TheLadders Blog

I recently attended the 2013 NAPW National Networking Conference. Approximately 1,500 successful business women from all over the country gathered in New York City for a day of learning, networking, and inspiration.

If you’ve read my articles on The Career Chronicles, or follow me on Twitter and Facebook, you’ve probably read about my involvement in the National Association of Professional Women (NAPW) before. NAPW is an exclusive network for professional women to interact, exchange ideas, educate, and empower.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Ignite Your Network” – and it did not disappoint! The day began with an introduction from our host and NAPW National Spokesperson Star Jones. During her talk, Star spoke about what she calls the “Seven Steps to Success.” I liked them so much that I wanted to share them with all of you:

1. Investigate: What do you want to achieve? Do your research and figure out how to get there.

2. Initiate: How do you plan to change? Do you need to bring someone into your life to get there?

3. Insight: It’s time for some self-examination. If something’s failed in the past, ask yourself, ‘Why?’

4. Intuition: We all know that ‘uh-oh’ feeling that tells you not to do something. It comes in a flash – don’t disregard it.

5. Intention (my personal favorite): Focus your mind on the results you want to have. Your attention will send you in the direction that determines your destination.

6. Inspiration: What brings you joy? Is it working with children, meditation, or perhaps giving back to the community? Find out what you love to do and figure out how to incorporate it into your goals.

7. Innovation: It’s time to break out and do something you’ve never done before. Take a risk; think outside the box.

Star set the tone for the conference with these seven steps. The day continued with conversations from world-renowned keynote speakers, Adrianna Huffington and Martha Stewart, insightful panel discussions, and interactive workshops. The event not only inspired and motivated me, it gave me an opportunity to practice my networking skills.

I urge all of you to find a professional association (or two) that aligns with your career aspirations and start networking – you never know who you will meet, what you will learn, or how one simple meeting could change your career path!

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert for TheLadders, the online job-matching service for career-driven professionals. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC) and Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) who provides job search and career guidance for professionals looking to make their next career move. Have a question for Amanda? Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered in her weekly column, and be sure to follow @JobSearchAmanda on Twitter and “Like” her on Facebook for up-to-the-minute job-search advice.

Happy Mother’s Day! In celebration of all the hard-working mothers out there, we recently conducted a study to see if the names they choose for their children could have possibly dictated their future success in the workplace. First, we analyzed data around first names from TheLadders’ nearly 6 million members against variables such as industry, salary level, and location. We wanted to prove the null hypothesis that what your mother names you makes a difference.

Second, we populated a few lists, hoping they would generate some additional questions. We started by aggregating and sorting names that were at the top of each list:

Top five C-level names, by gender, in ratio to their overall frequency:

Top five highest-paid names:

Both lists are normalized for frequency (not just absolute counts) giving a ratio of [C-level first names]/[all first names]. Here are a few quick takeaways:

• Christine was the only name that showed up on both the top five C-level and highest paid lists
• The top 10, highest-paid, C-level executive names earn, on average, 10% more than other names
• The top 25 most-popular names make about $7,000 more, on average, than the rest of the list
• Females make, on average, 22% less than their male counterparts in all comparisons

One point we noticed was that shorter names seemed to be higher ranked across all categories and metrics, so we investigated further. It turns out we were right, and there is a correlation between the number of letters in your name and the average salary:

Doing a simple linear regression, it looks like every additional letter added to your name accounts for a $3,600 drop in annual salary. One exception is names with seven letters, like Stephen, but closer inspection showed that seven-letter names lend themselves to males over females, so it’s higher paid males over-indexing and inflating the seven-letter bucket.

This surprising trend of shorter names led us to look at nicknames, and test whether Williams truly make less money than Bills. We looked at every abbreviation and nickname we could identify; here is a summary of results in the “Nickname versus Proper Name” head-to-head death match (gold stars for the winners):

All the shorter names earn more. Our test included 24 pairings, and in only one case (Lawrence vs. Larry) did the longer name win. Still not convinced? The definitive proof for this theory can be seen in Sara vs. Sarah, Michele vs. Michelle, or Philip vs. Phillip –  one letter less positively correlates with increased salary.

In conclusion, it DOES make a difference what your mother named you. So, to all prospective mothers, our advice is to keep Baby’s name short and sweet – your child will thank you when they’re raking in the money one day.

Thanks, Mom, for naming me Daniel but nicknaming me Dan. Happy Mother’s Day!

Daniel Cronyn is the director of consumer marketing at TheLadders. Besides a passion for creative direct-response campaigns and analysis, he spends his time tracking down obscure music events and even more obscure food choices across New York City.

Anyone who has ever looked for a job knows the drill: find job online, send resume, wait, and never hear back. If you’re sending out dozens of resumes, like most job seekers do, you’re likely familiar with this broken process — and frustrated when you don’t get a response. In the careers industry, this broken loop even has a notorious name: “The Black Hole.”

Recently, TheLadders conducted a study on job-seeker behavior using “eye-tracking” technology to determine how we could help close The Black Hole while leading job seekers to their perfect job. We analyzed how job seekers view job postings, what they actually saw, what they concentrated on, and what they totally missed.

If you’re unfamiliar with eye tracking, it’s a way to record and analyze where someone focuses on a page, and in what order they do it (see cool visualizations above).

So, what did we find out?

Job seekers assume The Black Hole exists because employers do not take the time to respond, which is only partially true. What we found from our behavioral analysis was that job seekers also played their part in The Black Hole, which can be statistically proven through our eye-tracking study.

The fundamental conclusion of our study relies on sensitivity and specificity, two really important statistics terms. Sensitivity, in this study, was the ability of job seekers to correctly determine a good job “fit” for them, while specificity was the same job seeker’s ability to determine a job “not a fit.” Basically, we were on a mission to find out if job seekers were applying to the right jobs, and avoiding applying for jobs that were not right for them.

Surprisingly, the results of those two pieces of analysis showed us that job seekers were unable to determine good jobs, only picking good fits at a rate of 38%, but were able to tell bad fits at a rate nearly twice that. For further clarification, this means that out of every 10 jobs an average job seeker applies to, six of them will be bad fits. Additionally, this means that out of every 10 job postings viewed, the job seeker overlooks at least two that are good fits.

Our primary assumption for why this happens is due to the time spent reading and assessing the positions. Sixty-five percent of our study participants self-reported spending up to ten minutes reading job postings before applying; however, our study findings show that, on average, job seekers spend less than a minute per job posting – even less when they determine it’s not a fit.

What can TheLadders do to help job seekers make better decisions in the job sourcing and application process? We have to make the application process more precise, so that job seekers can better identify the right opportunities and avoid getting stuck in The Black Hole. This is why we recently introduced TheLadders Scout, a competitive-analysis tool that provides job seekers with an anonymous overview of who else applied for that same role.

To determine the effectiveness of TheLadders Scout, the second part of our study tested how participants viewed the competitive data provided, and whether it influenced their ability to identify good fits.

The results were equally surprising, in that job seekers eyes were heavily drawn to the new feature on the page, and spent on average 12 incremental seconds viewing the competitive data.

Additionally, participants viewing job descriptions with TheLadders Scout were able to determine good fits at a 35% higher rate than job descriptions without Scout. With 12 seconds of viewing time being devoted to TheLadders Scout, we expected the overall viewing time of postings with TheLadders Scout to increase, but we were proven wrong. Job seekers spent 24% less time finding fits with TheLadders Scout.

Looking at these “heat maps,” you can see that job postings without Scout data on them (pictured on the left) drew job-seeker attention primarily to the title, company description at the top, and then the first line of the first couple of paragraphs. The majority of information (such as job requirements) was skimmed, or went completely unnoticed. In the Scout version, not only was more information read, but 12 seconds were spent reviewing the competitive information and determining based on other applicants if the position was truly a fit.

For us at TheLadders, the study provided valuable information, not only on why The Black Hole exists, and why employers and job seekers have equal roles in contributing to it, but also on how we can provide features and tools to help close The Black Hole.

Download the full research study. 

 Daniel Cronyn is the director of consumer marketing at TheLadders. Besides a passion for creative direct-response campaigns and analysis, he spends his time tracking down obscure music events and even more obscure food choices across New York City.

There are lots of buzz words flying around in product development these days, but what they are and how they are applied can be hard to grasp. I’d like to pull the curtain back and share how we’ve been applying “Lean UX” in product development at TheLadders.

My team has been working on an iPhone application for our job seekers, which is due to launch in the coming months. As Lead User Experience Designer on the project, I have collaborated closely with my team, applying a “Lean UX” approach – which TheLadders is known for, thanks to the great work of Jeff Gothelf and Will Evans, my predecessors here. In this multi-part series, I’ll share with you how we got through the early, foggy stages of product definition quickly; how we built out the guts of our app while constantly testing with users; and a cutting-edge long-term study we’re running with real users for the last two months of development, while we refine the last set of features.

First: What is this “Lean UX” you speak of? 

Inspired by Eric Reis’s Lean Startup, in a nutshell, “Lean UX” is an approach to design that emphasizes cutting waste by experimenting your way toward results as quickly as possible. “Results” are often defined by some indicator of business viability or customer satisfaction – so this often means getting something in front of customers that we can learn from. In traditional (“waterfall”) design, a problem is defined, then a solution is thoroughly designed and specified before anything is built. With Lean UX, the problem is defined, reduced to its core, and then we sketch, talk, and prototype in quick succession to make something to get in front of customers for feedback. We bring these learnings back to the shop, retool what we need to, then put it out there again, iterating like this until we have enough information to go back and take a real stab at the larger solution.

WEEK 1

The Foundation

We began with a hypothesis, an understanding of constraints, and some overall design principles.

Our hypotheses were simple: we thought that users want to know when new, relevant jobs become available, regardless of where they are. We also thought that once they find a good job, they want to reach out to the employer or recruiter – from their phone – with ease.

Because any good app is usable within the first 30 seconds – and it can be hard to get people to come back once they put it down – we identified other important problems we’d encounter, and broke the entire problem into 3 parts: First use by a new member, core functionality, and re-engagement. We decided to focus first on the core of the application – discovering jobs and taking action on them – and created some ideas.

Creating Ideas

Design studio is a (fun!) team exercise, where everyone in your cross-functional team (in our case: engineers, product managers, designers, and stakeholders) generates ideas in the form of sketches of the actual interface. The process is preceded by declaration of the problem you are solving, who you’re solving it for, and any guardrails, or constraints, you must work with.

In our case, we drew ideas for Rashad, a “proto-persona,” or sketch based on institutional knowledge from years of customer outreach, who we felt may reflect real user needs. We painted a picture of Rashad using the app: he was in his car at lunch time, scanning the list for new jobs. He finds some he sort of likes and wants to look more closely at later. But he sees one in particular that he wanted to get a lead on now, so he takes action.

Before starting, we also reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of the designing for the iPhone:

Advantages

• Users are often interrupted, and must complete tasks in short bits
• It’s easier (and preferred) to consume than create
• Instead of keyboard/mouse, users have other ways to input information:
  • Gestures + Multi-touch
  • Location information (compass, gps, accelerometer, gyroscope)
  • Bluetooth
  • Still + video capture
  • Microphone/speaker (speech to text)
  • Integration with native apps – contacts, email, calendar, reminders, iCloud, phone, text messaging, twitter, passbook, maps, voice memos

Disadvantages

• Small processor size
• Small screen size (difficult for older folks and fat fingers)
• Lack of tactile feedback (another reason typing is hard)
• May not have internet – (users can be offline i.e., in a subway tunnel)

With this, we drew. And we created lots of ideas.

We reviewed them all, and selected a few, which, thanks to POP app, we were able to photograph and organize into a simple, tappable prototype to share with users on a phone.

TheLadders was conducting a public event the next day, so we had a great opportunity to do exactly that. We wanted to know: (1) Do job seekers need to know about jobs on the go, and if so, what sort of support do they need? and (2) Would reaching out to a recruiter about a job they’re interested in, on their phone, solve a need they have?

Learnings

Through conversations with a handful of users, we learned a few things. First, both of our hypotheses were true – users were pretty excited about the possibilities of learning about new job matches on the go, and most of them said they would expect to be able to reach out to the job poster via phone. However, we also learned that they had a high level of skepticism that they’d actually hear from anyone, and that their most desired feature would be an ability to save the jobs.

To be honest, these weren’t mind-blowing learnings; we had anticipated these needs. But hearing them from users helped us understand the severity of the needs, and unified the team around empathy for the user, rather than seeing these as simply features in a backlog.

Within a week, we had defined our problem, created a common understanding of possible solutions (and heard everyone’s voice), validated our hypotheses, and gained valuable insight that would help us prioritize and focus the development of our app.

We took this information back to the office and imagined what the recruiter side of things would look like – after all, we work in an ecosystem, where what happens on one side affects the other.

In the next part, I’ll share how we explored this part of the problem, and then took all these early experiments into higher-fidelity product development.

Michelle Zassenhaus is a Lead User Experience Designer at TheLadders.  When it comes to design and photography, her eye for detail and artistic talent make her a natural.

Last week, we held our third annual Career Day at Richard R. Green High School of Teaching. Career Day is an afternoon when professionals from across the city come to the school to speak with our students in small classroom settings about their career paths and industries. The big idea, of course, is to expose our students to careers they may never have even heard of through a compelling personal connection, in hopes of inspiring them to pursue whatever it is that they really love and are excited about during and after college. What’s unique about this event is that every single one of our 550 students, regardless of academic standing or self-motivation, gets to participate.

Given that many of our students have had limited exposure to different careers and have faced challenges and stifled opportunities throughout their education, Career Day has the potential to be a truly transformational moment in their lives, opening them up to a future they simply could not have imagined before.

Career Day is my favorite project, and each year I try to come up with ways to make the event more meaningful and engaging for students. It has grown tremendously from 19 speakers in the first year to 48 speakers this year.

Additionally, we added a Career Fair, in which Amanda Augustine, job search expert for TheLadders, spoke with students about their individual passions and dream jobs. At the fair, students had the chance to speak with representatives from a variety of professions, including the military (Navy and Marines) and AmeriCorps (Vista, NCCC and CityYear), as well as non-profits that offer internships to high school students.

The speaker series featured professionals from non-profits (including Russell Simmons charities), magazine journalism (the editor and art director from US Weekly magazine), graphic design, product design, music entertainment, system design, cinematography, social media, law, nursing, fitness, software engineering, architecture, broadcasting (Terrence McKnight from NPR & WQXR), finance, healthcare management, and education. A week later, students are still talking about the speakers they met and spoke with at Career Day. In high school time, that’s an eternity!

To learn more about Career Day, or to volunteer next year, please visit the website at wix.com/rkessous/rrgcareerday.

Rachel Kessous has been a public school teacher in NYC for 9 years. In addition to being a teacher, Rachel is also the Director of the Liberal Arts Academy, where she coordinates career preparedness programming for students and mentoring programs focused around finding students passions and preparing for college.

In my last post,  I wrote about why it’s important to challenge your existing assumptions when you build products for mobile devices. As I explained in that article, it is not enough to merely copy (web) functionality and make it look nice on a smaller screen; you have to first re-think what functionality is necessary for a mobile platform. Today, I want to talk about finding inspiration in new places.

When we started our competitive research early in 2013, we investigated every major job-search app within Apple’s app store. We wanted to see how they dealt with the unique challenges of mobile devices and, more importantly, solved the problems of their mobile customers. To be frank, we were disappointed. Most apps just replicated their trusted web experience: login, search for jobs, save or email jobs, and sometimes (if you already had a resume on file), you were allowed to apply using your phone.

Not only do these well-known job-search processes require significant time, they are tasks better managed on a desktop or laptop where you have lots of screen space –which is something you don’t have on your phone.

When we started wondering who else was trying to solve similar underlying problems, it didn’t take long for us to draw correlations between the online job search and online dating. After all, they are based on the same premise of matching people and putting them in touch with each other. If you stop thinking about resumes, job descriptions, cover letters and applications, job search is exactly the same thing as dating. We want to put the right job seeker in front of the right employer. In dating, matching is based on things like height, weight, interests, hobbies etc. In the job search, matching is based on experience, skills, career desires, etc.

So, we did some investigating to see if there was any innovation happening in the dating space. To our surprise, there was. One app that has gotten quite a bit of attention lately is Tinder.

Tinder reinvented online dating with simplistic mobile functionality

At the core, Tinder matches people based on their profiles, and then establish a connection between two people that “heart” each other (think “hot or not”). With that simple functionality, Tinder broke the conventions of countless other dating apps that require users to spend substantial time searching through dating profiles and sending messages to each and every person who appeared somewhat promising. Sound familiar? Yes, that’s exactly how most job-search sites function.

Now think about this paradigm in the job-search space. Why shouldn’t we first match job seekers with jobs and then ask whether they consider themselves a perfect fit for the positions? Then, once job seekers identify a couple of well-suited positions, we approach the employers to see if they agree. If both parties are in agreement, a connection is established, followed by resume (and possibly cover letter) exchanges if necessary.

See what’s happening? We take the work out of the job search. Let us do the heavy lifting and present you with initial matches so that all you need to do from your mobile device is tell us which opportunities you’re interested in. If the employer agrees, you two can take it from there.

Benjamin Grohé is the Product Manager for new consumer products at TheLadders. When he is not coming up with innovative ideas to delight our customers, he is celebrating his European heritage by cruising the streets of New York City on his new Vespa or playing football (the REAL football).

TheLadders is the leading job-matching service for professionals.  As a privately owned company, we do not disclose our financials. However, because we are constantly asked about our growth and performance by our outside stakeholders, we have decided to share with the outside world – for the first time — selected company metrics on a quarterly basis.

First Quarter 2013 Highlights:

• Jobs Posted by an Employer: In the first quarter of 2013, we have seen the number of jobs posted by employers on our site increase 116% year-over-year and 21% quarter-over-quarter. Jobs postings soared in Q4 2012 with our move to a free search and post model.
• Targeted Hiring Alerts (THA): THA are jobs sent via an alert from employers to a select group of professionals that matches the requirements of that specific job. This metric represents growth in both jobs and candidates. Since revamping that product in Q4 2012, we have experienced explosive growth.  THA have increased by 368% year-over-year and 47% quarter-over-quarter.
• Number of Employers using TheLadders to find the best candidates has increased 86% year-over-year and 21% quarter-over-quarter.

First Quarter Benchmark:

• At TheLadders, we serve the entire market of career-driven professionals, but today, we are best known for helping candidates and employers find and fill jobs that are $80K and above.  At this salary level, we mostly compete with LinkedIn. Our benchmark analysis highlights our performance vs. LinkedIn Corporate Solutions Customers.

Strategic Announcement:

• With the anticipated launch of our native iPhone app for professionals, we expected to release data in Q3 about our app downloads and, later, about our monthly mobile active users.

 Alex Douzet is CEO and Co-Founder of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.

Last Thursday, I presented at the Clustrix NYC roadshow. Technical executives and leaders from two of the world’s largest database groups on Meetup, New York City’s MySQL and NewSQL groups, were treated to an in-depth presentation about our direct experience with Clustrix, a leading scale-out database. The event, hosted at our SoHo office, drew attendees from companies like SMBC Capital Markets, Getty Images, Pythian, Pixable, M-Square, and ACES.

Historically, databases were the bottleneck in any system, and in the web world, often the primary cause of website downtime and bad user experience. We wanted to keep the downtime as low as possible, so we looked for different ways to scale our database. We also wanted our developers to focus on adding value to our product, rather than spending time working on a database layer. The goal was to scale the system smoothly and economically as requirements increased. A new database system would be able to handle large numbers of concurrent users, provide continuous availability, and process extremely large data sets.

We had several options to scale our database: break it to smaller databases called shards, migrate to a simple key-value or a document store, buy a big iron database, or adopt a modern internet-scale database solution called NewSQL.

The term NewSQL was first introduced by The 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in a 2011 research paper discussing the rise of new database systems as challengers to established vendors.

“NewSQL is used to describe… new relational database products and services designed to bring the benefits of the relational model to distributed architectures, or to improve the performance of relational databases to the extent that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity.” - The 451 Group

TheLadders became one of the first adopters of NewSQL database technology, which is why I was invited to present at the Clustrix NYC Roadshow. I spoke about scalable database solutions, costs and benefits, comparison, selection, implementation process, and a little bit about the future of the NewSQL database market.

The presentation explained the rigorous evaluation and decision-making processes my team undertook to choose a scale-out primary database and captured the audience’s attention right away. Clearly, we understood how critical it was to put the right database solution in place to help power our business. And we left no stone unturned in our evaluation of alternatives. Several attendees mentioned that the depth and detail of the evaluation were highlights for them. The audience walked away with first-hand insight about the strengths and weaknesses of the many alternative products and approaches evaluated by my team.

Of course, what they ultimately wanted to know was why TheLadders chose Clustrix and what results we experienced. Several attendees took notes as I walked through the specific, detailed criteria and performance results that led to Clustrix as the clear choice. Wrapping up with details about the implementation process brought it all home for attendees, as there’s nothing like learning from real-world implementation experience.

Sergei Tsarev, Clustrix CTO and founder, followed up with an overview of the Clustrix solution, use cases, and architecture. He then closed the session with a live demo of Clustrix on Amazon Cloud (AWS), demonstrating the simplicity of starting up the Clustrix scale-out SQL database on AWS in 6 easy steps, and under 10 minutes.

As expected with the technical experts in the crowd, the Q&A session got fairly deep on the inner workings of Clustrix and how it has performed and evolved at TheLadders. The informal networking after the presentations prompted even more thought-provoking questions and insightful discussions.

Overall, it was a great event and the Clustrix team was grateful to TheLadders for hosting and presenting our story. Perhaps the clearest sign of the event’s impact was that multiple attendees stated that they were “convinced,” and wanted to start testing Clustrix right away. I think that speaks volumes to the clarity of the presentation and the credibility of the Clustrix database solution.

Dmitri Mikhailov is the Principal Database Architect for TheLadders. Prior to TheLadders, Dmitri worked for Fortune Global 500 companies in Europe and the United States. He’s worked with big data for over two decades, designing and developing efficient solutions on every major database platform.

After many weeks of careful planning, my colleagues and I were proud to launch our inaugural JobMobile event in New York City last night. This was the first in a series of nationwide events that brought together the talent acquisition community to discuss major innovations and strategies in mobile recruitment. It also served as a festive platform for us to honor the top 1% of recruiting professionals in New York, better known as TheLadders ELITE.

Our CEO and Co-founder, Alex Douzet, gave a keynote presentation on the ever-increasing demand for mobile solutions across a broad spectrum of sectors, including recruitment. It’s estimated that within the next twelve months, employers can expect 50% of their web traffic to come from mobile devices. This shift in our businesses creates many opportunities, but also comes with its challenges.

Employers cannot simply transform their companies’ web experience to an iPhone screen. Mobile requires an intuitive design and user experience that brings convenience to the job seeker with functions like “one-click apply.” With that in mind, Alex discussed TheLadders’ latest projects, including our mobile-responsive site redesign for job seekers; the introduction of our proprietary, competitive-analysis tool, TheLadders Scout; and our impending mobile app that will allow job seekers to find and apply to the right job on the go.

I had the honor of moderating a diverse panel discussion featuring industry thought-leaders Karen Miller, vice president of people for Seamless; Jack Kelly, managing director and co-founder of the Compliance Search Group; Karsten Vagner, director of people for ZocDoc; and Melissa Enbar, director of recruiting for Birchbox.

Our goal was to have an honest conversation about mobile recruitment and discuss what’s working for their organizations and what challenges remain. This group did not disappoint! Not only did they share their best practices and common gripes, but they also talked about the differences in their approaches. For instance, corporate recruiters look for synergies between their product and marketing teams to build a mobile recruitment strategy that fits their brand and shows off their corporate culture; whereas agency recruiters tend to utilize mobile and social in different ways to attract the right type of candidates to suit their clients’ needs.

What I learned from this lively conversation is that every professional interprets mobile recruitment differently to suit their business needs. From the utilization of social media, to developing mobile-optimized career sites and mobile apps, to incorporating Skype and texting into the interview process, organizations can find large and small ways to attract the right candidate pool.

After the panel discussion, TheLadders Director of Client Relations, Employer Marketing & Sales, Thomas Murphy, honored TheLadders ELITE and presented them with their awards and ELITE jackets (I have to admit I’m jealous – those jackets are great)!

The night ended with cocktails and conversations. As always, it was a pleasure to meet so many great people and get a chance to chat. I want to thank everyone who was able to attend and give a special shout-out to our wonderful panelists for their participation. If you’re a recruiting professional who lives in Chicago, San Francisco, or Atlanta, keep your eyes peeled – we’re coming to your town soon!

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert for TheLadders, the online job-matching service for career-driven professionals. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC) and Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) who provides job search and career guidance for professionals looking to make their next career move. Have a question for Amanda? Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered in her weekly column, and be sure to follow @JobSearchAmanda on Twitter and “Like” her on Facebook for up-to-the-minute job-search advice.

About a month ago, there was a rally held in Washington D.C. to protest a perceived lack of action by the government regarding climate change. This was estimated to be the largest group in history that has gotten together for this purpose – 35,000 individuals, filling the National Mall, from the Capitol building to the Washington Monument. For those unfamiliar with our nation’s capital, this is an expansive 1.2-mile piece of land.

I’m telling you this because TheLadders would now require a space of the same proportion to fit all of the employers on its site. That’s right – we hit a new milestone this week: more than 35k employers are using TheLadders to find the most qualified job-seeking candidates out there. Luckily, each hiring manager can search for candidates from the comfort of their own computer or mobile device, so we won’t be renting out the National Mall anytime soon.

Our primary goal at TheLadders is to match the right person with the right job. As a member of TheLadders’ Employer Relations team, I am reminded of this goal every day as I approve new employers to use our site. For those unaware, every single employer profile submitted has human eyes on it before it gets approved (more often than not, my own beautiful blues). Taking this step allows us to verify that only legitimate recruiting professionals are allowed to post and search on our site.

Now, there is no certification needed to make a recruiter “legitimate” – we simply use the information on each person’s profile to ascertain whether they are right for TheLadders. The information can be found in a corporate email address, it can be found on the company website they provide, it can be found in the “About Me” section they write, etc. We take a look at the total package and then make a judgment call. If an individual doesn’t meet our standards or have a complete profile, he/she receives a personal email explaining why they weren’t approved. Often times, those turned away contact our Employer Relations team to find out what they need to do to get approved, and eventually are.

So, is this process of maintaining a high standard for employers on TheLadders worth it? Are we able to have our cake and eat it too? This is a commonly used idiom, albeit one that has never made much sense to me. Rather, I would say that through our approval process, we are able to eat a larger piece of cake that is delicious while still being nutritionally sound. On second thought, maybe desert analogies are not the best way to categorize this success. More than 35,000 employers using TheLadders, all meeting our high standards for quality, is a mark of success that stands on its own.

Andrew Wilson is a Junior Account Manager at TheLadders, specializing in recruiter acquisition and onboarding for the Employer Relations team. He enjoys Cleveland professional sports teams, and things that don’t make him miserable.