Monster.com rebrands to foundit, to take data-based approach to hiring

Homegrown job portal, Monster.com, has announced plans to rebrand itself, and add new functionalities targeting a new age job market. The company will now be known as foundit and plans to make use of artificial intelligence (AI), data and analytics to serve jobs to its users. Monster claims it serves more than 70 million job seekers right now, and has 10,000 corporate customers across 18 countries. 

The India, South East Asia and Middle-East businesses of Monster Worldwide, the parent company behind Monster.com, are owned by business services provider Quess Corp. Only the India, SEA and Middle-East businesses will be rebranded to foundit at the moment. The rebrand has been in the works since Quess took over Monster, but was delayed due to the pandemic and some other reasons.

“The platform of the future needs to cater to a highly dynamic job market, skill-based hiring and changing expectations from careers. We are excited to unveil a new direction for Monster from simply facilitating job and candidate discovery to enabling significantly better talent management outcomes,” said Sekhar Garissa, chief executive officer of foundit.

In an interview, Garissa told Mint that the revamped platform looks to take on more new age offerings, like LinkedIn, by utilising existing databases to serve recommendations to customers. The foundit platform will use AI-based recommendations to serve jobs to candidates and also curate prospective candidates for recruiters. It will also provide personalized services to users, like mock interviews, prep materials and more.

“We acquired Monster APAC & ME with a vision to transform white-collar talent acquisition. Over the last couple of years, organisations experienced everything from the Great Resignation and the Great Regret leading to mass hiring at an unprecedented pace. But now as the market settles, hiring is going to be a lot sharper, focused and skill-based. Such precision can only be achieved through the combination of human ingenuity and technology and this is what we have to offer our recruiters and job seekers through foundit,” said Ajit Isaac, founder and non-executive chairman of Quess Corp.

Garissa said that the company plans to implement such changes by April next year, and will look at other features and services after that. 

The revamp also comes at a time when companies like Monster and Quess are experiencing a pressure on bottomlines due to slowdown in IT and ITES hiring across the world. Revenues for Quess’ IT staffing and selection business, which usually reports margins of 13-17% and accounts for 7-8% of its core earnings, were cut in half, according to quarterly earnings reports filed by the company earlier this month.

Isaac and Garissa also said that while the downturn in the IT/ITES jobs market has hurt bottomlines, there are still enough jobs available on the market.