It's a scary time for Monster.com

Is Monster.com in danger of losing its job?

Earlier this year, when Hans Gieskes' son graduated from Connecticut College, Gieskes suggested that he post his resume on Monster.com, and start job hunting. Gieskes the Younger had a different idea. ''He said, 'Dad, I'm using SimplyHired,' because it gives him all the Monster listings, the listing from HotJobs, and all the other sites in one single search," Gieskes recalls.

It was a surprising answer, since Gieskes was for a brief period the president of Maynard-based Monster. But now that Internet job hunting is more than 10 years old, the established leaders -- companies like Monster, Yahoo's HotJobs division, and CareerBuilder, a joint venture of several newspaper companies -- may be showing a few flecks of gray, as a generation of scrappy young sites elbow in. SimplyHired, headquartered in Silicon Valley, is one new player, pulling together job postings from across the Web.

Gieskes' new start-up, Cambridge-based H3, is another, offering cash bounties for quality referrals.

''You're seeing a lot of activity, because the recruitment market is coming back," says Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research. And the irony, Li says, is that where newspapers felt their business was being upended by websites like Monster in the mid-'90s, now it's Monster, the online recruiting leader, with nearly $600 million in revenues last year, that is concerned about keeping its franchise.

''Anytime companies get big, they innovate less," says Auren Hoffman, a San Francisco entrepreneur who earlier this year launched KarmaOne, a site that offers rewards to people who refer their friends or colleagues for open positions, similar to H3.

Hoffman and Gieskes both believe that cash can motivate people to circulate job listings through their personal networks, perhaps enticing highly skilled candidates to apply, even if they weren't in the market for a new job.

''If you ask Americans how they found their current job," Gieskes says, ''60 percent will say they got it through a network or a referral."

The idea of dangling incentives to encourage people to tap personal networks for candidates is not new. In Boston, Refer.com tried the same tactic, before going out of business in 2001. ''They produced very bad quality candidates," Gieskes says of Refer, ''because they allowed any stranger to put forward names of people to try to get a reward."

With H3, he says, ''in order to refer someone, you have to be approached by someone who knows you," and who sends you an e-mail first about the job. If there's a $3,000 bounty, for example, and you pass the e-mail along to someone who gets hired, you keep the three grand. If you pass it to a friend, who sends it to another friend, who sends it to someone who lands the gig, the three referrers each get $1,000. H3 demands a 10 percent fee, paid by the employer, on top of every bounty that successfully fills a cubicle.

One problem that first-generation websites like Monster and HotJobs don't address, Hoffman says, is that their audience is entirely made up of people who are actively looking for a job. ''A vast percentage of the people who are looking aren't the people you want," he says. ''It's extremely hard to get to the people who aren't actively looking, and generally, that pool is much better."

Companies like Indeed of Stamford, Conn., and SimplyHired of Mountain View, Calif., are trying to aggregate as many postings as possible from corporate websites such as Monster, HotJobs, Craigslist, and anywhere else jobs might be advertised. Paul Forster, chief executive of Indeed, says his company adds 130,000 jobs to its database each day, from 1,500 sources. (The New York Times Co., which owns this newspaper, has a financial stake in Indeed.)

Both companies plan to sell ads related to their search results, a model that Google has made insanely popular. A search for graphic design jobs might bring up ads for graphic design supplies, a particular employer, or continuing education courses, for example. If these so-called ''meta search" sites prove popular, they could reduce the need for companies to pay to list jobs on Monster, HotJobs, and CareerBuilder, and instead just post the listings on their own sites and count on a service like Indeed or SimplyHired to make them more widely available.

SimplyHired chief executive Gautam Godhwani predicts that job sites like Monster won't be able to charge employers for each posting much longer. ''The market is moving toward a performance-based offering," where employers pay a fee only when a posting results in a hire. That's the idea behind yet another recruiting start-up, Mkt10 of Tysons, Va., launched by the former chief executive of CareerBuilder.

Monster isn't standing still. The company named a new president in September, and also added features intended to better match job seekers with relevant jobs. But don't expect dramatic changes. When I asked Diana Nicholson, the company's senior vice president of product management, whether she'd consider including listings from other sites in Monster's search results to make the site more comprehensive, she said, ''if you have the same number of job seekers looking at a larger number of jobs, the response to any individual job will go down." And while more choice would be good for job-seekers, it wouldn't be good for Monster's paying customers -- the employers.

''We're definitely in a period of increased competition," Nicholson says, ''and I think that's good for the industry, since it keeps everyone on their toes and moving forward."

''Monster and the other big sites will have a good year, since the hiring market is picking up," says Gieskes. ''But I have never seen public companies launch disruptive technology products. They have to do whatever will please the Wall Street analysts for the next quarter."

The real buzz these days in recruiting circles isn't about Monster. It's about what will happen if Google decides to unveil a job search function of its own.

''We're 100 percent dedicated to this," Forster says of Indeed, one of the sites that would be most affected by a prospective Google Jobs site. ''Just because Google is doing it doesn't mean they'll dominate it."

Spawn of MonsterJeff Taylor, Monster's founder, isn't sharing many details about his new start-up, Eons Inc. of Charlestown. ''I'm going to target the 50- to 100-year-old market," says Taylor, who is a spry 44, ''and I'm trying to figure out how to be disruptive to traditional business."

He will say that the four-person company is in hiring mode at the moment.

Taylor started Monster.com in 1994 (it was originally called The Monster Board). The next year, he sold out to TMP Worldwide, a New York company now known as Monster Worldwide. But Taylor stuck with Monster until this August, ensuring that it would be one of New England's best-known survivors of the dot-com era.

His new venture is developing what might be dubbed a next-generation AARP, building a loyalty and rewards program for Internet savvy seniors (and those who've just started to notice the wrinkles).

Taylor officially started work at the company last month. The actual launch will come sometime next year. The company recently raised $2 million in funding -- $1.5 million from the Cambridge firm General Catalyst, and the rest from Monster Worldwide and Taylor's own pocket.

Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com.