Monster.com was the pioneer in the online recruitment industry. To maintain its competitive advantage more than a decade later, the company has taken the data-driven road using research, business intelligence and predictive analytics.

Jean-Paul Isson, Vice President of Global BI and Predictive Analytics at Monster Worldwide spoke today about how the recruitment giant went from good to great using business analytics to support its overall decision making process across all regions. Jean-Paul Isson also discussed Monster’s success with increasing customer retention, market share and customer profitability, while managing competition from paid sites, free sites and social networks.

Facing competition from both paid and free websites, monster.com turned to business analytics to maintain its lead in online recruitment by addressing customer churn, share-of-wallet and profitability and to grow market share. Jean-Paul shared Monster’s approach to achieving their vision of innovating the Business based on the solid foundation of data-driven decision-making. Using his own daughter as an analogy, his recommendation was to start with baby steps and to celebrate every milestone reached. The Business Analytics equivalent to ‘smiling, sitting up, crawling then walking’ is to:

• Describe (the environment).
• Analyze.
• Understand.
• Explain.
• Predict.
• Act.

Jean-Paul's department also has a clear mandate from the business to "Develop & implement employers, job seekers and market knowledge to provide strategic intelligence to the business for best practices and profitable actions."

As with many of the presenters at the conference, Monster.com starts with the business problem(s). From this they derive a compelling vision of a better future, assess the available resources (human and otherwise) needed to address the issue, and agree on a set of success criteria (measures) that will confirm their success and give a specific RoI. The result is a business that is aligned and can be proactive and confident in its dealing with the markets, not just reactive to competitive pressures.

Jean-Paul also shared a segmentation matrix based on the potential value of customer and prospects and propensity to purchase. By using a simple matrix in this way, Monster can measure movement between segments and align strategies with Sales and Marketing. The results have been spectacular improvements in increased customer retention, sales force & marketing productivity, increased market share and profitability by customer.

Monster.com is a poster child of using research, business intelligence and predictive analytics to support a global decision-making process.