CareerBuilder, Monster Finalize Merger

The merger of legacy employment sites CareerBuilder and Monster has been finalized, according to the new company, known as CareerBuilder + Monster.

The once-mighty titans of the job board industry announced in July that they were combining forces. Monster, based in Weston, Mass., is a subsidiary of Randstad, the world’s largest staffing firm. CareerBuilder, based in Chicago, is majority-owned by Apollo Global Management, an asset management company.

CareerBuilder investors, including Apollo, now hold a controlling interest in the joint venture, while Randstad retains a minority interest. Both sites will continue to function separately, according to the announcement.

Monster got its start as The Monster Board in 1994. Monster.com was established in 1999. Randstad acquired Monster in 2016. CareerBuilder was founded in 1995. Apollo acquired a majority interest in CareerBuilder in 2017.

Both Monster and CareerBuilder sat atop the industry at different times in the past 25 years. That was before Indeed—launched in 2004—popularized job aggregation and pay-per-click job advertising on its way to becoming the world’s most trafficked jobs site.

Experts forecast that the merged brand will likely reach third place in U.S. traffic but remain far behind Indeed and ZipRecruiter.

The merged brand could result in a marketplace with greater scale and reach as well as a streamlined experience for users of the sites. But most industry experts think that it is probably too late for these jobs site pioneers and that the merger will do little to change people’s perceptions of the brands as lacking innovation and relevance.

“The two brands are long past their prime,” said Chris Russell, a lead consultant and the managing director of RecTech Media, a recruiting technology consulting company in Trumbull, Conn. “Both sites are just hanging on to their dwindling brand awareness, which gets smaller by the day.”

Steven Rothberg, the founder of College Recruiter, a co-host of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces podcast, and an industry veteran, noted that “the merger does not mean that the one organization will thrive or even be stronger than the two were prior to the merger.”

Rothberg cited as precedent the 2005 merger between Kmart and Sears, once-leading brands that had fallen on hard times.

“Today, you still see their stores, but they’re far fewer in number and relevance than they were even at the time of the merger,” Rothberg said. “What customers wanted from their retailers was not what either organization individually or the two of them collectively were able or willing to deliver, and so those customers continued to drift away from them and toward retailers who were more forward-thinking, including Target and Amazon.”

Chad Sowash, a recruitment industry veteran and co-host of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, worked at Monster in its heyday.

“I was at Monster in January 1999, and what happened?” he asked. “We did Super Bowl commercials, right? And then CareerBuilder did the same thing. But when you’re a company and you have to spend that kind of cash to be able to sustain traffic, it’s going to be a problem long term.”

There are tens of thousands of niche jobs sites that are generally doing well, Sowash noted. Project-based sites such as Upwork are doing good business, as well as sites that focus not only on duration-based job ads but also on performance-based programmatic advertising.   

“But the ones that are just still trying to hang on to an old design, much like Monster and CareerBuilder did, are sinking because they’re rearranging the deck chairs as opposed to making course corrections in time,” he said. “Back in the day, Indeed won the SEO game. They didn’t need Super Bowl commercials. Until they did. Now look at what’s happening with Indeed.”

Indeed has experienced some struggles in recent years. The company laid off about 15% of its workforce in March 2023 and another 8%—about 1,000 employees—in May 2024.