Monster.com launched an iPhone version of its BeKnown app on Tuesday but the app offered more frustration than help for job seekers or professional recruiters and showed how out-classsed Monster is in the networking sector.
The app, which builds off of a Facebook app Monster launched in June, looks more like a marketing department’s effort to get more Facebook users to use the job search site rather than “a solution for job seekers and recruiters looking to manage just one network of contacts,” as it bills itself.
The first thing the app does is broadcast to a user’s page the fact that a user has signed on to the program — classic viral marketing technique. In a second step, the program asks them to invite friends to use the app, too. It’s the first hint that the company is more concerned with spreading its message to my followers and my email address book than in helping me find a job.
After that, the main pain point is functionality and design. It does not have an easy, streamlined efficiency to it, and it plagues your Facebook page with badges that describe how many places you have been to, or what you like to do. This feels a lot like spam, and it’s different than, say, a Foursquare badge, because the user doesn’t know it exists or that he has done things to achieve it. I removed the app and blocked it from posting to my Facebook pages.
On the phone, the app doesn’t operate like a stand-alone app with its own UI or functions. It looks like someone put a Facebook page in my mobile browser and put Monster.com banners on it. My patience for that is about 10 seconds. I had to squint to see what was in the windows. It seems to have left the professionals out, too.
If innovators want to disrupt the job seeking market, give job seekers a solution where it really has been hurting them – in getting the right information to the right people. The lack of networking functionality – and then the spamminess of the interaction – in Monster’s app acts more like a barrier to use than something to incite interest.
Was BeKnown supposed to solve the pain points for job seekers? It seems to have at least solved one thing for Monster. Monster doesn’t have many users, relative to the number of users on Facebook. Perhaps this made it easier for them to find new recruits for their own business.
