Monster seeks pan-Euro ad agency

Online recruitment brand Monster is on the hunt for an advertising agency for a pan-European brief.

Monster spent about £4.5m in the UK on advertising last year. It is not known whether this will go up with a new agency, but observers say an increasingly tough online recruitment market means it will be forced to hike spend.

The pitch is being overseen by Monster.co.uk marketing director Lisa Hutt, who took over from Charles Wasdell earlier this year, and is being handled through the AAR.

Monster has worked with Leo Burnett in the past on a project basis in the UK. The agency was appointed to handle Monster¹s above-the-line and digital advertising in 2005, snatching the account from Saatchi & Saatchi. When Leo Burnett took over the brand¹s UK advertising it saw the recruitment sites ad-spend more than double from about £2m in 2004. Monster.co.uk has around

2.8 million visits a month and carries 2 million CVs on its website. The site claims to list on average more than 1,900 new jobs a day.

This week, MySpace ann-ounced the launch of MySpace Jobs UK after a successful roll-out of the service in the US, which has attracted about eight times more listings than rival sites. The MySpace offering will be powered by online job search engine Simply Hired, and MySpace predicts the move will bring more than 1 million job vacancies to the site, creating the largest online database for jobs in the UK.

Social networking sites are predicted to take an increasing role in online recruitment as users can swap experiences, hints and point people in the direction of vacancies.