Which Job Board Deserves the Title of Biggest and Best: Simply Hired vs. Monster
Jolene Pilgrim
If you’ve recently been active in the job market, either as a job-seeker or prospective employer, you’ve probably come across a variety of web-based job platforms, each touting to be the best for matching quality candidates to open positions. That’s all well said and good, but our grandma also claims her oatmeal cookies are the best cookies ever made and the grandkids still secretly feed them to her dog Penny when no one is looking.
While baked goods to job boards may not be a fair comparison, it does beg the question: just who is deciding what makes a site the “best” and what does that actually mean for candidates in search of a new career, job or part-time position? Here we break down two of the biggest names in the online job board game: Simplyhired.com vs. Monster.com. Let’s see how these behemoth’s compare.
Where They Stack Up
When it comes to bonus features and research tools, Simply Hired and Monster are definitely two of the biggest names in the job search game. Both sites provide independent research on large companies that may be hiring, often through paid endorsements by those companies but, hey, everyone’s got to make a living. Editorials, blogs and helpful articles on everything from interviewing to resume construction to networking how-to’s also provide a wealth of knowledge and show an additional level of commitment to educating their users and operating as an all-around resource.
Where things start getting a bit more uneven, however, is in the nuanced ways that SimplyHired allows users to break down search results when on the hunt for that new position. Both Simply Hired and Monster have optional search filtering which includes part-time and other non-traditional job listings, but Simply Hired takes things a step further. The SimplyHired.com site also lets you sort by education and experience requirements and even has optional salary limits that tie into the database’s proprietary salary calculator tool.
Purpose and Method
The main reason for the differences between the Simply Hired and Monster platforms requires a bit of a history lesson. SimplyHired was founded in the early 2000’s as a job search aggregator. This means that on an ongoing basis, Simply Hired’s virtual spiders go out crawling along the web of various job boards, company listings, and recruiting sites and bring back links for those potential jobs to one master list that’s easily searchable on a centralized website. Users can also sign up for daily alerts to have the most relevant of these listings, based on their job search criteria, delivered straight to their email inbox. Not too shabby for convenience and efficiency if you ask us.
Monster, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer to the job aggregator game. Monster.com’s original mission was to provide a platform for companies to post listings directly. Monster had some plusses when it was first launched, providing resume samples and guidance that, however clunky, was still pretty handy when we were first out of college. But that advice and more sophisticated versions of it are now widely available thanks to advances in internet tools and searches and Monster has not managed to move away from its core platform of direct posting, greatly limiting the number of available jobs.
Bottom Line for More and More Thorough Listings
The functionality, ease of use and long-term history of both Simply Hired and Monster have led to stark differences in the sheer volume of listings available to those in search of new employment avenues. SimplyHired has one of the largest database pools available when it comes to online job boards, including those it drags back from Monster.com’s platform.
The sheer volume of job listings provides candidates with an efficient, one-stop shop for their job-search needs. While Monster certainly has some research benefits, when it comes to matching up the highest quality candidates with the most lucrative job openings, Simply Hired wins hands down. We’d give them one of grandma’s cookies as an award, but Penny seems to have eaten them all.
