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.

Hot on the heels of attending TED2013 in Long Beach, CA, I flew back last weekend to deliver a “Founder Talk” at the 2nd Annual NYU Entrepreneurs Festival, a two-day event to promote and support entrepreneurship across the University. As a proud NYU alumnus, I was invited to be a keynote speaker to share my stories of success, along with the challenges overcome along the way, with the rest of the NYU community.

Additional presenters included founders such as Dan Porter of OMGPOP and Paul Berry of RebelMouse, as well as Rachel Sterne Haot, Chief Digital Officer to Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and the City of New York. She spoke about various initiatives underway in New York to cultivate local technology talent for the city’s innovative community. Fellow NYU alumnus Jack Dorsey, founder & CEO of Square and creator of Twitter, made his way back to New York University for a fireside chat with Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures.

You can follow the conversation about the NYUEF on Twitter here.

Tom Post, Managing Editor at Forbes, interviewed me on stage for almost an hour, before taking questions from the audience. Below is the agenda of topics I discussed with Tom:

• The Road Towards Entrepreneurship: From Golden Arches to CEO
• TheLadders is Born to Address an Unmet Need
• The Business Model Comes Full Circle
• A Year of Fine Tuning
• Re-envisioning TheLadders with a Mobile-first Lens

You can watch the entire keynote presentation here.

I had a great time at the NYU Entrepreneurs Festival, and very few other reasons would incentivize me to cut short my stay at TED besides the opportunity to speak at my alma mater. I look forward to doing it again.

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 week, I flew to the TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in Long Beach, CA, my fourth visit. As CEO & co-founder of TheLadders, I attended TED as a guest, rather than a speaker, which is the only show I attend in this more passive role. Although TED is an excellent platform for networking, the main reason I attended the conference was to hear about and learn from outstanding presenters.

Because most of the TED speakers do not work directly in my industry, the immediate implementation of my learnings from there are not obvious. However, there are some amazing moments when I absorb so much from these speakers that it is a humbling experience, demonstrating that a captive audience can learn from practically anyone. Whether a scientist, street-musician, artist, fashion mogul, serial entrepreneur, or a high-school graduate, these categories of “teachers” commonly demonstrate that their ideas are worth sharing. Additionally, I returned home with the feeling that challenges such as climate change, poverty, or job creation can, indeed, be solved. As human beings, if we have a purpose and put our minds to the task, we can be incredibly resourceful and creative.

Bono projects extreme poverty rate of zero by 2030

I highly recommend these three TEDTalks once they become available online:

1. Taylor Wilson, teenage nuclear scientist: Solving the world’s energy crisis

At 14 years old, from his garage, Taylor Wilson became the youngest person to achieve fusion with a reactor. Now, he wants to solve the world’s energy crisis with a safe nuclear fusion reactor. With a $100,000 grant from PayPal’s Peter Thiel, Taylor is skipping college to start a company that will manufacture a safe, non-replenishable fusion reactor (at least for 30 years) that either can be buried or sent to space. His newly designed reactor can produce 10-times the power of a traditional nuclear plant, with the intent of being commercialized in three to five years.

2. Ron Finley, South Central’s renegade gardener: “Plant some shit”

Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central LA’s food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating. He is a true urban farming hero who thinks outside of the box, and could not help but notice what was going on in his own backyard: drive-throughs and drive–bys, both contributing to the area’s high diabetes rate. Ron’s vision started with the curbside garden where he grows fruit and vegetables. When the city tried to shut him down, his fight led to a movement that provides nourishment, education, and health. Additionally, his plans for a green café will create jobs in his poverty-stricken neighborhood.

3. Phil Hansen, stroke-of-genius artist: Embrace the shake

As an art student, Phil Hansen developed an artistic style for extreme pointillism that ultimately caused a tremor in his hand and permanent nerve damage. Eventually, he dropped out of school and stopped creating art until a neurologist suggested he “embrace the shake.” This recommendation propelled Phil on a journey to invent a new approach to making art by embracing his personal limitations. However, suddenly faced with too many choices and resources at his disposal, Phil lost his creativity. To find it again, he challenged himself to create art, only using materials that cost less than $1.00. Phil taught me the biggest lesson from my week at TED:  “I had to be limited to become limitless.”

These are just a few examples of the fantastic TEDTalks during my week, epitomized by the following quote from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

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

The backbone of every high-growth company is its people. In the knowledge economy, a strong team is the foundation for success and top talent is the driving force. As Jim Collins said in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, “Get the right people on the bus.”

At TheLadders, we will be celebrating our 10-year anniversary this summer. For the past decade, we have hired more than 500 people, constantly focusing on getting the “right person on the bus,” and constantly ensuring that they are sitting in the right seat on that bus. We always strive to hire the best and get the most from our staff. Coaching, just like in sports, is the key to empowering employees to reach above-and-beyond. Just as with Sir Roger Bannister, we want TheLadders to break the four-minute mile; achieve what they might perceive to be unachievable.

Not surprisingly, TheLadders alumni network in New York City is strong and vibrant. When we ask them what they miss most about working at TheLadders (besides Bagel Friday!), they say it is the people. Over and over, we hear from our current and former employees that what makes the difference are the incredible colleagues they have worked with or are working with.

At TheLadders, we do not expect our staff to work here forever. Eventually, we know that people will leave. Furthermore, we know that as much as we enjoy promoting from within, we cannot possibly promote every great hire to a Vice President or C-level position. That said, one measure of our success is to assess where our alumni end up, post-employment with us. It is always a great sign when one of them lands a top job. That is the way that Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, looked at his company. In the 90s, when a company needed a loan, it went to a bank. When a company needed a CEO, it went to General Electric, which minted business leaders the way that West Point mints generals.

Last week, I was thrilled to read in All Things Digital that Ware Sykes, TheLadders’ former VP of Sales & Services, became the CEO for NoWait, the OpenTable for restaurants that don’t take reservations. Ware joined TheLadders in 2006 as an MBA intern from Columbia Business School and worked his way up the executive rank.

Last month, when I heard that Jake Levine, General Manager at Digg, made Forbes’ iconic “30 under 30” list, I tweeted and posted the following link: http://onforb.es/Ws5iRZ. Prior to joining Betaworks/Digg, Jake did strategy work at TheLadders, directly reporting to TheLadders’ Founder Marc Cenedella and me.

Here are several other alumni who became CEOs and entrepreneurs after working with us:

• Derek Pilcher, Managing Director and owner, TheLadders.co.uk

• David Carvajal, Founder and CEO, Dave Partners, LLC

• Michael McCurdy, Co-founder and CEO, TestingMom.com

• Thilo Semmelbauer, President and COO, Shutterstock

• Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Founder and CEO, Care.com

However, not everyone wants to be a CEO. We also have alumni who are function leaders at other successful New York City tech firms:

• Alain Benzaken was Vice President of Technology at TheLadders for five years. He is now the Senior Director of Software Engineering at Buddy Media Salesforce.

• Ofir Shalom was Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders for five years. He is now the CTO at Group Commerce.

• Angela Romano Kuo started as a recruiter with TheLadders, working seven years before becoming Vice President of Human Resources. She now is the Vice President of Human Resources at SecondMarket, Inc.

• Leslie Semegran started as a marketing manager at TheLadders in 2005 before working her way up to Vice President of Marketing and Engagement, reporting directly to me. She is now Vice President of Marketing at Care.com.

As previously mentioned, TheLadders also proudly promotes from within. For instance, I promoted two leaders to the executive rank, just last month:

• Kyri Sarantakos was promoted to Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders. He joined the company in 2005 as a software engineer. During the past seven years, he has moved up the ranks to become a manager of core architecture and development, an application architect, and, most recently, a principal software architect.

• Selena Hadzibabic was promoted to Director of Product and UX at TheLadders. After graduating from Dartmouth College, she joined the company in 2006 as a junior community associate, an entry-level position. Subsequently, she was promoted to product manager in our U.S. operation, and then became the sole product lead for two years in our former UK operation, where she was based in London before returning to New York in 2011.

If you are a tech professional in New York City and are looking for your next challenge to enhance your skills and your career, join TheLadders! Why?

You may say: “My friend is starting a company and I can be the VP of Technology and get a lot of options.”

Yes, that may be true, but is your friend giving you the leadership training necessary to succeed in that job? Will you be out of a job in six to 12 months because the company did not raise sufficient capital or you do not possess the skills required to lead and drive performance from a team? You will learn that skills on the job at TheLadders.

You also may say: “I have a generous cash offer from Amazon, Google, or Facebook.”

What is going to make you successful are the people you work with, the challenges you will face, the opportunity you have to influence the strategy, and your access to leadership. As a software engineer in New York working for Amazon, Google, or Facebook, you may never be exposed to Jeff, Larry, or Marc. At TheLadders, you will get frequent exposure to the CEO. At TheLadders, we won’t give you the answer to a problem. We will give you a problem statement and will ask you to determine the answers that fulfill our shared vision.

At TheLadders, your last interview will be with me, the CEO. You will hear directly from me that during the next four years of your life, you will experience tremendous professional growth. That is a guarantee that TheLadders offers. Your experience with us will take your career to the next level.

So, is TheLadders a CEO factory or are we just lucky? You be the judge.

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 week, I visited a few of our partners in Silicon Valley. First, I met with the recruiting team at Apple where we discussed trends in the online-recruiting industry, the impact of mobile disruption on recruiting, and TheLadders’ 2013 product roadmap.  As my next meeting, with Zappos in Henderson, NV, wasn’t until a few days later, I decided to spend the weekend in nearby Las Vegas and participate in the 26.2-mile “Strip at Night” Zappos.com Rock ‘n’ Roll Las Vegas Marathon.

Despite running several marathons around the world, I found this event unique because the race started in the afternoon and finished at night in front of The Mirage Hotel in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip. Given the high altitude and dry heat, it was a challenging competition. Below is a picture of me at the start line.

The following day, I met with the recruiting team from Zappos, which is well-known for giving private tours of their headquarters to anyone interested in their culture and operations. I had heard about the tour after reading Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness.

In many ways, Zappos offers the typical culture of a start-up: young, informal, and with an open-plan. No one in the flat organization has an office, and food and drinks are free. Not surprisingly, you can find these attributes among many tech start-ups in both Silicon Valley or in New York City.

However, here is what I found to be most unusual about Zappos:

1. Nearly 3½ years after being acquired by Amazon, Zappos still operates fairly independently of its owner. In 2013, Amazon will take over the fulfillment and warehousing of Zappos’ merchandise in Kentucky, near the UPS hub. That is the only influence Amazon exercised over Zappos.

2. The Executive Corner is called the “Monkey Row.”  See below.

3. If you want the inside scoop on Zappos’ culture, you must read its annual culture book, which is produced by Zappos’ employees. The content, except for typos and spelling errors, is unedited, providing the public an opportunity to read about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

4. There is no standard, annual, base-salary increase for just “being there.” Learning, development, and self-improvement are highly encouraged, and acquiring news skills is the path to increasing your compensation. For example, their royalty program empowers employees, with the help of a full-time life coach, to “Get Off Your Butt” and go through a personal growth experience via a professional or personal challenge.

Once employees have achieved their goals, they get to be part of the “Goal Club Wall” in the company’s main staircase:

5. They do not track many KPIs. Their call center is not data-driven. They do not measure talk time or drop rate. In fact, there is little focus on profit, shockingly for a company that generated more than $1B in annual sales.

6. Finally, CEO Tony Hsieh’s number-one concern is employee satisfaction and improving his employees’ happiness.

Regardless if you agree with the Zappos approach, it is definitively a unique culture that is not for everyone. So, if you plan to work there, get ready to drink the Zappos “Kool-Aid.” But, what cannot be argued is the fact that they have built a phenomenally successful e-commerce operation that produces value for its stakeholders and its ecosystem.

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

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been two weeks since I reported on Hurricane Sandy’s impact to TheLadders office in downtown Manhattan. Since then, we’ve relatively returned to business as usual, but we fully realize that many people and businesses are still suffering from Sandy’s devastation.

I feel a deep sense of compassion for the loss of homes and, most tragically, lives. As a business owner and entrepreneur, I am empathetic for other business owners who have experienced damage from the storm.

I thought long and hard about what our company could possibly do to help with hurricane-relief efforts. We are an online job-matching service for career-driven professionals – how can we leverage our expertise to best assist job seekers affected by the hurricane? After some discussion with my talented and supportive team, we came up with the following plan:

• Donate $300,000 worth of Premium job-search services to those impacted by the hurricane
• Donate $10,000 to Hurricane Sandy relief efforts for those who have been heavily impacted and cannot take advantage of the above benefits
• Support our neighborhood restaurants that were affected by the hurricane by fueling TheLadders’ hard-working employees with free lunch until Thanksgiving

Hurricane Sandy left a path of destruction in its wake, impacting Americans all along the East Coast. The responsibility of rebuilding and helping those in need is one that is shared among everyone. Skip your morning coffee and donate to the American Red Cross. Clean out your closet and put a pile of clothes together for those who have lost everything. Volunteer to distribute emergency-relief supplies to affected families. If everyone chips in, just a little bit, we can rebuild together.

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 spent two days in Raleigh, NC, at the Internet Summit 2012 where I spoke on two panels: “Designing and Optimizing for Multiple Screens” and “Internet Entrepreneurship.”

The most exciting part of my trip was that it was the first time in 20 years that I returned to the “scene of the crime.” This is a story that very few people know about me – one that took place long before my time as COO and Co-founder of TheLadders.

In 1993, I was a freshman at the University of Colmar, in Alsace, France, studying economics and business. I quickly realized that as a Frenchman preparing for a career in business, I had to speak English fluently if I wanted to be successful. Since I am not the type of person who can master a foreign language via classroom study alone, I engineered a bold move. I decided that I was going to spend the summer working in the United States and, therefore, learn English there. Like I usually do, I approached it with a sink-or-swim mentality.

Through a student organization’s intermediary, I was able to secure a working permit for the summer. I bought a round-trip ticket between Paris and New York, but first needed to decide on a final destination. As a teenager, I had already traveled with my family to the West Coast, so I targeted the East Coast. Strategically, I decided to avoid cosmopolitan areas for fear of working with too many foreigners, hence limiting my language practice. Therefore, I ruled out New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., Miami and Atlanta. In fact, I narrowed my options to Upstate New York, Vermont or the Carolinas. Because it was the summer, I also was seeking proximity to the beach to enjoy the warm weekends. Raleigh, North Carolina seemed to match everything I was looking for. Even though it’s not right on the water, it’s only a two-hour drive to the beach. I was sold!

In June of that year, I boarded a plane from Paris to New York. When I got to the Big Apple, I spent my first night at Columbia University before jumping on a 12-hour Greyhound Bus to Raleigh. At the time, I had very little: $300 in cash, two bags and a piece of paper saying that the McDonald’s at 3710 Western Boulevard was willing to hire international students for the summer.

When the bus finally arrived in Raleigh, the first thing I did was find a place that I could afford for one night; I knew no one and had no place to go. After I checked in to the hotel, I walked to McDonald’s, letter in hand, and asked the store manager for a job. Because I needed the money to survive on my own, I was anxious to get started and requested a start date of the very next day.

I needed to improve my English before being allowed a customer-facing job at the counter, so I spent a memorable summer in the kitchen flipping burgers and pancakes. When the manager kindly offered to introduce me to other employees, one of them offered me a room to sublet for the summer. I had a job, a summer home and an opportunity to practice English every day with Americans. Life was good.

I ended up spending the whole summer there before returning to school in France. Those two months in Raleigh became a life-changing experience for me, a truly pivotal movement that later gave me the confidence at age 22 to permanently move to New York City. The rest, as they say, is history!

For the past 16 years, I have traveled extensively across the United States visiting many cities and states, but last Thursday was especially meaningful…to come back for the first time to where it all began!

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

To our customers and friends,

First and foremost, if you have been impacted by Hurricane Sandy, we hope that you and your loved ones are safe and sound.

You probably didn’t know TheLadders headquarters are located in lower Manhattan. Like most of that area, our office is currently still without power and our entire staff is working remotely. Despite the hurricane, our employees have been working tirelessly to get our teams and systems running so that we can continue to serve you. At this time, we can gladly assist you with customer service requests via email at
help@theladders.com or on live chat via TheLadders.com.

We will respond to emails within 24-72 hours. Hopefully, phone support will be available starting Monday.

We will continue to keep you updated in the coming days. In the meantime, we ask for your patience as New York, and the entire East Coast, recover from the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy.

Warmest regards,

Alex Douzet
COO & Co-founder
TheLadders

This week, I am in Las Vegas at the Onrec Global Recruiting Trends Conference 2012, speaking about “Building Meaningful Relationships between Job Seekers and Employers” and “The Value of Information: Strategy for Innovation.”

Additionally, we are seizing this unique opportunity to announce to the community that we are now a free resource for recruiters and employers. In fact, we are proud to announce that we offer:

-          Unlimited Search

-          Unlimited Post

-          Unlimited Targeted Hiring Alerts

In a nutshell, TheLadders now offers for free what LinkedIn, Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, Dice and the rest of the industry offer for a fee.

So, why are we giving away our unparalleled services for free when recruiters and employers are willing to pay for them? Here are five reasons:

• As of last year, we no longer focus only on $100K+ jobs; instead, we target all professional job seekers. Candidates on TheLadders can pay $25 per month to gain full access to our network. However, we also offer a freemium model for job seekers, which afford the ability to apply to targeted hiring alerts, as well as be searchable and contacted by recruiters and employers.

• The revenue we generate from job seekers enables us to continually optimize the job-matching experience, enabling us to fulfill our mission of matching “the right person for the right job.”

• As I mentioned in my recent blog post “Introducing the ‘Less than Free’ Business Model,” free enables us to improve product features for job seekers. Free is also exciting for recruiters, as they are just as essential to our success as job seekers.

• Free enables us to embrace and migrate our ecosystem to the next generation of job search — mobile — empowering us to re-envision our business with a “mobile-first” approach.

• Having recently reached a milestone of 25,000 recruiters and employers, free will enable us over the next three years to provide access to our network to more than 100,000 active recruiters and employers in the U.S., positioning us as the leading platform for professional jobs.

Mobile is disrupting the way job seekers interact with content, and we are contributing to this disruption.

Over the coming months, we will release several new innovations for both job seekers and recruiters. Our next milestone will be our job-seeker app launching in early 2013, followed by native iOS apps for iPhone and iPad. Stay tuned…the future of jobs is coming and TheLadders is pioneering the trail!

Download Alex’s OnRec Presentation — Building Meaningful Connections ›

Download Alex’s OnRec Presentation — The Value of Information ›

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

In growing tech companies, the time we spend out of office together can be as important as the time we spend in the office together.  Building good relationships and a shared sense of fun about our future make longer hours and the winding road to success feel like a victory in itself.

At TheLadders, we’ve always made time to get out of the office together.  And while we’ve never been into trust falls or rope bridges, we have enjoyed paintball and bowling and competitive triathalons — or even just picnicking in the park with each other — over the years.

But this fall, I decided to try something new.  We’ve all heard the expression “you eat what you kill”, but what if your team had to, you know, actually eat what they kill?

I took my team, by bus and boat, to find out on the swirling seas around Montauk.

Now at TheLadders, which I co-founded with my friends Andrew and Marc almost a decade ago, we’ve always been a nimble company.  Our mantra from the early days was “We’ll make it even if we never raise a dime!”

Being resilient has served us well.  We’ve only raised $8 mm in equity capital and we pioneered a new industry, signing up over 5 million job-seekers and 25,000 recruiters to our professional job-matching service.  After our first raise in 2004, we never raised another round. Success with that type of bootstrapping means always being resourceful.

Which leads me to last Tuesday and a bus carrying me and twenty of my top colleagues to Montauk.  We boarded the 85-foot Marlin VI Princess for a five-hour fishing trip. With a twist.

You see, “eat what you kill” is a common saying in our tech community, but tonight, it was also our bill of fare.  I told my team that that night, dinner was our responsibility:

“Tonight, we will be eating what we kill.

Fish is the only item on the menu, but not just any kind of fish.  It will be true, locally sourced, line-caught, fresh fish, right off of this boat.

Caught by you.

So, if you want to feast, let’s catch a lot of great fish.  If you want to go home hungry, let’s come back empty-handed.  The choice is yours.”

So we fished…

 and fished…

and fished…

and fished.

And took in the scenery.

We had a blast.

And we caught 22 fish: four large striped bass, several bluefish and few tuna.

And they were tasty.

And we learned a lesson, in the way that only “doing it yourself” can really teach you.

If you want to learn about bootstrapping your business, my saying is:

“Eat what you kill!”

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