• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, December 26, 2006

Continuing its drive to align with traditional newspapers, career site Monster will replace CareerBuilder as the online recruitment service for the St. Petersburg Times next month.

Monster and the 300,000 daily-circulation Times will launch a co-branded job site that will include career-related advice, a resume builder and salary information in addition to national and local job listings. "This is an important deal for Monster because Tampa Bay is a growing market and gives us a major presence in the state of Florida," said Peter Newton, senior vice president and general manager, small and medium-sized businesses, Monster North America.

Over the last several months, Monster has forged deals to power online job listings for 45 daily newspapers and eight television properties. Most recently, it tied up with privately owned Freedom Communications, which owns 36 papers including The (Bergen) Record and the Orange County Register.

For its part, the Times went with Monster because of its high brand recognition, large resume database and features, including its salary information center. "We think this is going to be a better solution overall for our customers," said Christine Montgomery, director of electronic publishing for the Times. She added that the Times Publishing Company-owned paper would also gain access to the extensive recruitment market research gathered by Monster.

The Times is the fifth newspaper, including the Akron Beacon Journal and the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, to replace newspaper-owned CareerBuilder with Monster this year. A third front opened in their two-way battle when Yahoo announced a sweeping deal in November for Hotjobs to supply online job ads for 175 newspapers nationwide including Times rival The Tampa Tribune. The national job sites are vying for a bigger share of local ad dollars from small and medium-sized employers.

In a report issued last week, market research firm Borrell Associates Inc. found that online job listings eclipsed print newspaper ads for the first time in 2006 by $5.9 billion to $5.4 billion. But the study warned that newspapers are striking Faustian bargains by linking with job sites to boost classified revenues.

"These deals look a lot like surrender for the bigger newspapers," said Borrell President Gordon Borrell. "They're walking away from franchises they've spent decades building up, and are now relegating themselves to building up someone else's franchise."

However, the Times' Montgomery described the Monster deal as a "true partnership," in which the job site gains entry to the local market while the newspaper boosts traffic to its employment site through Monster's brand awareness.

Monster, meanwhile, has no plans to slow down its push for more newspaper partners. "We're accelerating our momentum," said Newton, who noted that the company plans to add at least as many papers to its roster next year as in 2006.