It has been rumoured for a while that Monster was laying off German customer care staff in order to set up a new client central in the Czech Republic. My German blogger friend Thorsten took up the challenge and made an in-depth research to find out about the truth. Since his blog post is in German, I will give you the English version here:
Monster.cz have their headquarters in the Czech capital Prague while their technical staff is situated in Brno. As you can see on the map (click for full view), Brno lies very close to the Austrian and Slovakian borders. Here the new customer care staff is going to work as Thorsten discovered. Thanks to the networking site XING, he found a new Monster employee who had indicated in their profile that from this September, they would start working as a Customer Service Manager German Market in Brno.
Thorsten saw that this person had worked in Austria before, so he had a look on the Austrian jobpilot and monster site. He found several job advertisements - cleverly published by a Prague recruitment agency - in which German Customer Service Representatives were hired. But he did not simply ascertain that these were Monster job ads. He asked his Slovakian wife (who speaks Czech as well) to contact the recruitment agency and the information she got revealed that the hiring company was a big international firm that sold job postings. Apart from that she learned that the new customer central were not only (but mainly) to work for the German market but also for the rest of Europe.
But why is Monster doing this? Thorsten calculated a salary saving of 1.3 Mio Euro per year with a 50-person customer central in Brno. He thinks that money cannot really be the reason for such a move. He rather guesses that Monster is going about the Eastern European online recruitment market in a big style. Since the American and Western European markets are getting saturated, this would be understable.
The rest remains to be seen. I for my part can tell them that the Eastern European market is already in the very capable hands of large online recruitment alliances such as the CVOnline Group, their emeajobs and preselector Europe (where Monster is, by the way, listed as part of their network (what will happen here???)), ONREA and local players like sprace.cz, profession.hu or profesia.sk (all part of the Network).
The war is on. May the best one win! And what will become of the Western European online classified market? I heard there were very interesting changes and possible acquisitions about to take place. The autumn and winter perioss are gonna be hot!
As to the career portal’s terrible layout, well, yeah, it’s not very cute but the results - the number and quality of candidate response - really rock. Earthworks-jobs is worth every penny, and it’s not a very expensive site by the way.
