INTERVIEWS

Existing enterprise clients who used the old Monster application told me they didn’t utilize the Save folders feature because their ATS (applicant tracking system, a separately licensed, third-party app) made it irrelevant – everything they needed to save and search was done locally on the ATS.

Small to medium sized business generally do not use an ATS (it’s not cheap and not cost-effective for small organizations), so I interviewed a dozen small business owners or recruiters. These customers are the target audience for Monster+, and they thought they would use a feature that allowed them to sort and review applicants and candidates. The only downside would be that customers typically don’t use just one job listing site, and we wouldn’t have access to any data to other sites, so the feature couldn’t replace an ATS. But users I interviewed that it would save them time over the course of using Monster.

One interesting callout from these interviews was around nomenclature. Internally at Monster, we used the terms Applicants and Candidates almost interchangeably. But in talking to recruiters and HR specialists at both enterprise and small-to-medium businesses, we found that they differentiate; applicants are people who apply to a job listing, and candidates are people that recruiters source on their own and reach out to initiate contact. In fact, depending on the hiring organization, there can be a legal requirement to track people as candidates rather than applicants, so delineating those two groups on Monster is necessary.