If you are one of the few organizations still posting jobs with Monster, what does the Randstad acquisition mean for you?

Let’s start with what happens to Monster. This deal is doomed. As famed investor Warren Buffet once observed, “When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” Monster is a business with a reputation for bad economics (as employers spend less money on Monster and more money on job aggregators like Indeed and social media sites like LinkedIn.)  That’s why it could be acquired for only $429 million, down from a peak market cap of nearly $8 billion.

But if there is any “good news” for Randstad, it’s this. They don’t have a reputation for good management to ruin.  So while they lack the leadership team and strategic vision to make an acquisition like this work, another failure will not hurt their already-mediocre reputation. Randstad is an also-ran in the US, and Monster is probably ten years past its sell-by date.

If you are an employer trying to decide where to post your jobs, use this simple approach instead of committing to one job board.

Monster was a rare survivor of the first dot-com boom and bust, just like Yahoo (also recently acquired). But the world changed around it and the company couldn’t change with the times.  It’s a cautionary recruiting tale for the ages.