11/14/08

Recruitment blogger Joel Cheeseman snagged a rare interview with Monster's Eric Winegardner, VP of client-adoption, talking about the revamp of Monster.com and the public unveiling, set for Jan. 10.

The Cheezhead also got his hands on a new sales brochure that touts the remodeled Monster, which he posted here. (It's a PDF file. If your browser doesn't support PDF viewing, click right to download it to your computer.) In it, we get a couple, small, tease-y peeks at the new interface, which looks much fresher than Monster's current design. As a sales piece, it's short on specifics, though.

Elaborating on what's new, Winegardner described tools intended to help job-seekers manage their careers, including a "mapping" tool and "benchmarking" tool that tracks a seeker's career and offers career insights and relevant recommendations for career growth. Sounds cool. As more and more people are thrown out of work, they'll probably have the time to do what sounds like a lot of data entry.

Don't look for Trovix-powered search-and-match features at launch. Winegardner said that's not coming until later 2009. "The decision to put so much weight behind this new-and-improved Monster without integrating Trovix’s technology seems like a very risky move to me," Cheeseman writes. "Granted, job-seekers don’t know Trovix from Plavix, but the industry is watching. And if this relaunch plants the company flat on its face in disappointment, future updates that actually might be interesting could fall on deaf ears."

Related: New Monster will be an 'almost 100%' rebuild, Iannuzzi says