Monster.com to USAJobs users: Come on in, the water’s fine
October 20th, 2011 | Office of Personnel Management | Posted by Stephen Losey
Isn't it ironic? Don'tcha think?
The Office of Personnel Management’s attempt to bring USAJobs.gov back in house and shut out Monster.com ironically* may end up driving job listings back to Monster.
Until recently, Monster.com was in charge of running the federal government’s job listing website, but the company lost its gig when OPM insourced the site and designed its own new version. But USAJobs 3.0 is still plagued with problems, more than a week after its relaunch.
Today, Monster.com announced that it will offer free job postings over the next 30 days to federal agencies that need to fill vacancies.
“Despite our nation’s current economic challenges, federal agencies have jobs they need to fill quickly,” Monster Worldwide CEO Sal Ianuzzi said. “At the same time there are qualified job seekers actively looking for those positions. As a public service, we’re offering these free postings to ease the burden during the transition and to help connect federal agency employers to qualified talent.”
Avue Technologies — whose CEO Linda Brooks Rix is no fan of OPM — applauded Monster’s decision, and said it should offer free postings indefinitely. Last week — one day after USAJobs 3.0 went online and when the problems were first starting to surface — Avue announced it would make its Avue Central platform free of charge indefinitely.
Meanwhile, OPM is still scrambling to obtain and install new servers it hopes will allow USAJobs to handle the unprecedented traffic since its relaunch. Yesterday OPM Director John Berry said he’s pushing agencies to extend their non-emergency job vacancies by three weeks, to accommodate users who are having trouble getting on the site.
* This is not one of those rain-on-a-wedding-day examples of pseudo-irony. This qualifies as a bona fide example of situational irony, where someone’s actions result in the exact opposite of what was expected or intended.
UPDATE: OPM just released a new statement from Associate Director Angela Bailey, in which she said OPM has successfully added three servers to improve the site’s capacity. This, as well as some other added hardware, should improve USAJobs’ search engine and job posting functions.
Some users are annoyed that they’re having to reset their passwords, but Bailey said the extra steps are necessary to safeguard applicants’ personal information.
“USAJobs 3.0 continues to make steady progress with the new site since its implementation last week,” Bailey said. “As of Wednesday afternoon, over 180,000 applications are successfully submitted through the new site, 38,067 in the last 24-hour period. Technical teams are working hard to ensure these numbers continue to increase.”
Tags: Monster.com, music, USAJobs
Comments
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Wendell Says:
October 21st, 2011 at 8:41 amWith Monster giving away free postings to federal offices, that tells me that they are mad little boys because the US government is trying to run their own job board. So lets just give away product for free to make it even harder for them to get their site to work. Sad tactics, I guess that is why I have always used Careerbuilder. They care about what they look like to country and the World! I guess that is why they are the number one job board on the internet
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MonsterHaters Says:
October 24th, 2011 at 11:27 amit’s amazing that you would take an opportunity like this – a situation where monster has offerered up FREE listings to help the government fill important roles – to bash monster. way to fabricate an ulterior motive in order to promote CB. pathetic!
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Free Job Board Says:
October 29th, 2011 at 3:23 pmNew Jobs just posted!