I was invited to Soho to review the new Monster recruitment app that launched last week. Sadly, I was rather unwell and could not attend but my colleague, who works in recruitment software development, attended in my stead and perhaps this was a better person to review it anyway.

‘Although the venue, Bar Chocolate, had a slightly misleading name as there didn’t appear to be any chocolate, the promise of nibbles and free beer put me in a positive frame of mind.

I will start by saying that the Monster iPad app is fairly similar to the iPhone one, albeit with a few improvements – a nice coffee mug in the corner (which was excitedly pointed out to me) and the new layout with the tool bar on the side did look nice and neat and seemed to be more user friendly than the iPhone app. You can log on (providing you have an account) or you can sign up to an account providing you the added benefit of saved searches.

The best bit about the app was the ability to flick from job to job once you’d found a list of suitable ones. Instead of having to constantly go back to your search page or trying and navigate back to the one you liked at the beginning, the simplicity of the flick page turns was marvellous. In this way, you can see that you would choose your iPad over your laptop for job searching, if only for the lack of constant ‘back’ button pressing or millions of tabs being open at once. You can quite easily upload CVs and cover letters to your iPad and store them for use on the app, although you can only have one CV on your account at a time.

I’m not sure that I agreed with one of their main selling points which was that you could use the app to look for jobs whilst at your desk, on your iPad  i.e. it’s the height of subtlety and no one would know what you were doing. Now personally, if I sat at my desk with an iPad out, I think my manager might notice even if it didn’t even cross his mind that I was looking for another job. But essentially, the app does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s an app for Monster that you can search for jobs on. After the negative reviews from their iPhone app, Monster seem to have got it right this time.

Though the app wasn’t the most innovative nor the most technologically spectacular app I’ve ever seen, I don’t think it was supposed to be. It’s functional, it’s easy to use and it’s a nice way to search for jobs on the go.’

So there you are! Hopefully, I’ll be able to attend the next one and there’ll be chocolate this time around..