Resume Mogul

By Jeremy Caplan

As CEO of the biggest online job-search company, Andrew McKelvey is worried less about competition from HotJobs.com or CareerBuilder.com than about his ongoing battle with newspapers for small companies' classifieds. He recently spoke with TIME's JEREMY CAPLAN.

TIME To what extent is Monster.com hurting the newspaper industry, which has long profited from help-wanted ads?

ANDREW MCKELVEY The FORTUNE 1000, the companies with at least 2,500 employees, by and large have stopped doing business with the newspapers. That's about a third of their total help-wanted classifieds right there. The newspapers were slow in responding. The Sunday Boston Globe in 2000 had around 100 pages of help-wanted classifieds. Now they have fewer than 25. What happened? IBM tends not to run full-page ads anymore. They spend their money online instead. That's typical.

TIME How are newspapers fighting back?

A.M. They realize they have to hold on to small- and medium-size-business classifieds. We're trying to take that market. On an evolutionary basis, things move from off-line to online. When the 50-year-old manager of the Brown Shoe Co. loses an employee, what does he do? He reaches for the phone to put an ad in the paper because that's what he's always done. What's his son going to do? Flip open his laptop. That's evolutionary. It's a gradual process. We're trying to make it revolutionary. I'm glad I'm on our side, not theirs. But they'll diversify.

TIME You have developed a site in India and bought online job sites in China and Korea. What prompted the recent expansion throughout Asia?

A.M. I had been in China in the early 1990s and was not terribly impressed. I thought it would be a good place to go if you were making washing machines, but I wasn't sure it was a great place for a service company. But as China started heating up over the past few years, I said, "I think I made a mistake."

TIME What changed your mind?

A.M. We saw rapid development. You can't ignore the largest country in the world. This won't be an overnight success. But this isn't like pet rocks, which were terrific on Monday and not so good on Tuesday. Is there any doubt China will be bigger in online-recruitment revenue than the U.S. at some point? None. Will it take 10 years? Twenty years? Doesn't matter.

TIME How are job postings changing?

A.M. We have more listings at the high end, with salaries up at $325,000. We have CFO positions and some small- company CEO openings that pay $100,000. Of course, that's not to suggest that the counterpart of Jack Welch is going job hunting online.

TIME What about the skilled-job market?

A.M. Skilled and hourly listings are growing. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Nickel and Dimed that after working two jobs, she didn't have the strength to look for another. Now she would have the energy, because she would just go online. Of the 50,000 resumes we get a day, more than half come from blue-collar workers. Are the machinists and lathe operators looking for a job online now? You bet. We have even put in a team to police the listings, which have included everything from prostitution to money laundering.

TIME What's ahead for Monster.com?

A.M. Our R&D labs are working on some way-out stuff with cell phones. We're anxious to do this because of cell-phone usage in China. You'll one day be able to look for jobs using your cell phone and get notified of new openings. And we're focused on small businesses. We've always concentrated on online recruiting, and that's still our singular focus.