Monday, March 7, 2011

My Monster Job Post Experience







Lena Seino
PR/Social Media Intern, The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication

I am a senior public relations major graduating in May of this year, so like many of you I’ve been browsing online for any and every job prospect.  One Sunday night in early February I started to take a look at Monster dot com. They require you to create a profile before you can delve deeply into their site. So, at the spur of the moment, I created an account, a profile, and posted my resume.

By nine a.m. the next morning, my phone rang. It was a company rep who had seen my Monster profile!  By the end of the day I had received three calls – two were requests for immediate phone interviews.  One of the calls was from Comcast, wanting person-to-person (door to door) marketing reps, which is definitely not what I want to do. Another was a marketing firm looking to hire someone immediately, which I was unavailable for.

The third phone call was from a Japanese-based recruiting company, looking for bilingual candidates to place in companies that work both in Japan and America. With my experience in Japanese this is not only a very real prospect; it could be a fabulous first job after college. My resume is on file at that organization and they say I’ll be contacted if an opening comes up closer to my graduation date.

I was shocked by the response I got from just posting my resume on Monster.  I highly encourage you to join Monster if you are entering the job world. But first, here are some things to keep in mind:

·     Know what kind of job you want and make sure your resume reflects your interests. That way you’ll be more likely to hear for the kind of companies you are most interested in.
·     Be prepared to get phone calls and on-the-spot interviews soon after posting your information!
·     Be aware that you may get an initial flurry of calls, and then nothing, so your original posts are very important. It’s been a month since that rush of calls and my phone has been quiet. I just updated my account info so we’ll see if that makes a difference.
·     Don’t fall for the screens that are actually advertisers fishing for contacts. I realize this is a way that Monster makes money, but because they format the pages exactly like the account pages – it’s easy to be tricked! A friend of mine filled out a University of Phoenix ad on a website recently and has been bombarded with phone calls ever since.

Thursday, March 3, 2011