TheLadders Blog

TheLadders is proud to announce a new partnership with Work4Labs, a top solutions provider that enables job postings to be promoted via TheLadders on Facebook. Starting this week, our page has a new tab — “Apply To Jobs for Free” — where job seekers can select and apply to more than 15,000 open jobs as a Basic member of TheLadders, for free. These job postings are the freshest open positions across the country from our Enterprise clients, and include all experience levels.

Our partnership with Work4Labs allows job seekers to easily search for open positions that fit their profile by keyword, function and location. The Work4Labs application on Facebook allows job seekers to join TheLadders in a quick and easy way while remaining on the social platform, as well as filter the job postings to view those that match their profile and set email alerts for new jobs that fit their expertise.

We are excited to offer job seekers another channel for accessing our wealth of freshly posted professional job openings while on Facebook!

Matt Anderson is the consumer marketing associate at TheLadders handling digital marketing to job seekers online. When not promoting TheLadders, Matt enjoys venturing with friends around New York City for unique, delicious bites to eat and, in the warm weather, relaxing on the beaches outside of the city.

Last week, TheLadders hosted The Ladders Connect, the first in a series of events featuring a dynamic panel of industry thought leaders. Hosted at Helen Mills, one of New York City’s most unique venues, nearly 150 guests gathered for a thought-provoking panel discussion about the challenges faced when hiring a multi-generational workforce.

Moderated by TheLadders Job Search Expert Amanda Augustine, the panel included:

• Tom McElroy, Global Head of Recruiting Operations & Systems, Bloomberg
• Anne Molignano, SVP of Human Resources, Sony Music Entertainment
• Sara Patterson, Head of Talent Management, Condé Nast
• Mitchell Schwartz, Director of Staffing, Hewlett-Packard

The special evening kicked off with an introduction and product announcements from Alex Douzet, COO & Co-Founder of TheLadders. He proudly alerted the audience that we are now a free resource for recruiters and employers, which was met, not surprisingly, with huge applause. In fact, we currently offer:

-          Unlimited Search

-          Unlimited Post

-          Unlimited Targeted Hiring Alerts

After the presentation and panel discussion, guests mingled with their industry colleagues over cocktails and conversation. Reflecting the event’s theme of meaningful connections, everyone received an all-device, solar-powered charger to stay connected with TheLadders’ more than 5 million, on-the-go members.

Save the date for our next event, taking place on January 10, 2013, at Grand Central Terminal. Details to follow!

Lisa Hagendorf is the Vice President of Public Relations for TheLadders where she is a huge ambassador of the brand in the office. At the gym. And on the street. She just can’t stop talking about TheLadders. Ever.

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.

You hear a lot these days about how a powerful resume can make all the difference in the job search. The web is full of tips on writing, rewriting, polishing, and re-polishing your resume. There’s certainly value in learning what goes where, how keywords work, what to say and, especially, what not to say. While there’s something to be said for the DIY approach, it’s also worth considering how a professional approaches a complex and challenging resume. We often talk about how a resume should tell your story, but this is the story of the resume itself.

Meet Aaron.

Aaron came to us as a VP of product development with an Ivy League degree and some seriously varied experience. In addition to his VP role, he’s successfully launched his own magazine and held a director-level position at a digital agency. As if this budding career wasn’t varied enough, he told us that his next challenge would be landing an executive-level marketing position. Aaron had never held a marketing title, but he was convinced of his ability to land the job.  Upon review of his resume, it became clear that the skills were there, but the resume itself was a muddled hodge-podge of tasks and achievements without any trajectory or context.

Certified Professional Resume Writer Michael Cirigliano with TheLadders said that the biggest challenge was prioritizing the focus of Aaron’s resume. He had great experience in many different areas, but not all of it was applicable to the positions he was interested in.

During the initial call with Aaron, Michael spent about 30 minutes digging through the existing resume and placing all of his accomplishments in their proper functional context. The next step was to turn the Aaron’s accomplishments into a narrative. Deconstructing all of his experience in e-commerce, marketing, and business development provided a more complete picture of him as a professional.

Within 48 hours, Aaron had a new resume that told the story of his career path, highlighting key attributes that would make him an attractive candidate for an executive-level marketing position.

About six weeks had passed before Michael received the following email from Aaron.

Hi Michael,

Not sure if your remember me, but you helped craft my resume a few weeks back.  I wanted to let you know that the first company that received the revised resume has hired me as their Chief Marketing Officer — an ideal position that I’m very excited to begin.  I’m certain that the extraordinary version of the resume significantly helped this process, and I wanted to personally thank you for your help.

If there’s anything I can do recommend your work, please let me know and I’ll be happy to assist.

While the typical executive-level job search takes several months, lightning sometimes strikes. We wish Aaron the best of luck in his new position, and are so happy to have been a part of his success story.

Do you have a resume success story? We’d love to hear from you! Email us at resumesuccess@theladders.com. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more resume wins in the weeks to come.

Ryan Galloway is the Content Development Manager for the TheLadders’ Career Services Team. He helps writers develop innovative strategies that make members’ job search documents more effective. When he’s not working, he’s out buying way too many books. But he doesn’t have a problem. Really.

At TheLadders, we pride ourselves in providing our members and affiliates with valuable tools that make the job search as seamless, and painless, as possible. As such, I’m very happy to announce that we’ve added two more resources to our already established arsenal: The Career Chronicles and the Recruit Blog.

The Career Chronicles is TheLadders’ premier job search and career advice blog, written by our talented staff of resume writers and career coaches. Additionally, beginning today, our resident Job Search Expert Amanda Augustine will answer your toughest job-search questions in her weekly advice column Ask Amanda. If you have a question for Amanda, submit it here for a chance to be featured in an upcoming column.

For our recruiters and employers, we have our new Recruit Blog, which is chock-full of information from our enterprise team about candidate sourcing, resume selection and interviewing. What’s more, we will publish a variety proprietary research conducted by TheLadders to arm you with valuable insight into the mindsets of today’s job candidates.

In our mission to supply you with the best resources available, we hope that you find these new tools useful. As always, we welcome your feedback.

Patty Youngclaus is the associate manager of public relations at TheLadders. Outside of work, Patty enjoys going to the beach, playing softball and being around family and friends. Once football season begins, her weekends (and sometimes Mondays and Saturdays) are reserved for the New York Giants.

After witnessing hundreds of recruiters enter the outskirts of Hire Mountain, our two-level behemoth of a natural wonder found on the expo floor at the SHRM 2012 Annual Conference, I noticed something. The recruiters who approached us were genuinely interested in our product, not just the giveaways and raffle entries. Great questions began to surface as visitors took an active interest in improving their online recruiting efforts. I might be a bit of a pessimist, but based on my experiences at other conferences, the feeling is that most people are there for the show and prizes and not for the information provided to enhance their discipline. Remarkably, this has not been the case this year at #SHRM12.

Most of the HR professionals who approached our Passport sign-up booth asked engaging questions about our services. They challenged us on aspects of their hiring needs and ultimately displayed a true interest in refining their recruiting efforts. While the $5,000 vacation raffle was a nice perk of visiting our booth, once they began to sign up, their attention turned towards how they would actually be able to leverage our product in their favor. It was great to see that our service really is a winner in the eyes of recruiters, and their feedback proved to be a greater talking point than any prize. The recruiters today at #SHRM12 turned me into an optimist: good products and information outweighed spectacle and luxury prizes.

Kean Gardner is an Account Manager of Recruiter Relations for TheLadders who loves to ensure that every recruiter knows how to find, and connect with, the best candidates for their jobs. He also loves to rip holes in the dance floor and educate on healthy living.  

We live in a mobile world where business never stops. Most of us read emails, send texts, and engage with coworkers, friends and family on our mobile devices. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s makes us more productive wherever we are.

So why are recruiters still reduced to staring at their monitors as they try to find the perfect candidate?

We asked our product and development teams that same question. During a “hackathon,” a few of them answered it: Recruiters can go mobile, too. With a lot of hard work, a mobile app was born.

Today, TheLadders is proud to launch our first mobile app for recruiters: “Recruitable™.”

TheLadders Recruitable mobile app will instantly connect recruiters to fresh “recruitable” candidates that match their job posts, so recruiters can contact great candidates instantly, wherever they are.

This is great for TheLadders recruiters and job seekers alike. It means more frequent—and faster—connections.

(For now, Recruitable is only for recruiters on TheLadders who have a full RecruiterLicense, and only available for the iPhone. Download Recruitable from the app store now.)

So what does Recruitable bring to the table for recruiters?

Instant notification of great candidates.
We spend a great deal of time away from our desk: waiting for the next train, buying special order lattes, or jumping between meetings. Recruitable aims to make these moments more useful.

Recruitable compares every new candidate who joins TheLadders to a recruiter’s existing job posts, and immediately sends the recruiter a push notification when there’s a match. Recruiters don’t need to keep checking email or even run a search. Recruitable simply hands them great candidates.

Key candidate info.
Recruitable provides the candidate’s name, location, title, company, and dates of current and previous roles. According to our recent eye-tracking study, that’s what recruiters need to make a decision on whether or not to connect with a candidate.

Recruiters quickly see new matches for their open positions, and job seekers are given a jump start on a job. Win, win.

Instant communication.
First impressions are important, but being first is more important. Recruitable gives recruiters the chance to send a personalized message to matching candidates at the moment they join TheLadders. That means both the job seeker and recruiter have a competitive edge.

We’re excited about Recruitable. We can’t wait to help both recruiters and job seekers find the right match, at any time.

Download Recruitable from the app store now or read the press release.

Dan Logan is a Product Marketing Manager at TheLadders. As a frequent host of company meetings, he’s used to answering questions and keeping up with industry trends. He also lives in Brooklyn… and loves it.

Last Thursday evening TheLadders hosted the latest New York Semantic Web Meetup, a gathering of local technology professionals specializing in various areas of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Information Extraction. The members are especially focused on issues having to do with markup that enables better extraction and retrieval through entity identification and linking of various types. The so-called “semantic web” community is basically a consortium devoted to data standards suited to various use-cases in industry – for example, we have a special markup for Resume data known as Human Resources eXtensible Markup Language (HRXML). This is arguably a “semantic web” markup despite the fact that it does not represent “linked data” by itself but could certainly enable applications that did. The “semantic” part is really about the inferences that can be drawn through utilizing the linked data.

A big issue in getting search and information retrieval to the “next level” is data normalization. This was a theme throughout the evening of talks and one that is central to improving everything from job matches to expanding triple-stores.

Marco Neumann is the organizer of the group and does an excellent job of gathering attendees and attracting top-notch talent from around the area as speakers. It was a pleasure to host this Meetup and the reviews were some of the best that recent meetups have had. Go Ladders!!!

Click here for the presentation ›

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. 

A few weeks ago one of our talented Interactive Designers, Michelle Zassenhaus, suggested we pitch TheLadders executive team on a persona research project. We discussed the need and merit of this project for a while without reaching a clear consensus. Where I was getting stuck was the need for this exercise given how much face time we actually have with our customers. We run usability testing every week. We call customers on an ad hoc basis but it amounts to nearly weekly conversations. The company has an annual focus group initiative and our customer service teams are always vocal with prevalent customer issues. In short, we know our users. So why would we need to create personas?

I posed the question to several folks including Tristan Kromer. Tristan suggested that instead of trying to sell the organization on an expensive project where they weren’t sure what they would be getting for their money and we, the UX team, couldn’t cohesively articulate why we were even doing it, we should introduce the executive team to the concept of personas as a corporate alignment tool. The idea seemed not only viable but also valuable. At the end of that lunch-time chat, I promised Tristan I’d write a blog post recapping the activity and its results. And so, here we are.

I decided to pitch the organization on a proto-persona (aka ad-hoc persona) exercise where the executive team would articulate who they believed we were building products for and how our current and future offerings would meet their needs in the near-term future. My belief was that in each of their points of view, the executive team had a different target audience in mind. In addition, I believed that many of them were approaching corporate strategy from the inside out – in other words, from their particular discipline (e.g., marketing, products/features, services, customer support, etc) and not from a customer-centric point of view. The goal of the exercise was to get everybody’s points of view out on the table and then consolidated into a single, shared consensus about who we believe our customers are and what needs of theirs we should be solving in 2012 and beyond.

My timing could not have been any better. The team was going through the nascent stages of 2012 planning and, if I could have the exercise pulled together quickly, we could build it into their process. I built a quick proposal where I articulated a problem statement, the objectives and goals of the exercise and the specific methodology we would employ to achieve those goals. Michelle and I reviewed it a bit and off it went for executive approval. Luckily for us it was quickly approved and I was cleared to book the executive team for two, 3-hour meetings over the next two weeks.

(It’s worth mentioning that our target audience had broadly expanded in the month prior to these exercises. In October 2011, TheLadders expanded its market reach from the $100k+ salary range to include professionals of all levels. This opened our products and service to a whole new set of potential customers. )

Day 1 – persona creation

Pens, paper, ipads and pizza. What else would you need?

The first day consisted of pulling the team together from noon to 3pm (pizzas were brought in) and presenting them a short introduction. The presentation stressed that we were going to look at the company from the customer’s point of view. Our goal was to articulate who the customer was (or were) and what needs they have that we could choose to serve or not serve. Michelle and I introduced the executives to the concept of an ad-hoc persona by explaining that these were going to be “people” they believed were going to be our customers now and in the coming future. It was important for us to stress the difference between real personas and ad-hoc ones. These were not going to be research-proven customer archetypes. They were however going to be reference points which the team can use as filters in the 2012 planning and decision-making process. We closed the short pitch with examples of what they’d be creating.

The team was going to sketch quadrants for each persona. Here is an example of a finished persona:

Example of ad hoc persona

The top left quadrant was for a sketch of the individual, a name and some basic demographics.

The top right quadrant was for behaviors and beliefs of the persona.

The bottom left quadrant was for demographics.

The bottom right quadrant was for needs and goals.

The team was given 15 minutes to create as many personas as they could or felt were necessary.

Once complete, each executive presented their persona to the team. They read the persona out loud and posted up on a wall. The team would then provide some feedback on the realistic qualities (or not) of that persona and some real-time adjustments were made.

Marc Cenedella, CEO & Founder of TheLadders, presenting his personas

Next, the team was asked to place each persona on a set of 5 spectrums. The spectrums were: years of experience, education, ambition, risk tolerance and tech savviness. Each executive was given three Agile planning poker cards. The cards had the numbers 1, 3 or 5 on them and the team was asked to vote by raising the card they felt most appropriately mapped where each persona fell on each spectrum.

The team voting with planning poker cards

Much like Agile planning poker, if there was consensus there was minimal discussion. If , however, there were outliers or a broad distribution of opinion on where a particular persona lay on a particular spectrum, we encouraged the team to discuss and debate that. In many cases, the outliers managed to sway some votes. In other cases the majority won and in still other cases the team made real-time adjustments to their personas to more closely match their view of our target audience.

As each name was voted on the spectrum, their name was written on the whiteboard in the appropriate spot. Almost instantly, patterns began to form. There were clear clusters and clear outliers. At the end of the 3 hours exercise we had a board filled with personas and persona names mapped to spectrums.

Spectrums with names mapped on them

We ended the exercise by thanking the team and letting them go for the day. Michelle and I spent the next few days consolidating the 20+ personas that were created down into a manageable size based on their spectrum distributions. We wanted to get to 3-5. We ended up with 6.

Completed persona

Day 2 – Persona verification and design studio

Day two began with donuts. It was morning and it was early. Donuts help. A lot.

We began the exercise with the team by going over the consolidated set of personas. We’d sent the team the document in advance of the meeting so they would come in , in theory, prepared to discuss. We projected each persona and began a vigorous discussion around their validity not only as a “real” person but also as a customer that we wanted to support moving forward. This part of the exercise truly engaged the team. Strong opinions were presented and an excellent debate ensued around some of the newer customer types were now attracting to the site.

Reviewing the consolidated personas

Each persona was reviewed in detail and adjusted, in real-time, to provide a representation that the team could agree upon. This was probably the part of the two-day exercise where the most consensus was built. At the end, we still had 6 personas but they were now modified enough to where the team was comfortable with all of them as viable customers (Note: interestingly, one contentious persona had to get down to a vote and made it in as a customer by a vote of 5-4).

The second half of this exercise was a design studio. Many articles have been written about how to run these and we use them regularly with the staff at TheLadders. We modified this one for time and focus. The first 5 minute round of sketching consisted of a single 6-up template for each executive team member.

The design studio in progress

Each executive presented and got critique from the others. The team was then split into two groups based simply on where they were seated and asked to consolidate their sketches in to one big sticky note drawing. The drawings were all supposed to be of TheLadders.com home page articulating value propositions that were relevant to the 6 personas. Each critique session asked how the designs presented were valid for the various personas. The teams consolidated their visions into two big drawings that amazingly enough converged on similar themes.

Big sketchin’!

We dismissed the team, thanked them for their time and asked for any feedback (good or bad) on the exercise. We followed up with a summary email that recapped what we did and what the themes were that we found. In addition, we stressed again that these were our beliefs and that, now that we had them, we will be using them to drive recruiting for usability studies, compare them against other customer samples and will update and adjust them as we find characteristics of real customers that go against our initial beliefs.

The one final asset we created was a printed deck of persona cards so that these ideas could easily come to any executive meeting – especially the ones where we were not present.

Persona cards – front

Persona cards – back

Learnings

We had several goals when we set out to run this exercise with the executive team. The first was to introduce them to the concept of personas. We achieved this goal to the extent that the team now knows what this tool is and what components make it up. Given that these were ad-hoc personas, it is incumbent on us, the UX team, to continue to update the 6 personas we created as we learn more from actual user interactions. We must then update the executives with these new details.

The second goal was to get the executive team thinking from a customer-centric point of view. For the duration of the exercise we succeeded though it was a constant effort to keep the conversation focused this way. Each executive’s tendency was to fall back to their traditional points of view based on their responsibilities and, as moderators, it was our job to bring the focus back to the customers. One additional thing that I found particularly interesting was the team’s tendency to present their feedback and insights to me, the moderator, as opposed to their teammates. Our goal was to have the team debating each other and, while that happened at times, much of the conversation was happening with the moderator (Michelle or I) as the initial recipient who would then bounce the dialogue back to the team. Beyond the exercise, it’s too early to tell how successful we’ve been. Our hope is that the printed card deck will serve as a reminder for the team.

The third goal was align the executive team around a target audience and get them to debate and agree upon value propositions that serve the needs and goals of that audience. Again, within the constraints of the exercise I believe we were successful. We created over 20 ad-hoc personas and consolidated down to an agreed-upon set of six. We designed landing pages for those personas that spoke to the value of the products and services we’d offer them in 2012. There was consistency in the themes the team raised and a general acknowledgment of a shared understanding. Will this alignment last into future planning meetings? Again, it’s too early to tell but early indications point to only minor erosion of these initial ideas.

This article was first published at jeffgothelf.com

Jeff Gothelf is the Director of UX at TheLadders. He’s also the author of Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business (O’Reilly, 2012), Agile practitioner, interaction designer, blogger, public speaker, author and design/product thinker.

We’ve all heard the old adage that when your work is your passion, you’ll never work another day in your life.

I find this to be true.

With my creative drive, I discovered very early on that there was no other career for me than one in the marketing world. And as someone who is passionate about what I do day in and day out, I can quickly recognize when I see others who have the same fire about their job.

I see that in my Signature team members.

Now I know you’ve heard of TheLadders Signature program, right? It’s our (hopefully soon-to-be) famous (that’s my big goal!) systematic 6-month job search program tailored for each one of our clients. Yes, I said it, tailored and we guarantee you a job offer!

Can you feel my excitement through your screen?

Our certified Career Advisors work with job seekers from identification of their job goals, to resume re-write, to offer negotiation and even through onboarding into their new role. Wow! Knowing how hard the job search can be, this program provides a partner to ride along with you for this sometimes-wayward journey. That, to me, is double wow!

This leads me back to our Signature team. Quite simply, they are awesome. When one of our clients receives a job offer, you would swear the customers Career Advisor also got an offer. Our Career Advisors are vested in the success of our clients and they, along with the entire Signature team, receive great joy when someone is placed.

What were some of TheLadders Signature team placements in the past few weeks, you ask? Well, some of the placements include roles such as:

• Vice President of Sales in Texas
• Strategic Account Executive in California
• Solutions Design Architect in Illinois
• Project Manager in New York
• Vice President of Marketing in Boston
• Chief Operating Officer in Colorado

What fantastic work our team has achieved thus far and we are only at the beginning (famous, famous, famous; if I see it, I can achieve it)!

A job has the ability to change someone’s life. If we can get someone into their dream role—which at the end of the day benefits not only our job seekers, but also their families—we’ve done a great thing!

So to that end, I must go back to work and continue making this program (yes, you already guessed it) FAMOUS!

Janelle Taylor is Marketing Manager, Consumer Services at TheLadders.com. Her great love for marketing knows no bounds—similar to her love for books and March Madness.