TheLadders Blog

Right from the start, it was clear to me that these guys were experts.

On AMC’s new show, The Pitch, two ad agencies go head-to-head for a piece of new business. The ability to win new business can make or break an agency. Pitching a client is a fast-paced, exciting, and often highly stressful experience that only the best pros excel at.

One of the agencies in this weekend’s episode of The Pitch is DIGO, an integrated full service brand and business growth agency. I had the opportunity to head over to their offices in Manhattan and talk with DIGO’s Founder and CEO, Mark DiMassimo, and President Lee Goldstein.

We talked about the pitch process. The job search. And the importance of finding the right fit. Right off the bat, it was clear these guys knew what they were talking about.

As a job seeker, you only have to pitch yourself when you’re in a job search. These guys? They pitch for a living.

Watch the video to hear what they had to say. You’ll be as impressed as I was. And there’s plenty that you can take away for your own job search.

Of course, don’t forget to catch The Pitch on Sunday, June 3^rd, at 11 PM ET. If you want to see how the pros do it, that’s your chance to catch Mark and Lee in action!

William Beard is the Associate Creative Director of Copy for TheLadders. He loves to travel, always has ESPN.com open, and always takes the cheese option when it’s offered.

I had the privilege of participating in an event called Straight from the Source: Employer Representatives Mentor Women, hosted by Women@Work in Westport, Connecticut, yesterday.

Women@Work, co-founded by Eliza Shanley, is a great organization that is “dedicated to Keeping Women at Work Through All of Life’s Ages and Stages.” They offer a wide range of services which help mid- to senior-level women professionals advance their careers and find jobs. Often times these women took time off to raise their families and are now faced with reentering the workforce in a tight job market.

Every month or so, Women@Work holds an event where they ask individuals from various corporations to meet with its members to discuss two major topics: where they see opportunity in the marketplace, and what key advice they’d give professionals looking to reenter the job market.

I was very excited to attend this event because I could offer a unique perspective – not only could I talk about how I see the job market in the internet space, but I could discuss what job trends TheLadders sees across multiple industries and functions, as well as provide some practical tips to make every person at the event a more effective job seeker.

Eliza opened the event by moderating a short panel discussion with me and representatives from home furnishings retailer Pottery Barn and financial services firm Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.

Although we all came from very different industries and company cultures, a few themes seemed universal:

A positive attitude goes a long way. When you’re going in for an interview or even an initial phone screen, you need to be in a good mood and show the interviewers that you want the job. No one wants to work with a Negative Nancy!

Research is key. Employers want to know you took the time to read their website, recent news articles about the organization, etc., and that you have a good understanding of how they work and what’s going on in their world. Prove in your cover letter and during the interview that you’ve done your homework. Whenever possible, find someone you know who works at the company and grab a cup of coffee with them to learn more about the organization and its culture.

It’s more than just skill set. When a hiring manager gets a job requisition approved, they want someone who can not only do the job, but also fit in with the company and team culture. Assume that a portion of every screening and interview is devoted to determining how well you will fit in with the company’s culture and the make-up of your specific team.

After the panel discussion, we broke out into smaller groups where the attendees could sit with each panelist and ask and every question they had about the job market and the search. A lot of this time was devoted to going over the dos and don’ts of resume writing and networking.

This was a really great event. The attendees were very enthusiastic and each speaker brought something different to the table.  Thanks again to Eliza Shanley and Women@Work for putting together such a polished event! I look forward to working with this group again.

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert at TheLadders. Always on the go at work and away, Amanda trains and competes in races and triathlons in her spare time.

Last week I attended the Marketo User Summit organized by our partners at Marketo, who help us with the simplification of our marketing efforts. This year, their attendance more than tripled, with over 1,400 customers. It’s no wonder they were named the fastest-growing private company of 2011 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. (You can see tweets for the event with the hashtag #MUS12.)

The conference kicked off with live deep-dive sessions of “Marketo University.” These were interactive, hands-on workshops and included pre-work for participants. The content was of a high quality and relevant, especially for advanced users. I wish I could have attend all of the sessions, and I had a hard time prioritizing them.

Some of the notable keynote speakers included Sue Bostrom, formerly CMO of Cisco Systems, Andy MacMillan, SVP, Products for Data.com and Salesforce.com, and Justin Gray, CEO and Chief Marketing Evangelist at LeadMD. Jon Miller, VP Marketing and Co-Founder of Marketo, led several break-out sessions and delivered an excellent presentation on the Lead Qualification process – after all, Marketo is best-in-class when it comes to SDR and sales teams.

My top five key takeaways from the Summit:

1. Don’t do social, be social.
2. The role of Marketing is shifting – make friends with Sales & IT.
3. If you can’t report on it, why are you doing it?
4. Less than 20% of inbound leads are “sales-ready” and typically need to be nurtured for 4 months.
5. When talking to your CEO/CFO, provide details of the ask and how the expense will make a difference.

(My 6th learning was to find out how to clone myself so I could attend all of the sessions!)

The culmination of the conference, of course, was The Revvies award ceremony, where Marketo customers were recognized for their achievements in the innovation, leadership, success metrics and business impact categories. TheLadders was named the winner of the Most Dramatic Business Impact award in B2B, which is a huge achievement. We implemented the software in November 2011, and I’m proud to say it had immediate impact on business and culture across the sales and marketing teams.

Kudos to the teams here at TheLadders who made it happen!

Inga Romanoff is Director, Enterprise Marketing for TheLadders and the Marketo Regional User Group Leader in New York City with over ten years of marketing experience in the U.S., Russia, Europe and Asia PAC. Inga is responsible for strategic initiatives in developing the B2B platform at TheLadders.

Last week I attended Mobile Health 2012, with a focus on “Baby Steps for Big Results.” The idea being there’s power in “baby steps” done quickly, for long term behavior change. Hosted by Stanford U’s Persuasive Technology Lab, this year’s keynote speaker was Weight Watchers CEO and ManMeetScale blogger David Kirchhoff.

David took the opportunity to speak of his personal struggles with weight loss and the dreaded word “maintenance.” He shared one of his own baby steps for keeping the weight off when confronted with temptation…he tweets. For example, @dkirchhoff “On a flight back from St. Louis. Just turned down another warm cookie. It’s the little victories…” There’s something about publicly declaring your weakness and celebrating your win.

So what’s this got to do with TheLadders? And why did we attend a mobile health conference? It’s a good question. What I told attendees is that there’s synergy between the trials and tribulations of health and wellness behavior changes and job search behavior changes. What do I mean by this? In my role as a product leader at TheLadders, I witness countless job-seekers struggling with adopting best practices for a faster, more meaningful and more prosperous job search simply because the tasks at hand appear daunting, or they are overloaded with irrelevant jobs and action-less info.

At the heart of the conference…Baby Steps! (Actually, I find this term a little off putting so I’m going to call it “Starter Steps” to steal from Tim Chang of Mayfield Fund, a conference panelist. Starter Steps translate into BJ Fogg’s new program “3 Tiny Habits” as a way to create new behaviors – in health, or in our case, the job search. Fogg states only three things will change behavior in the long term:

Option A. Have an epiphany
Option B. Change your context (what surrounds you)
Option C. Take baby steps

Unless you’ve ever spotted a unicorn, forget about the epiphany – it’s too difficult. Instead, focus on changing your context and taking starter steps. These two options are practical and can lead to lasting change if you’re following the right program. Fogg warns that few winning programs exist – luckily TheLadders, like Weight Watchers, is one of them, in my opinion.

You should join a future session of Fogg’s Three Tiny Habits to try starter steps for yourself, and while you’re at it, check out Stanford’s Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change.

For more from the audience and participants of Mobile Health 2012, check out the #mh2012 Twitter stream.

Chantal Botana is Director of Consumer Product Development at TheLadders. She’s a pragmatic leader whose mantra is “Insight, creativity & innovation are what make good products great.” She’s #lean and #agile, and a Real Madridista.

Recently, when I was asked to speak at Women’s Career Strategy Conference, I was very excited for the opportunity. After all, I’ve worked at TheLadders for eight years, and I’ve spent the last two primarily on our Signature program, which helps job seekers land a job in six months.

The Women’s Career Strategy Conference, presented by career-intelligence.com, was designed for professional women considering a career change, a new job hunt, or simply looking to advance within their current organizations. Approximately 75 top-notch career thought-leaders and candidates gathered in Stamford, CT yesterday to discuss everything and anything related to career development, from managing your professional image to using social media for career success.

I was given the opportunity to speak on a panel entitled, “Why You Didn’t Get the Job”, where I talked about getting your application past the various gatekeepers (both human and technology-driven) in an organization and some of the major Dos and Don’ts of resumes. I also spoke about the eye-tracking study TheLadders conducted, which revealed that the average recruiter spends 6 seconds screening a resume before deciding if the candidate is a fit or not for the position.

Right before lunch (I had to captivate a hungry crowd!) I gave a presentation about the Signature program and touched upon a few of the topics our Career Advisors cover with their clients: taking inventory of your strengths and passions to develop a concrete set of job goals; assessing each job posting to determine if the application is worth your time; and growing a strong, balanced network to mine for unpublished job leads.

It was a great day! I met a number of very talented, dedicated professional women and got to compare notes with my peers on the latest job hunting tools and strategies. And rest assured, we will incorporate any new tidbits into our program to keep it relevant to our clients!  Thanks again to career-intelligence.com for putting together such a valuable conference.

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert atTheLadders. Always on the go at work and away, Amanda trains and competes in races and triathlons in her spare time.

The weekend before last, I had the pleasure of participating in the inaugural EMC Data Science Global Hackathon. The event, orchestrated by kaggle as part of Big Data Week, involved teams around the world competing to build better, more accurate predictive models of metropolitan air pollution. Air pollution threatens millions of people around the globe suffering from asthma and other respiratory diseases each day, and predictive models like these can provide an early warning system to alert the public regarding dangerous levels of pollutants on an hourly basis.

There was a global competition, in which teams from London, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, and Turku, Finland (as well as independent entrants from around the web), battled for 24 hours straight to top the leaderboard by building the most accurate prediction models. The NYC event also included a Data Visualization competition: who could transform the competition data into the most effective and impactful visual form.

My team focused on this Data Visualization competition. Lo and behold: we won! Team CornerOffice (comprised of Frederic de Sibert, Gregory Gorin, and myself) “out-visualized” the other teams competing in the 28^th floor offices at Bloomberg to take the top prize. Our submission leveraged a data analysis and visualization tool called Tableau to create customized, interactive dashboards providing insight (and some animation) around the time, location, season, weather, wind, and other factors affecting pollution levels in the Chicago metro area.

Frederic de Sibert and Gregory Gorin, Noah's partners in the hackathon

Several other competitors boasted impressive visualizations as well – including a simulated public website for accessing pollution prediction information, and another interactive dashboard showing how changing the ranges of any attribute in the data set affected the distribution of all other factors. Thus we were in good company as the esteemed panel of judges – Cathy O’Neil (Intent Media, Mathbabe.org), Chris Wiggins (Columbia University, HackNY), and Jake Porway (NYTimes, DataKind) – chose our entry for the win.

Visualization of poisonous winds in the Chicago area

Having unfortunately elected to take a cruise to the Bahamas last December (ok I’ll admit, probably not the most accurate use of the word “unfortunately”), I missed last year’s annual TheLadders Hackathon, and thus last Saturday marked my first time participating in this kind of event. I was glad to get the W, but even more so to learn a great deal, meet a bunch of great people (especially my teammates Greg and Freddie), and finally see what all this “hackathon fuss” was about. Many thanks must go as well to Matt Turck and Shivon Zilis of Bloomberg for providing the impressive venue and supporting the NYC arm of this global competition. Though this was my first hackathon, it certainly won’t be my last!

Noah Goldenberg is “The Data Guy” (aka Research Analyst) at TheLadders. He’s a New Jersey native, but also spent time as a Virginian and occasionally still says “y’all”. When he’s not wrangling data or winning hackathons, he likes to take it easy and run marathons.

I am excited to be part of the “Innovators and Innovation” Panel at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium coming up May 8^th. The event is a fascinating blend of top industry leaders and well known academics chaired by Seth Grimes of AltaPlana. The purpose of the panel is to lead discussions into where the field is going in terms of new innovations and uses. Many people are not even aware of what the uses of Sentiment Analysis are today, much less in the future. Even for many companies that are familiar with it, the technology is used to help them answer the question “is my brand healthy?” but they don’t explore ways that it can be useful outside of brand-building.

The term “sentiment analysis” itself is somewhat unfortunate as it brings to mind “feelings” and “opinions” implying that it only can be used where an opinion holder exists as the author of some sort of textual material. This is just one particular area covered by the technology. In fact, the opinion holder can be the reader of a particular text interpreting the set of facts described therein as “good” or “bad”. For example, sentiment analysis can be used on a corpus of news data to separate “good news” from “bad news”. This is a very worthwhile thing to do and very useful for business. The same technology could be also used to detect negative earnings reports in annually filed corporate documents and a host of other financial indicators. Furthermore, sentiment analysis does not need to be used only on documents but can be used on word groups as short as sentences or Tweets. So really “Sentiment Analysis” is an umbrella term that describes a set of classification techniques operating on a wide variety of texts.

I am eager to see where some of my fellow panelists and speakers go with their ideas. In particular, I am interested to hear the talk by Richard Brown of Thomson Reuters on Forecasting Financial Market Response and to hear Ryan Sager of the Wall Street Journal talk about how the media is using Sentiment Analysis. As for myself, I will be considering issues pertinent to our customers – how is sentiment analysis relevant to a job or candidate search? It is actually very relevant for both. As a jobseeker, you already know you should be researching the companies you want to work for. But most jobseekers interpret that as researching only the company’s products and services – instead of finding out what it would be like to work there. There are plenty of ways to find out how people feel about working at a company. Sites like Glassdoor have employee reviews and can help the jobseeker learn about the corporate culture. Another fun thing to do is check the Twitter stream for the company name. There is actually a nifty tool out now just for checking sentiment on Twitter called Sentiment140.com. I just tried it out using the search term “TheLadders”. Pretty cool!

So if jobseekers were to be sentiment-analysis-savvy, they would learn a great deal about the culture of the companies they are applying to. The same goes for recruiters. As a recruiter you need to be on top of your company’s reputation and know what employees are saying about it. It is much easier to close candidates if you can convince them that they will like the work environment and be able to back that up with evidence.

It looks like I will be the only participant from my industry at the symposium. I actually look forward to that since I will probably learn about new ways to use sentiment analysis and learn new data processing techniques that I can ultimately use right here at TheLadders!

Panel: Innovation & Innovators from Seth Grimes on Vimeo.

Leslie Barrett is the Senior Search Architect at TheLadders. Leslie has worked making enterprise search software for companies large and small for many years. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University in Computational Linguistics, is a frequent speaker on issues in Search and Sentiment Analysis and is the author of over 20 academic papers on language technology. 

As any of our career experts will tell you, having a great personal brand and a clear and concise elevator pitch to deliver your professional value is key. Get your pitch right and it could be just what you need to unlock networking opportunities that could lead to your dream job.

We’ve teamed up for a co-promotion with AMC’s new series the The Pitch to announce our first Twitter contest! Share your super-brief elevator pitch on Twitter using the hashtag #mypitch and you could win a 3-month Premium membership on TheLadders.

How to Enter

1. Follow @TheLadders on Twitter
2. Learn more about crafting your elevator pitch from our selected articles.
3. Tweet your personal elevator pitch with the hashtag #mypitch
4. If your #mypitch tweet is a winner, we’ll DM you with info on how to redeem your free membership.

Now onto the technicalities: The contest, beginning on Sunday, May 6 at 12:00:01am ET and ending Wednesday May 16 at 12:00:00am ET, is open to legal residents of the United States. Winners will be notified on or around Thursday, May 24. Contestants must be at least 18 years old and have a registered Twitter account. For full details, see contest terms and conditions.

That’s enough from me—now I want to hear from you! See you on Twitter.

Kate Addicott is lead copywriter & voice behind @TheLadders. When not tweeting, Kate creates content to engage members and attract new ones. (At exactly 140 characters, the preceding bio is Twitter-ready.)

Mother’s day is here, and I wanted to talk to you guys about something I call Mom guilt. I’m not talking about the guilt trips our Moms all treated us to when we didn’t clean our room as a kid, or now when we don’t call as often as they would like. I’m talking about the massive guilt every working Mom feels every day. Guilt that we are not spending enough time with our kids, coupled with guilt that our work may be suffering from not having our undivided attention 24 hours a day.

The author, Holly, and her daughter, Juliet.

TheLadders recently released a survey to more than 250 women who are, or soon will be, working mothers. The results had me nodding furiously while answering a work email, changing my daughter’s diaper and submitting my sales forecast all at the same time (yes, moms multi-task). Balancing a career and a family is a huge struggle for 87% of respondents, with 55% admitting that “excelling at both is overwhelming.”

In addition, when it comes to balance, 13% “struggled at first, but now it’s under control,” 16% “always put family first and work has suffered for it,” and 3% “always put work first and family has suffered for it.” I can only assume that the other 13% that said they “Successfully manage both aspects” actually slipped on baby drool and tripped into the computer, selecting the wrong line by mistake.

Either way, the survey results are enlightening, and while I still feel that pang of guilt when missing little milestones in my daughter’s life or needing to run out of work early once in a while, at the very least this survey assures me that I am not alone.

You can read the full survey results here. And don’t forget to call your Mom!

Click here for a PDF version of the info-graphic › 

Holly Esposito is a Senior Account Manager at TheLadders, and Juliet’s mom. If you see her running down Canal Street in New York, please make way… she needs to get home to relieve the baby sitter by 7pm.