SWOT Analysis with case study of Monster.com

The SWOT analysis is an extremely useful tool for understanding and decision-making for all sorts of situations in business and organizations. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It provide a good framework for reviewing strategy, position and direction of a company or business proposition, or any other idea. SWOT analysis also works well in brainstorming meetings, and team building games.

It is often interpreted as  SWOT Analysis 2x2 Matrix in business and marketing planning.

SWOT:

1.     Strength

2.     Weakness:

3.     Opportunity:

4.     Threat:

SWOT Analysis for Monster.com

Strength:

• Brand Name: It’s a no 1 job portal that has well organized management and is supported by latest tools and technology.
• Huge Database: This site is used by all job seekers and users are worldwide, thereby making a big database.
• Financial stability: Financial status for the company during previous years are as follows:

·         12 months ending 2010-12-31 : $874.92 million

·         12 months ending 2011-03-31 : $993.64 million

·         12 months ending 2012-06-30 : $890.39 million

·         12 months ending 2013-09-30 : $807.58 million

                Referring to above data, we can say that the company is quite stable in terms of financial status.

• Global Availabilty: Monster has its own staff based in different countries. Monster
• Listing at AOL: Monster has done four year contract with AOL to be only career provider at their site which provides monster the opportunity to attract millions of AOL users.

Weakness: 

• Inter-dependancy: As monster.com is an online business, it depends totally on Internet technology, hardwares and softwares installed.
• Limited Audience: Many people specially from villages dont have access to internet so monster.com is unable to target them.
• Lacks F2F communication: monster.com lacks face to face communication, which can change customers' mind for doing their business in long run of time.
• Fake promises: Many companies, specially consultancies who reach job-seeker through monster.com asks for huge money form them. Money might not be concern if person gets job, but it became a serious issue for them, if they dont get job, but just fake promises. This is a key factor in diverting many users to other site and to offline job searching. Moreover, they suggest their friends to not to invest money in this site. This harnesses company's financial status.

Opportunities:

• Sub Sites: Monster has opportunity to launch micro-domains which can be used by other companies for career section, such as taleo.net
• Expanding Brand: Monster.com has opportunity to expand its brand by opening more sites. We can take example of naukri.com which has many other sites firstnaukri.com, matrimonials etc.
• Merging to local market: Monster has opportunity to make its business large by aquiring more sites in local market.
• Tie-UPs with MNC: Monster.com needs to tie up with many multi national corporates to be their only recruiter.
• Increase contract with AOL: AOL has 20 million users, so it can be a best place for monster for increasing the business. Monster should increase the contract period with AOL.
• Career fairs: monster.com has started doing online career fairs named "monster vcf(virtual career fair)" which attracts much more audience to participate. Moreover, many MNCs participate in this fair, which centre point of attraction for all job seekers.

  

Threats:

•  Dependency on AOL and other sites: If AOL or any other site on which monster is relied change their strategic partnership with monster.com and pick another product then it will be a big downfall to monster.com thereby increasing growth for the competitors.
• B2C communication: New technology that enables direct communication between business and customer can be a serious threat to the monster.com. People can go directly to companies website and register there.
• Union of competitors: Many competitors can work hand to hand so that they can act larger to monster.com. A popular phrase says "Where there is unity there is always victory."
• Recession: If hiring will go down, then it will automatically affect the business of monster.com which is totally dependent on hiring.
• Tax scheme: Currently, online business has to pay much lesser tax than others. But, if rule changes and add all type of taxes to online business too, then monster.com business can go suffer vast financial issue.