Monster is a jobs board, which in the UK is billed as a leading careers website. The marketing gump on their web site includes the following statements

• It's committed to connecting organisations with individuals
• helps you explore the possibilities and find the opportunities that are right for you
• Offers innovative technology and first class services
• Changes the way people look for jobs and employers look for people
• Contains a searchable database
• Is part of Monster Worldwide Inc., (NASDAQ: MNST), a member of S&P 500 index and the NASDAQ 100.

They are currently spending god knows how much on their "monster works for me" global add campaign. Rob Brouwer, CEO, Monster UK & Ireland, comments "It's aim is to encourage and motivate candidates towards a positive career move in 2007 based on their own individual needs or desires - the reason they go to work".

Call me old fashioned but for me one of the key reasons people go to work is to be paid, but with all this "innovative technology" and "searchable database" thingy there is no way to filter your results by how much you would like to be paid or a minimum salary requirement. Everything is jumbled in together and it's a hit and miss whether the optional keywords field will successfully filter out what you don't want. The chances are it will also filter out the jobs you do want as they simply may not contain the chosen keyword.

The search structure is basically ten years old Web 1.0 ("very 1998") and you can't find anything on it unless you're prepared to set up camp for the day and "pan for gold". It would make far more sense to use some of that TV money to add new search parameters or new table columns or tables to the database. In fact, such small changes might only take a week of development work for one person, I'm sure this cost is probably less than the cost of one TV advert.

Rob, I am certainly motivated towards a positive career move, your marketing team have devised a good add, I just wish that when I peeled that label off there might have been some "innovative technology" and a "searchable database".

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I think that this is not confined to "Monster" when you use any of these websites the amount of "crap" that you have to filter yourself is huge. For example you find a position that you find interesting and read the contents of the job description and you say "yeah I'll lash in the CV for that". That done and you renew your search and come across another job, you read the description and say again " yeah I'll lash in the CV for that also". The recruiters call you and you find that its the same job in the same company but with two different descriptions.

Add to this the "automatic" update that appears on the websites giving the impression that the recruiter is diligently updating the postings on a daily basis, which they are not.Or even more annoying not taking jobs that have been filled down from the webstie, it becomes a very annoying experience.

If you decide to get notifications via email you'll be bombarded with every available job in the geographic area which means that you have to become the filter, a tedious exercise.

Of course, jobs are also made up.

They're made up so candidates will send CV's in. They increase the size of their database and is the way a lot of agencies grow in size

If you ever run a competition for worst logo ..... scrap that, there can only ever be one clear winner - monster.

Surely this logo can't appeal to anyone over the age of, ummmm, 15.......

The ONLY job board doing anything close to online job "matching" is www.jobster.com which is a Web 2.0 version of Monster and much more compelling.

I'll agree with the last comment. Jobster is beautifully made, but is localised for US so you can't use it in Europe. The functionality and ease of use is infinitely better than Monster.

If they localise it for the UK I think we will see a re-enactment of George and the dragon. The dragon being the Monster web site and George of course being Jobster.

Even though it's better, it still doesn't allow you to search in money terms. However, the need to do is reduced as the results of a search tend to only contain relevant results.

Maybe we'll soon see the end of the stupid Monster!!

Actually irish jobs .ie is also well organised.

You perform a search similar to monster i.e. not being able to filter by salary band.

However, unlike monster which produces bags of unrelated results (little more than SPAM as far as the user is concerned), Irish Jobs have added in another step. Rather than producing all the results you can filter by job title, which is being used almost like a tag.

You then only get the results you want.