The new Monster is taking more and more shape in Germany: last Monday I received a press release saying that the CAN (Career Ad Network) has been activated for Germany after having been launched in the US, Canada, the Netherlands and France before.

Thanks to CAN, recruiting companies have the possibility to attract potential candidates that do not necessarily visit the Monster site itself. Job postings are promoted via text banners throughout the ad network. In Monster.de’s case, the Top20 web sites listed by the AGOF (Association for Online Research in Germany) will be used for promoting jobs via the CAN. Thus, the available sites may vary according to the moment when banner campaigns are made.

I contacted Monster in order to receive some more details on the subject and here are some of the bits and pieces they came up with:

  • Job listings are displayed as banners (Skyscraper, Leaderboard and Rectangle) in a Google AdWords-like fashion, meaning they consist basically of text and, possibly, the company logo.
  • The banners are exclusively published on those sites of the AGOF’s Top20 (or 30) that are relevant to the target group (relevance is Monster’s priority). This is assured by Geo- and Behavioral Targeting
  • Apart from that, the ads are also to be found on Monster (10 to 15 per cent of the booked PI’s).
  • Hiring firms can order so-called “CAN-Units”. A banner can take up to 4 units with 1 CAN-Unit corresponding to one of the place holders (again, as in Google AdWords).
  • I wonder whether each banner element (unit; the job teaser) has to be from the same company or whether a mixture of different employers is possible. Anyone a hint on that?
  • Prices vary according to the number of bought CAN units, starting from 395,00 euros a piece.

So let’s have a look at the current AGOF Top 20 (from 25th February):

Number 1: T-Online (JobScout24 is part of the German T-Online Group)
Number 2-5: free email hosting providers. Those sites are very good in general given that they have gigantic traffic and allow perfect targeting.
Number 8: StudiVZ (a kind of Facebook, very popular among German students) - they have been acquired by the Georg Holtzbrinck Group in 2007. And Georg Holtzbrinck is one of the major stake holders of the Top5 German job board stellenanzeigen.de.
Number 9: Spiegel Online - they have a close job posting co-operation with stellenanzeigen.de…
Number 17: MeineStadt.de - good network for local and regional candidate search. They used to re-publish listings from StepStone.de and Monster.de (the two sites had actually bought traffic from meinestadt.de) and had announced in January, that they wouldn’t sell traffic to them anymore. But, what the heck, the Monster banners can be published in other parts of meinestadt.de since they also offer a dating service and other classifieds such as cars and apartments.
Number 18: the social community wer-kennt-wen.de (”who knows whom”) - well, I consider that this site should be handled with care concerning banner job postings. It rather seems to be used by its members to find flirts and more than find a serious job.

Conclusion: I think that CAN is a very interesting product and am going to propose it to my clients to optimise their passive candidate search. My guess is that other job boards will soon start setting up similar services for their customers. The battle is on ;-)