monster.co.uk > Reviews (20)

I may start another round of job hunting, so update my CV and upload onto some web sites. www.monster.co.uk is one of them chosen by me. I used this web site before; I got some phone calls and emails from employers talking about job opportunities. Although at the end I did get the job from them but generally I think it's a good job site, with lots of information, and now the user experience seems better than before.

The main page of the web site is quite clear and friendly, with the navigation tabs telling you that you can sign up with them and manage your monster, search jobs, upload your CV and get career advice.

The first thing I did is to search jobs to see any possibilities in my working area. There are almost all the sectors of jobs you can choose from the list either by one or by multiple choices. Yes, there are lots of jobs listed in my area so I started to register with them.
= Create Account ======

It's free to create a user account and the process is fairly simple but you have to provide sets of information about yourself including your contact (basically your names and address), login and email (for you to login their system), career info (you have to specify your current career level, experience, education background and the job title you are looking for), you CV (you can build a online CV, upload your predefined word format CV, copy and paste your CV or don't want to have a CV right now just simply choose upload later). After enter all those are done, you have to check their terms and conditions and of course you have to agree in order to create an account with them.

There are several benefits for signing up them:
1. You can have your CVs and covering letters online.
2. You can make you CVs searchable for their registered employers, which can increase the opportunities.
3. They can filter the possible jobs and recommend them to you.
4. You can quick apply jobs through the web site.
5. You can review your job application history.

Manage Your Account =======

Once you got an account, you can login and start managing your profiles. You can edit that information you entered during account creation in My Account page. Personally I think this page is designed very nice, your information is divided according to sections and you can edit them separately. In My CVs page, you can manage your CVs. You can provide more than one CVs on the web site and I found it's very useful as for different types of job applications you may need to give different CVs. Like mentioned before, you can choose different means to make your CVs online and I prefer upload my word format CVs. If you have one in your disk and in word format, that's great just upload it. If not, you can choose to create a online CV with them, they provide forms you can fill in and the result will be displayed nicely by sections. Actually if you want, you can upload your own and create an online one. Different employers may prefer different formats.

I would say they manage the uploading CVs much better than before.

Remember before I upload my word CV with tables and bullet points, they couldn't recognise all and displayed very ugly. But now it just exactly like the format you defined in the word document.

For your own private issues, you may not want some employers to browse and view your CVs. But to enhance the opportunities, it was recommended to make your CVs searchable by public. That is what I did with my CVs, and then at the time I'm searching for employers, employers can search me as well. I received a couple of phone calls from job agencies since last week I put my updated CV online and public. However, if you really don't want certain companies to view your profiles, monster can let you block them. But you only have 5 to block.

You can also provide covering letters on the web site in order for you to quick apply jobs online. They allow one person to have maximum 5 covering letters. Furthermore, if you are afraid of writing a covering letter, they provide two templates as well one for graduates and the other one for experienced seekers. However, it's better to write your own covering letter that really represents you. When you have your CV and covering letter ready, you can apply jobs online. It's simple and quick.
== Search Jobs ========

There are lots jobs on this web site, so in order to efficiently search you'd better to search by categories and/or locations, job types and provide your search keywords. You can choose to sort the results by date or by the relevance, and display them in summary or in details. The results are clearly displayed in rows.
== Other useful information =========

Monster also provides career advices and has community, forum for discussion. You can even subscribe their newsletters or use RSS feed. Under career advice page, you can know how to write CVs and covering letters, take some online training, join assessment centres or perform a virtual interview, etc. These are very helpful especially when you first time looking for a job.

== Employer View =========

As a job seeker, I have no ideas about the employer views on Monster so I'm better not to comment on it.

To sum up, I think this is quite good job site with lots of job and career information. I really hope my new job hunting successfully.

Thanks for your reading, rating and commenting. They will bring good luck for my new job hunting. 