be a regional career leader across the Easter Europe and the Baltics. Otherwise, if these pursuits move beyond the Company’s core competencies, then it has entered into a high-risk zone that may again turn out to be disastrous as the companies it closed in the previous years.
Its strategic acquisitions and alliances as part of its business strategies pose a number of risks centered on integration, technology, customer relations, and corporate issues, which the Company still failed to provide information as to how the management would be dealing with these. In short, the Company showed no evidence of possessing an intervention plan to address these risks. Such disclosures are particularly critical for shareholders to understand in annual reports (Burlton, 2014).
Functional strategies
The entrance of new competitors in the online recruitment market forced Monster Worldwide to introduce more innovative products to specifically meet the changing needs of jobseekers and employers. In addition to its patented 6Sense semantic search and matching technology, which forms the backbone of its products and services, the Company also introduced a proprietary semantic resume search product called Power Resume Search (PRS), which is available only to customers in North America, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands (“Business,” 2013). In 2011, it introduced the cloud-based search product SeeMore to allow customers to build their own talent databases. Its Career Ad Network (CAN) format distributes employer job ads to a broad array of target websites in an effort to expand the employer’s pool of active and passive job seekers. On the global basis, these three innovative and proprietary products constitute almost 20 percent of the Company’s business, outperforming its more traditional offerings.
The corporate functional strategies appeared to more than adequate to support its drive for leadership in the market as its technology and knowledge based appeared to be ahead of the curve in the online recruitment industry. In addition, it displayed convincing indications that its competency in this area remained high. The cutting-edge technology backing the PRS, SeeMore, and CAN saw accomplishments in gaining markets for the Monster brand. It largely satisfied the cross-functionality issues of commercialization, industrialization, and solution platform (Storbacka, 2011) in the Company’s strategies to meet customer demands and move ahead of the competition in the industry.
References
“Part II, Item 5: Market for registrant’s common equity, related stockholder matters and
issuer purchases of equity securities.” Find Better: 2013 Annual Report. Weston, MA: Monster Worldwide, Inc.; p.16. Retrieved from:
http://ir.monster.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=110723&p=irol-reportsAnnual
“Part I, Item 1: Business.” Find Better: 2013 Annual Report. Weston, MA: Monster
Worldwide, Inc.; p.1-5. Retrieved from:
http://ir.monster.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=110723&p=irol-reportsAnnual
Burlton, R.T. (2014, April 10). Delivering business strategy through process management. In
Vom Brocke, J. & Rosemann, M. (eds.). Handbook on Business Process Management 2, International Handbooks of Information Systems, Second Edition. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2014. Retrieved from: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-45103-4_2#page-2
Engaue, C. & Hoffmann, V.H. (2011, February). Strategizing in an unpredictable climate:
Exploring corporate strategies to cope with regulatory uncertainty. Long Range Planning, 44(1): 42-63. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024630110000609
Iannuzzi, S. (2013). “To our shareholders, customers, employees and friends.” Find Better:
2013 Annual Report. Weston, MA: Monster Worldwide, Inc.; PDF file p.3-4 Retrieved from:
http://ir.monster.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=110723&p=irol-reportsAnnual
Parola, F., Satta, G. & Panayides, P.M. (2014, July 24). Corporate strategies and profitability
of maritime logistics firms. Maritime Economics & Logistics, 18(1): no information. DOI: 10.1057/mel.2014.18. Retrieved from: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mel201418a.html
Storbacka, K. (2011, July). A solution business model: Capabilities and management
practices for integrated solutions. Industrial Marketing Management, 40(5): 699-711. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019850111000551
Xiao, Q., O’Neill, J.W. & Mattila, A.S. (2012). The role of hotel owners: the influence of
corporate strategies on hotel performance. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 24(1): 122-139. Retrieved from: http://php.scripts.psu.edu/users/j/w/jwo3/documents/HotelCorporateStrategy.pdf
Yen, T.S., Idrus, R. & Yusof, U.K. (2011, July). A framework for classifying misfits between
enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and business strategies. Asian Academy of Management Journal, 16(2): 53-75. Retrieved from: http://web.usm.my/aamj/16.2.2011/AAMJ_16.2.3.pdf
