Monster Worldwide has two distinct customer segments: job seekers and companies looking to fill open positions. On the corporate side, customers, typically HR managers or recruiting firms, have several options when looking for candidates. Most use traditional means: searching through millions of resumes or posting their jobs online. However, some go a different route, purchasing placement on Monster's Career Ad Network (CAN), where job postings are distributed to “thousands” of sites across the Web. When a job seeker who is also signed up on Monster visits one of those sites, ads that match their expertise and skills are served. The targeting data—the job candidate's information—is never made public by Monster or given to the advertisers.
Until about six months ago, every job seeker was automatically “opted in” to the CAN program. However, two months ago hoping to give job seekers more control over their browsing experience, Monster changed its CAN privacy policy. Now, users can refine their information to include jobs in specific locations and categories. They can also opt out of the program entirely, said Judah Philips, senior director-global site analytics at Monster Worldwide.
“From our experience, job seekers want to understand and know how their data is being used so they can make more-informed decisions,” Philips said.
In addition, Matt Henson, VP-global public relations at Monster Worldwide, said it has created a quick guide to the Career Ad Network so end-users can go and learn how the company is deploying the ads. “We are empowering the users to have all the control,” he said. “Anyone can go to http://can.moster.com and find out everything they might want to know about the information we collect and how we use it.”
How Monster uses those data is simple, he said. While there is post-impression tracking so Monster knows when a cookie has been exposed to an ad, Monster only gives aggregate data to advertisers. “We can tell within two hours of exposure how many people viewed [an ad] and how many people applied based on that ad; but we're not tying personally identifiable information to that advertiser,” Henson said.
This move is an extension of an extensive privacy policy already in place that addresses all user data and how it is used internally and externally, Philips said. Monster has a global chief privacy officer who is in charge of all privacy and data security as well as a data governance group that is responsible for all user and internally-generated data including surveys and studies.
