Soon after we started developing our first mobile app we, realized that we are now building “shipping software,” rather than a website or web services. There are fundamental differences between the two, which proved to be a big challenge for our team—particularly, given our desire to continue using best practices of agile and lean development.

Product Development at TheLadders

Before I continue, allow me to quickly give you some background on how we develop products at TheLadders. We live and breathe agile and lean development day in and day out. If you haven’t read it already, my colleague Michelle wrote a great article about how we work in cross-functional teams in our company. If I had to sum it up, our mantras are:

• Communication and working software over documentation
• Actual data and user feedback over assumptions
• Product iterations over extensive planning

In true agile and lean-development fashion, we are committed to the idea of solving large problems by breaking them down into smaller, more edible problem statements. Based on that, we create hypotheses, which we turn into user stories. Armed with those, we then start developing actual software. Once it comes to software development, we aim for short iterations to get real user feedback and actual usage data as fast as possible because this guides our decisions as to what we build next. This process is designed to maximize speed of learning about our users and our ability to solve their problems. In a way, you can say that we “test” our way into a great product; a word that captures the essence of this process pretty well is “MVP” or Minimum Viable Product. In other words, we aim to build iterations of smaller products to learn along the way, rather than one, over-thought, or over-engineered, solution.

This iterative approach to software development works really well when you develop web products, because in a web world you can release software quickly and globally for all your users. You can also easily test features with subsets of your users by using multivariate testing. To put it more bluntly: it doesn’t matter if you screw up, because this is part of the learning process and you can recover from it quickly.

Our Mobile “App-roach”

With this understanding of our product development philosophy, you might be able to understand why we first struggled when we started to work on our first mobile app. Our ability to “test” our way into a great solution didn’t seem to be a viable option because a mobile app is software that your users download. And unlike a website, you can’t make quick changes to this software once it is in your users’ hands (quite literally). Consequently, critical bugs or feature flaws have a much higher risk associated with them. Releasing an unfinished MVP version of an app into the app store wasn’t an option because we didn’t want to receive 1 star ratings in the event that the app is buggy or users didn’t care for what we built. What’s worse from a product management side is that you are not able to test different features and experiences easily. In other words, the product that you provide to your users for download must solve the majority, if not all, of their needs. We call this the MDP, the “Minimum Desirable Product.”

Finding a Solution

The root of the challenge lies in getting constant user feedback and usage data while we are still working on the app. For reasons stated, we couldn’t accomplish this with a “live” product, but there are other tools and ways to solve that problem. We devised a diary study with 11 participants from our existing user base that fit our demographic criteria to represent the majority of our total user base. After screening hundreds of interested participants we picked our final 11 and used them as a proxy for user feedback and app usage. After initial set-up, we frequently sent them new versions of our app via TestFlight – a tool that allows you to provision apps on iPhones without going through Apple’s App Store. After every version release, we interviewed each user for 30 minutes each week and studied changes to user behavior. This process was tremendously helpful to prioritize our existing backlog of ideas and features, and helped us to uncover new problems and devise new solutions.

Looking Ahead

The decision to “test” our app along the way with a well-selected, handful of users was one of the best decisions we made early on. In true agile and lean-fashion, we listened to the user, looked at data and then changed direction accordingly. To prove the success of this approach, one of our participants recently mentioned that “this app feels like it was made for me.” So, to come full circle and answer the question I asked at the beginning of the article: Yes, we believe you can be agile when you “ship software.”

Keep an eye out for exciting news about our mobile app, Job Search by TheLadders, in the coming days.

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).

Since moving back to a free model for employers last October, we have made it easier for them to post jobs on TheLadders, yielding a 116% year-over-year increase in Q1 2013. One of the features we offer is the ability to rate the applicants either a “Fit” or a “No Fit,” which improves the matching experience on both sides.

In assessing this selection process, my team and I reviewed more than 100 jobs from this year’s first quarter and analyzed the 4,242 applications received for those positions. Typically, our jobs receive an average of 14 applications but for the purpose of our study, we selected jobs that received at least 15. We needed a large sample size to better understand and identify differences in behavior, and to ensure that the results were statistically significant. So, what did we learn?

• 17% of the applications received a “thumbs-up” rating, meaning they were a fit for the job
• 39% received a “thumbs-down” rating and, therefore, were not a fit for the job
• 44% of the applications were not rated at all

We studied 20 different variables for each job application in order to identify what caused an application to be rated a “thumbs-up” (a fit) or a “thumbs-down” (not a fit), which generated a fair amount of noise and inconclusiveness.

Ultimately, we were able to identify that the variables that best explain the ratings were:

• Time to apply
• Job Title
• Location
• Function

Shouldn’t Salary be a good indicator of “Fitness”?

Below are three different box plots that visually represent the salary distribution of the applicants to three different jobs. In two cases, we can see meaningful differences between “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down,” but little difference with the non-rated candidates. In the third case, we observe hardly any difference between all three groups.

Across all 100 jobs, we did not see any evidence other than if an applicant’s salary is two standard deviations away from the average salary of the applicants rated a “thumbs-up” (a fit) than in those instances salary was a factor. In others words, for the outliers, salary was a factor that influenced the rating negatively (either low salary or high salary).

For example, with a marketing manager job where the average applicant earns $120K a year, if an SVP in marketing earning $220K were to apply to that job then, the high salary of that person would be the reason why this applicant would be rated not a fit.

The other reason why our data excludes compensation from being a negative factor is that we already control that factor in our user experience. At TheLadders, we have organized our candidates and jobs in five salary bands. The distribution is as follows:

• $40-60K
• $60-80K
• $80-100K
• $100-250K
• $250K+

Therefore, a professional earning $60K a year cannot apply to a job paying $150K and vice versa, a $200K Vice President cannot apply to a $75K associate job.

Location:

Example: Managing Consultant, Chicago IL

The location of the applicant impacts the candidate’s fitness for a job. This factor is specific to the preference of the employers performing the search. In some cases, the company is willing to relocate out-of-state candidates and, in other cases, the company is not. The maps below illustrate the case of a recruiter not wanting to relocate candidates. Applicants outside of Illinois were rated a no fit or simply not rated at all.

Job Title:

Example: IT Infrastructure Program Manager Windows 7

The data reveals that with most of the jobs, the applicant’s current title is a great variable to predict job fitness. In our example below, you can see that the applicants with titles such as CIO, VP of IT Services, Director IT, and Personnel Manager were rated not a fit or not rated at all. The recruiter behind this job is rejecting the over-qualified candidates who are applying to position below their levels (see graph below).

Function:

Example: Project Execution Consultant in Construction/Real Estate

Function was a less obvious variable that helps predict a candidate’s job fitness because we already control for function at TheLadders with our matching algorithms. However, with keyword search, we do not prevent candidates with a background in a particular function to view and apply to jobs in a different function. As you can see in the example below, the recruiters rejected candidates with a background in operations, general management or engineering. Only candidates with a background in real estate and construction received a “thumbs-up” from the employer.

Time to Apply:

Example: Division Finance Manager, Atlanta, GA

As we investigated 20 different variables such as function, salary, location of the candidate, and job titles, we found that one of the leading success indicators to be rated a fit was time to apply. What does time to apply mean? It is the number of days between the time the job was published on our site and the time (stamp) of the application.

On average we saw the following:

• 10.38 days for a “thumbs-up”
• 13.53 days for a “thumbs-down”
• 19.79 days for the not rated

The causality between that variable and the three other rating types became even more apparent when we looked into the median time (midpoint of the distribution):

• 2.81 days for a “thumbs-up”
• 4.32 days for a “thumbs-down”
• 13.95 days for the not rated

In other words, half of the applicants rated a fit for the job had applied to that same job within 72 hours of the jobs being published on our site. The median time for candidates rated “not a fit” was 50% higher and for the non-rated candidates, the median time was 400% higher. Below is the applicant distribution by time for a Division Finance Manager job in Altanta. The green bars represent the applicants rated “thumbs-up.”

Who is getting the job in the end?

The findings from this study teach us that the people who are getting the job cannot be explained by only one variable. It is usually a combination (one or many) of having the appropriate salary, the experience level, being from the appropriate function (marketing professional applying to a marketing job), having the required expertise (online marketing vs. public relations) and preferably being located near the job location (to avoid occurring relocation expenses).

However, the most eye-opening finding in our research was the following: regardless if one might be the perfect fit for a job, the later one applies to a job, then the less likely one is to get a call-back. That is the sad reality, even if that person was the purple squirrel that the company had been looking for all along.

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.

A company is only as good as the employees who build it, and TheLadders is no exception. We’re proud to have an extrordinary pool of talent in our New York office, and we’d love for you to get to know some of our awesome teammates who make TheLadders the leading job-matching service for career-driven professionals. Here’s a quick Q&A with Rakib Azad.

How long have you been with TheLadders?

Just over two weeks.

What is your title at TheLadders and what are your responsibilities?

Sr. Manager of Financial Planning & Analysis. I will be overseeing the financial budgeting, forecasting, and analysis for the overall business, while also analyzing everything in between for key business insights.

What’s your favorite part about working at TheLadders?

I have not been here long enough to make the full determination, but so far I really like the think big (e.g. Big Data) culture and mentality.

When you’re not working, you can be found…?

I can be found at a sporting or any other random event in the city, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, gym, or at my home desk reading or working on my blog.

What is your favorite hangout in the neighborhood surrounding 137 Varick?

Not exactly in the immediate vicinity, but I enjoy several spots in the MacDougal/Bleecker St. area.

What’s the one tech device you couldn’t live without, and why?

Definitely my iPhone (and any future smartphone I may own), because I feel like the world is at my fingertips.

If you could meet any musician (dead or alive), who would it be?

Kurt Cobain

What mobile app do you use the most?

Tons of news sites, Facebook, and ESPN Score Center

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Astronaut (my goal now is to take a Virgin Space ride one day)

If you didn’t work in an office, what would be your alternate-universe occupation?

Unrealistically, 2^nd base for the NY Mets (even though they stink), somewhat realistically, an international diplomat

Rakib Azad is the Sr. Manager of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) at TheLadders. Besides a deeply held interest  in making sense out of numbers, he enjoys soaking in experiences, knowledge, and food  from every corner of NYC and whenever possible, a trip somewhere around the world.  

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.

I’ll admit it, I love attending job fairs. Sure, it’s an incredibly exhausting experience to talk to one person after another for several hours. However, if you thrive on interacting with others, it is also hugely stimulating. I’ve attended a number of job fairs lately looking for great engineers to join our team here at TheLadders. Uncubed, which we attended Friday, is one of my favorites. It bills itself as something of an “un-job fair.” I’m going to respectively disagree with them. Uncubed is everything I love about job fairs but taken up a notch. The energy level is higher. Perhaps it’s the music, or the food, or the alcohol that flows freely. Maybe it’s the electricity that is New York City and its citizens. Whatever it is, Uncubed feels different. Louder. Stronger. Faster. Better.

My day of loudness started in a rather subdued fashion – with a touch of learning and education. There were several classes taught early in the day. I spoke about how TheLadders has been leveraging Storm, a real-time event processing engine. It was great to get out into the NYC tech community and introduce people to Storm. I’ve always been more comfortable teaching in a collegial style. It probably stems from my having attended a small liberal arts college where class sizes usually peaked around 10-12 people. I tried to bring that spirit to Uncubed by using Paintbrush as a virtual whiteboard to sketch out the concepts I was trying to explain. I love teaching, and it was a cool challenge to teach an audience that was split evenly between engineers and non-engineers.

And then, the real fun began: wave after wave of people stopping by the booth, a blur of faces and conversations that come in rapid-fire succession, life stories and professional histories spilling out everywhere. Through the exhilarating chaos, we were able show off the great things we’ve been building, like:

• Our new responsive consumer website;
• TheLadders Scout, our proprietary competitive analysis tool for job seekers; and
• Our new mobile application that is going to turn the job market on its head.

And every now and then, I got the chance to talk deep computer science with a possible team member: distributed systems, machine learning, Storm, Hadoop and all the things that excite me intellectually and keep me coming into work every day. In the end, that is what I love most about job fairs: meeting smart people who I can talk to about solving hard problems, and that’s exactly what I did at Uncubed.

Sean T. Allen is the Principal Architect for TheLadders. He started at TheLadders in December of 2010 and has engaged in one brutal refactoring after another ever since. His turn-ons include programming languages, distributed computing, Hiwatt amplifiers and Fender Telecasters. His turn-offs include mayonnaise, stirring yogurt and sloppy code. He is one of the developers of Redline Smalltalk; an implementation of the Smalltalk programming language that runs on the JVM. You can often find him rambling on twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top five highest-paid names:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what did we find out?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the full research study. 

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

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

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

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

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

WEEK 1

The Foundation

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

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

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

Creating Ideas

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

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

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

Advantages

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

Disadvantages

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

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

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

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

Learnings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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