TheLadders Blog

Last time we met, I introduced the concept of “Lean UX”, and discussed how we’re putting it to work in the development of our mobile application. We got our arms around the core hypotheses, and did some quick tests with users. Next, we wanted to see how our concepts would shake out with recruiters – because after all, we can’t make job seekers happy if they aren’t hearing from the people who have the jobs.

The Meaning of “Team” (and why it’s essential to Lean UX)

Before going further, please allow me a brief interlude on what it means to be a “team” at TheLadders. We work in a loose agile/scrum approach (more buzzwords!) – which essentially means that cross-functional teams take on a problem statement and solve them independently. While the size of the teams vary, they often follow this configuration: development team (3-5 engineers including Q/A), a scrum master (or tech lead), a product owner, a UX designer, and a Visual Designer. (Additionally, copywriters work across teams.) The scrum master, product owner and UX designer form a sort of trifecta of team leadership, but in general, the entire team collaborates around creating solutions.

Because we’ve been light on resources, our team is unusually small – and stellar. We have Kat, our fearless tech lead – working on iOS development. She’s aided by Thomas – another jack-of-many trades, and Matt – our lightning-fast service architect. These three have been absolutely rocking it at a quick clip, and every challenge has been greeted with a “we’ll figure out how to make that awesome” attitude. They also share a passion for user experience, and can often be found observing user testing. Frank is working Q/A – making sure every corner of our app meets expectations; Suz has been coordinating all our uTest cycles, and Laura finagled our algorithms into place just before leaving us to have a baby. Ben is our product owner, whose product instinct and flare for team presentations always make us look good. Finally, I’ve been covering user research & testing, interaction design and visual design.

When issues arise, we huddle, discuss, and agree on what we will do about it, following a ‘just-in-time‘ approach, so we don’t get distracted with unimportant or impertinent issues.  We “stand-up” every morning at 10 a.m., present our progress to executives and re-prioritize our work weekly, and use trello to track our daily development.

As a team, we have established a high level of mutual trust – which is essential, in my opinion, for Lean UX to work. This trust is built in the early days by establishing a shared commitment to the problem, and a shared approach to determining solutions. The early exercises are as much about creating this trust as they are about making sure you’re extracting the best ideas from aspect of the team.

WEEK TWO 

Hypothesis Check – Recruiters

So it was in these early days that we took the first week of learnings from job seekers and turned them into ideas for recruiters. We gathered for another design studio. We established our problem, constraints, and who we were solving for.

Problem: As a Recruiter, I’m interested in candidates who may be right for my job but aren’t applying because they aren’t sure that they’d be a fit.

Who: Barry, an agency recruiter working in Atlanta. She recruits for Technology and Ops – and has 30 open job req(uisition)s. However, she’s always looking for good candidates to add to her pool. Once she’s reached out to a candidate, no one else from her agency can talk to them for 6 months. She works through her lists of leads in single workflows, mid-morning and afternoon.

And our biggest constraint was that it had to be worked into the current interface on the recruiter website: since our focus was the iOS app, we didn’t have the bandwidth to rework major portions of this site.

We drew, created lots of ideas, distilled them into quick sketches, and shared them with recruiters. That second part proved hard.

Some of our ideas, culminated into quick sketches to share with recruiters.

Learnings

Ben and I set up a handful of GoToMeeting sessions with recruiters who used TheLadders. Sharing our screen, we showed them a few concepts and asked them some questions.

We wanted to learn:

1. Was our hypothesis true­ – did this problem exist?
2. What’s the best way to present these job seekers? Are they applicants without resumes? Or simply “people ‘interested’ in your job”?
3. Do recruiters care about the immediacy of the feature (i.e., these job seekers are fresh, they are on their phones looking at your job – NOW)
4. What would motivate them to respond one way or another?

This time, our findings sobered us right up:

1. Nope, recruiters don’t really seem to have this problem!
2. In fact, they have too many applicants, and their time is wasted if they don’t have all their details together at once (like a resume).
3. Only a certain type of recruiter was willing to overlook an ‘incomplete’ in lieu of having immediate access to a fresh job seeker.
4. Worst of all, very few applicants are an obvious and uncontested match right off the bat. The rest of them may or may not be a fit for various reasons – but rarely were they definitely NOT a fit. Even if they were, they were very hesitant to click a button saying so. So getting a response to the job seeker was looking grim.

Humpf! We walked away deflated – but it was a reality slap we needed. We were entering dangerous territory if we presented these job seekers as applicants, and recruiters were judgmental about job seekers not having all their information together. But we also knew (from previous initiatives) recruiters were very anxious to recruit from lists of people who were simply viewing their jobs. This nut was truly hard to crack.

We realized we wouldn’t solve this in user testing – we needed to build-measure-learn our way into it. We decided we wouldn’t touch their interface, and instead test our way into this territory through email, down the road.

Most importantly, this cycle preempted a long and possibly costly road of imagining, designing, building, and assessing a solution for a problem that didn’t exist. It also helped us realize how tricky topic was – and how agile we needed to be to find the right path.  Finally, even though we still had some big questions to answer about the core value prop of the app, we gained valuable knowledge about helping job seekers put their best foot forward, and freed up our energy to focus on this part of the experience.

In our next installment, I’ll show you how we used all this early goodness to begin sketching out a complete vision for our first generation app, how we brainstormed which features we’d need, drew a line around what we thought the first version would include, and sketched, designed and tested into a high-fidelity mock-up of the full app.

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. Follow her at @zhaus.

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).

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.

The era of the PC is over. Apple has been saying this for a while and they are right. Sales of tablet computers and smartphones combined have overtaken PC sales. The once #1 PC manufacturer in the country, Dell, just announced that they are going private in order to take radical measures necessary to survive the post-PC era without the harsh glare of shareholders. Even Intel has started killing off its own PC business.

Of course, the change in devices owned and used by consumers has a profound impact on millions of other businesses. Big news outlets report that traffic from mobile devices now reaches and exceeds 50% of their overall traffic at certain hours of the day. Facebook is now a mobile company. Latest reports show that 25% of Americans now use their smartphone, not computers, for the majority of their web surfing.

So how has the move to mobile changed your ability to find the right job? In short: Not much…yet.

Yes, there are apps that support searching for jobs, and maybe some of them even let you apply. But in reality, they are just transferring an online (PC) experience to a smaller screen without adapting it to the mobile world. And that is a problem. What works on a big screen doesn’t necessarily work on a small screen. The when, where and how you use a smartphone should define the experience of the job search the same way it defines the experience of, say, consuming media. The fact is that no company has done the mobile job search right…yet.

We know that. We are talking about it. For starters, our new website is optimized for being viewed on any device. No more frustrations when you pick up your iPad and look at your job matches. Checking out the competition with Scout on your mobile phone? A breeze! Yet, as I said before, if you truly want to create a mobile experience, you have to re-think how job seekers will use their mobile devices to find the perfect job. Different platforms fulfill different needs. For example:

• Do you have access to your resume on your mobile phone? Probably not.
• Do you want to compose your cover letter on your iPhone 5? Not really.
• Do you have time to construct search queries on the go to get perfect job matches? I doubt it.

This is why we started 2013 with a new goal: build an iOS app from scratch.

Our goal is to create an app that is tailored to your mobile device that you can use on the go. This means that we have to find new solutions to problems already solved on the web.

So while you are reading this, we have a team at TheLadders working hard to come up with new solutions for your mobile needs. We are talking to job seekers, observing how they use their mobile devices and testing paper prototypes with them. It’s a new and exciting learning experience for all of us. Every day, we are surprised by the new things we discover, and we question things that we once took for granted. In the end there is one goal: to get the mobile job search right! Stay tuned for more to come.

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).

Being a huge fan of the rock band Foo Fighters, I recently purchased their entire discography on vinyl. Vinyl? Why vinyl? I know, I know, why vinyl?! You see, I am passionate about quality, and I am one of those folks that believe true quality music is heard best off a vinyl record. For me, quality is above all else.

That’s why I am really excited about what I’m doing here at TheLadders. I work with our Job Analysts to continue to post only quality jobs on our site. We go over thousands of jobs daily to make sure they meet our professional standards, are aesthetically pleasing, are shown to the right audience, and are categorized correctly. I have even worked with our Employer Relations team, who is responsible for vetting all employers that join TheLadders, ensuring that only legitimate sources are able to post positions and search for candidates. We pride ourselves in finding the right person for the right job, which is why we maintain high quality assurance of all job listings on our site.

We know how difficult and stressful the job search can be. Everyone here in our Stevie-award-winning Job Search Support Center is here to help. We do this through quality work, whether it’s through live chat, phone conversations or timely email exchanges.

Now, excuse me while I take a listen to some sweet jams by the Foo Fighters. Should I start with Burning Bridges, Stacked Actors, Summer’s End, All My Life, or my new favorite, Arlandria? Decisions, decisions…

Brenden Sparnroft is a member of the Job Search Support Center at TheLadders. For more than two years, he has been working with our job seekers to help them progress to the next step in their careers. Come summer, you can usually find Brenden barbecuing with his friends and family. 

Providing the means for a thorough understanding of TheLadders for employers has always been the main focus for Enterprise Account Management at TheLadders. We believe that proper education for our employer population will not only increase overall client engagement, but will contribute to maximizing proper and effective site-use as well.

More than a year ago, we started conducting “Spotlight Demos” on TheLadders in real time. In these sessions, rather than reviewing the entire site at once, we chose to pinpoint certain features for each month’s focus. This provided an opportunity to re-review permanent site functions and to introduce new features as they were added to the site. Choosing to do this on a more singular level has resulted in increased overall site use.

After measuring the success of the Spotlight Trainings, we quickly made these sessions more available to our recruiter base by increasing the number of demos held each month, and inviting more recruiters to participate. Since the start of the program, we have seen an increase of five times the amount of registrants per session, and that number only continues to grow. Additionally, by the end of each month’s training, the overall use of the highlighted topic spikes upwards of 15 percent, which is great news for our clients and the Account Management team!

Keep your eyes open for the Spotlight Training registration emails, and reserve your “spot” today!

Roxanne Prendergast is a Team Lead for the Account Managers in the Recruiter Relations department where she ensures that each client is properly educated on how to effectively maximize their time on-site.  Outside of work, she enjoys coaching both men and women’s volleyball at Yeshiva University.

As director of consumer marketing at TheLadders, I receive daily exposure to the world of job seekers. Industry data suggests that, while not everyone is actively looking for jobs, the majority of us would be open to new and interesting opportunities. Basically, between wintry economic times and passive job seekers, it has never been harder to conduct a competent job search.

A typical job seeker may wonder, “Who is my competition, and how do I stack up against them?” or simply, “Should I even bother applying for this job?” While that decision is ultimately up to the job seeker, it is fundamental enough to our customers’ satisfaction that we attempt to help them do so. In a post-web 2.0 world, it is not enough to provide the ability to apply to great jobs; a superior experience will bring its community together (with all the data it creates) to add value for everyone.

This is why we’re kicking off 2013 with our newest product, “Scout.” For the first time, we are giving job seekers a behind-the-scenes look at the other candidates who have applied for the same position. Based on your profile, you can see how you compare to other applicants in five categories: years of experience, education level, areas of expertise, current title, and current salary. All this information is anonymously aggregated and displayed in Scout, providing instant insight into the competition.

Take a look:

This is a powerful for three main reasons: competition, differentiation, and communication. For the job above, you can see that competition is on the high side, with 50 applicants, but how do you fair against the bulk of them? Take a look at their backgrounds, current jobs, and areas of expertise to determine how you differ from the competition, which will help you identify unique skills to showcase. Additionally, Scout alerts you when others apply, and when recruiters provide feedback.

Does Scout stop working when you are not at your desk? Of course not! We’ve designed Scout to give our Premium users on-the-go information in a slick mobile-responsive interface, as well. Savvy online marketers know that across the web, people are accessing the Internet from mobile devices outside of typical work hours more frequently and making Scout even timelier.

The job search has become much more cluttered over the past few years. As a job seeker, you should be utilizing tools that save you time and stress, and give you a more targeted approach to your search. Scout is one of these tools.

All Premium members of TheLadders will have access to Scout by summer 2013.

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.

What a way to kick off 2013: launching a new product, demoing it to thousands of NYC job seekers at Job Central, and receiving invaluable on-the-spot feedback!

Last year, as the online world started to rapidly shift away from PCs and desktops and towards the mobile world of smartphones and tablets, our product and tech teams sat down to examine how well we were serving job seekers in this new era. The answer? Not very well. So, we rolled up our sleeves and revamped the product from the ground up, focusing on three goals:

1. TheLadders should be accessible and usable anytime, anywhere.

2. The platform needs to be efficient and save job seekers’ valuable time.

3. Leveraging the knowledge and data we have about the job search, the product needs to shed light on what happens with job applications. It must reduce the “black hole,” what we’ve come to call the recruiter and company unresponsiveness many job seekers have encountered.

Scores of prototypes, dozens of usability tests, and several releases later, here’s what we are now able to offer:

(1)   Job matches tailored to the desired next step in your career. So much time is wasted running searches over and over, trying to determine how the search interface and algorithms work so you can get it to display the jobs that actually interest you. We wanted to cut out the unnecessary work, and deliver you relevant jobs on a daily basis.

Job Goals, shown in the left column, drive the job matches you will receive. As you use TheLadders, we continuously learn about your preferences, and optimize the matching algorithms to be more relevant to your specific needs.

(2)   TheLadders Scout gives you an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look into the job market and reveals what happens with job applications. Scout shows you who else is interested in the same job, as well as who already has applied. For each applicant, you can see an anonymous profile, showing you their previous experience and areas of expertise. To better understand how you compare to the other applicants, we also aggregated the information about their current salary, years of experience, and education level, and indicated where you rank within the group. As I spoke with job seekers at Grand Central about this game-changing feature, it was clear this type of information can have many uses:

• See your competition for a position. There may be “50 applicants,” but are they equally as qualified as you? You can use this information to gauge whether you want to apply to the position.
• If you choose to apply, you can use Scout to tailor your application and cover letter to highlight the ways in which you stand out from the competition and confirm why you’re the best fit for the job.
• After you apply, Scout will continue to provide updates with information about other applicants, and will include any feedback they’ve received from recruiters. So again, there may be 50 applicants, but if half of them were told by recruiters that they’re not the best fit, then they’re not competition you have to worry about. And, if you haven’t gotten any feedback yourself, Scout can illuminate why – are there already too many applicants for this opening? Are you perhaps under- or over-qualified compared to other applicants?

The anonymous profile on the left provides a sense of other applicants. On the right, you can see the aggregate information, with the orange carrot indicating where you rank.

(3)   Last but not least, TheLadders is now accessible anytime, anywhere. In the screenshots below, you can see how Scout can be as easily accessed and consumed on your smartphone or tablet as on your desktop.

iPhone 4S

iPad 2

Selena Hadzibabic heads up the Product team at TheLadders. Having worked on both the job seeker and recruiter side of the product, she is no longer cheer-leading either side: she just wants to put the right people in touch with each other.

What a day!

I’m glad I had the opportunity to speak at Job Central, Presented by TheLadders. The event, which was held in Grand Central Terminal’s beautiful Vanderbilt Hall, brought together thousands of professionals to network and gain valuable advice from dozens of career experts in the Tri-State Area.

As many of you know, I normally provide job-search advice through my weekly column on The Career Chronicles, and on Twitter and Facebook. So, it’s always a great privilege when I get the chance meet professionals face-to-face and answer their questions.

While I presented on one side of Vanderbilt Hall, the other side was occupied by a phenomenal speaker series. Among the industry experts was our CEO & Co-founder Alex Douzet, who announced exciting updates to TheLadders’ suite of products. Not only is TheLadders now device-agnostic, meaning it can be viewed from a computer or any mobile device, job seekers on TheLadders will soon be able to size up their competition using “TheLadders Scout.” Available only to Premium members, TheLadders Scout will provide job seekers with competitive information about anonymous fellow candidates in five categories:

1. Years of experience
2. Education level
3. Areas of expertise
4. Current title
5. Current salary

With all the advances in technology, the recruiting process has become more mobile, competitive and cluttered. It’s TheLadders’ goal to give job seekers the tools they need to target their search and find their perfect match.

Thank you to everyone who made it to Job Central yesterday. For those of you who couldn’t make it, please visit www.theladders.com/jobcentral to see what you missed.

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.

Recruiters frequently have days when they don’t have a spare minute to find new candidates for open positions, which is usually because they are busy meeting with employers to talk about MORE open positions that need to be filled. This is where a Talent Specialist comes in handy!  Recruiters with TheLadders have access to FitFinder, which is a service executed by a team of Talent Specialists that sources candidates for you.  In the last two years, the FitFinder team has worked with hundreds of recruiters, on thousands of job openings, to identify the most qualified candidates for their open positions.

While our service was saving recruiters time sourcing candidates, it wasn’t uncommon for the selected job seekers to decline interest or become unresponsive once contacted by the recruiter. So, we took it a step further and are now “pre-screening” qualified job seekers to confirm their interest in job openings before submitting their information to recruiters.

Now, within 72 hours, we are able to provide recruiters with job seekers who are not only a fit for their openings, but have confirmed interest in their jobs! This gives recruiters more time to build relationships and schedule interviews with the right job seekers.

Having piloted this service for more than six months, we are extremely satisfied with the positive feedback we have received from our recruiters and members alike. So, if you are a recruiter and haven’t experienced FitFinder, what are you waiting for!?

Carrie Markworth is the Jr. Manager of the FitFinder team at TheLadders. She has spent the last two years mastering Boolean search and helping recruiters find the perfect match for their open positions. When she’s not working, she is out exploring Manhattan and trying to find the best burger in the city!