About a month ago, there was a rally held in Washington D.C. to protest a perceived lack of action by the government regarding climate change. This was estimated to be the largest group in history that has gotten together for this purpose – 35,000 individuals, filling the National Mall, from the Capitol building to the Washington Monument. For those unfamiliar with our nation’s capital, this is an expansive 1.2-mile piece of land.

I’m telling you this because TheLadders would now require a space of the same proportion to fit all of the employers on its site. That’s right – we hit a new milestone this week: more than 35k employers are using TheLadders to find the most qualified job-seeking candidates out there. Luckily, each hiring manager can search for candidates from the comfort of their own computer or mobile device, so we won’t be renting out the National Mall anytime soon.

Our primary goal at TheLadders is to match the right person with the right job. As a member of TheLadders’ Employer Relations team, I am reminded of this goal every day as I approve new employers to use our site. For those unaware, every single employer profile submitted has human eyes on it before it gets approved (more often than not, my own beautiful blues). Taking this step allows us to verify that only legitimate recruiting professionals are allowed to post and search on our site.

Now, there is no certification needed to make a recruiter “legitimate” – we simply use the information on each person’s profile to ascertain whether they are right for TheLadders. The information can be found in a corporate email address, it can be found on the company website they provide, it can be found in the “About Me” section they write, etc. We take a look at the total package and then make a judgment call. If an individual doesn’t meet our standards or have a complete profile, he/she receives a personal email explaining why they weren’t approved. Often times, those turned away contact our Employer Relations team to find out what they need to do to get approved, and eventually are.

So, is this process of maintaining a high standard for employers on TheLadders worth it? Are we able to have our cake and eat it too? This is a commonly used idiom, albeit one that has never made much sense to me. Rather, I would say that through our approval process, we are able to eat a larger piece of cake that is delicious while still being nutritionally sound. On second thought, maybe desert analogies are not the best way to categorize this success. More than 35,000 employers using TheLadders, all meeting our high standards for quality, is a mark of success that stands on its own.

Andrew Wilson is a Junior Account Manager at TheLadders, specializing in recruiter acquisition and onboarding for the Employer Relations team. He enjoys Cleveland professional sports teams, and things that don’t make him miserable.

A couple of weekends ago, I headed down to Wharton Business School to attend their Startup Unconference.  A former colleague of mine, Ware Skyes, CEO of NoWait, invited me to run a workshop with him called, “How to Write the Perfect Product Spec,” which made me smile. Over the years, I’ve seen many product specifications, none of them perfect, and the idea that on day zero you would know exactly what you want on day 100, 200, and 365 is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed. However, I wanted to participate regardless, if only to drive that point home.

A big theme of the conference was managing business and technology interaction, a timely topic considering the number of young entrepreneurs I see just looking for people to execute their winning idea. In a keynote from Steve Welch of Dreamit Ventures, he cautioned about becoming too enamored with ideas, “The best idea ever at Dreamit Ventures never made it out into the market.” He observed that teams that executed well together had the most success at Dreamit, whereas the idea is secondary to the team that is executing it.

He is right, and young entrepreneurs should be focusing on finding good partners in technology, sales, as well as in marketing. I like to say, “Five dollars and an idea will get you a cup of Starbucks coffee.” The idea will absolutely change and evolve from when you get that first funding to when you have something customers will love and pay for. The team you pick will thrive with that change or they will not, and a good team that executes together is critical in all companies, especially in early-stage startups.

In 2003 at TheLadders, our big idea was a newsletter of hand-picked jobs sent weekly to sales professionals. In the 10 years since, our idea has changed countless ways; some things we’ve tried worked, while some have not. Our founder Marc Cenedella still sends his weekly newsletter, the largest and longest-running newsletters of its type in the world, but it’s just one part of a much larger and growing business. We have more ideas than time, and how we execute on them has proven to be the most important thing we do.

Therefore, we told the workshop of Wharton MBA candidates that we were not going to show them how to write a perfect product spec; that is an impossible and futile task. In fact, it is not the primary job of the entrepreneur to provide solutions, but rather to identify a need in the market:  “Potential User X has this pain; let us try to address it.”

The problems faced by young MBA founders are amplified when they have no experience in the technological and/or UX domains of the solution space. Not fully understanding a platform’s affordances and capabilities will, at worst, lead to a subpar product and, at best, a long slog of trial and error. Too often, money runs out before anything is launched.

What’s a fresh MBA graduate with a great idea to do? First, he or she should invest in finding great partners who can bring missing functional expertise to the table and then put those partners to work.

We offered the conference attendees a tool to use with their partners, a way to include them in devising solutions. Captain Picard says it best:

The entrepreneur sets the course and the team, as a whole, figures out how best to execute.

One technique to solve this is to start projects by including the whole team in devising solutions via a UX Design Studio. At TheLadders, we start all of our bigger two- to 10-week initiatives with this process. All functional groups are represented, including the CEO, marketing, product, development, and support.

Going back to the Startup Unconference, we spent the majority of the workshop running the MBA candidates through a mini, hands-on design studio. Using a little-known problem statement/scenario from NoWait, they did quick five-minute iterations of solo design and team review. The exercise gave them a process they could immediately take back to their projects, a basis for including their entire team in the problem-solving process.

UX Design Studios will not solve all problems of business and technology/product relations, but it’s a good start and relatively easy for small teams to try.

For more information about design studios and how to run them in detail, please see the following articles from Will Evans, who brought the practice to TheLadders:

http://uxmag.com/articles/introduction-to-design-studio-methodology

http://uxmag.com/articles/the-design-of-design-studio

Kyri Sarantakos is Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders.  When he’s not playing around with iOS development, he can be found hacking all things radio-controlled.

Spring is upon us! For most of us, spring evokes familiar images of Easter eggs, flowers, and longer, warmer days to come. However, according to our members, spring is also the time of year when you’re happiest with your job.

Across the country, employees report the biggest increase in job satisfaction when winter weather gives way to spring, boosting overall job happiness by 13 percent. Are you ready to be 13 percent happier?

While overall job satisfaction increases across the country from winter to spring, the variance of the increase was also dependent on things like regional climate, and a person’s job industry and salary. In colder American job markets, like Boston, New York, and Chicago, working professionals are 30 percent happier to see spring come than their counterparts in warmer markets like Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami. Makes sense right? If your winter is colder, then of course you’ll be happier to see spring than someone in a warmer climate.

But hold on, after further analysis, we discovered that people in colder markets report an average job satisfaction level 28 percent higher all year long than warmer markets (even those toughing it through famously cold Boston winters). Let’s look into why…

• Warmer job markets have a higher percentage of sales professionals
• Regardless of location, season,  AND salary, sales professionals generally report higher levels of dissatisfaction
• Colder weather markets have a more even distribution of professions across their top job types

Basically, more sales employees with a less diverse job market means that no matter how beautiful it is outside, that market is relatively less happy with their jobs.

TheLadders unearthed lots of other interesting trends; here are some highlights:

• Happiest Job Market: Washington, DC,
• Unhappiest Job Markets: Sacramento
• Happiest Professions: Law, Tech, and Accounting & Finance
• Unhappiest Professions: Real Estate, Sales, and Education

One more interesting trend showed that the axiom, “mo’ money mo’ problems” is actually true. Professionals making or “about to make” $100k proved to be the happiest, meaning there is a psychological factor in starting to make six figures (something employers could leverage in raises/bonus considerations), even though the difference between $90k and $100k is nominal in your take-home pay.

Additionally, the trend data shows quickly diminishing returns on incremental salary as employees near the $200k mark. Across all industries, professionals reported being less happy the more money they made after $170,000 per year. Think about that: on average, professionals making $240,000 a year reported being slightly unhappier than those making $40,000.

So who is the prototypical happiest worker in the country? Drumroll please…our analysis shows that a city-dwelling techie, who works in the northeast during the spring months, and makes six figures (but under $200k) is the happiest employee in the country. Conversely, if you find yourself working a sales job in Sacramento, perhaps this research will persuade you to pack your bags and take a cross-country road trip this spring.

* This study analyzed the behavior of more than 390,000 TheLadders members over the past two years.”

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.

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

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

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

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

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

You can watch the entire keynote presentation here.

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

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

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

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

Bono projects extreme poverty rate of zero by 2030

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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. 

As a Certified Professional Résumé Writer, I speak on the phone with job seekers every day. I work with clients from places as far-flung as South Korea, to those based right here in New York City. Often, the only way for me to determine my client’s personality type is to assess how he or she behaves over the phone. A thorough conversation usually tells me whether my client is professional, prepared, confident and composed.

For those preparing to launch a job search, or who are in the midst of one right now, here are some tips to improve your chances of clearing the phone interview.

Record a Voicemail

Make sure to update your voicemail before prospective employers and recruiters reach out to you. Include your full name and a promise to respond within 24 hours. Ringback tones must be in good taste.

Answer the Phone

Hello? doesn’t cut it when you’re in the middle of a job search. Instead, answer the phone with authority and competence. Identify yourself by saying, “Hi, this is Joe” or “Hello, Joe speaking.”

Communicate Concisely

Don’t let your answers exceed the scope of the questions. Your response time should be one minute or less. Get a list together of common interview questions and formulate concise responses. Read them aloud, time yourself, never rush, and speak confidently.

If you follow these guidelines, your chances of making a positive impression will improve greatly and will set you apart from the competition.

Dylan Houle is a CPRW and has written over 600 executive-level resumes and cover letters. Originally from San Francisco, Dylan now resides in Brooklyn.

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.

“You must be the change you wish to see….” -Gandhi

Eight years ago today, I joined TheLadders.

Back in January 2005, we were a small startup with only 25 employees. My first job was working on building a new version of TheLadders.com. At the time, there were only a few hundred lines of code and we spent the next few months working around the clock to deliver a new and improved website. When we were done and the site was launched, I remember my father asking me, “Now what? The site’s done; do you still have work to do?”

We certainly had more work to do then and we still do now. Today, our mission is the same as when we started: finding the right person for the right job. As long as our customers face frustration with their job search, we will be hard at work trying to help job seekers find their next job or employers their perfect candidate.

As we embrace 2013, I am seeing the same kinds of change and excitement that I saw in 2005. Over the past eight years, we’ve learned a lot about the job search, and we’re making big moves to reflect a new way of discovering job opportunities and candidates.

Fundamentally, we have changed the way we work. We threw long backlogs and task-lists out the window, and started working towards shared themes and goals among the whole company; not just technology, not just a single Scrum team. Themes shared by the CEO, marketing, sales, finance, customer service, product, tech and UX groups. With this approach, we have abandoned a traditional team structure previously set by executives and, instead, empowered our staff to determine how best to organize themselves to achieve our shared goals. We try and gather the right people in a room to solve a problem and we know they will make something great.

Have we figured out the magic formula for software-development success? Perhaps. We are closer to being agile with a lowercase ‘a’ than we ever before. We are making better decisions about how to best deploy our collective brainpower and talents. We are shipping value to our users faster. We are learning to say ‘no,’ affording us more time to focus on the work that best serves our users.

Almost 20% of our traffic is coming from phones and tablets, so the new website for TheLadders is completely responsive. It renders well on desktops, tablets and mobile phones. And, we are not stopping with just some fancy CSS; more is coming on the mobile front in the next few months, so stayed tuned.

Because finding the right job should be less tedious than searching through a database of titles, our team of data scientists and engineers work relentlessly to pair our users with the jobs that suit them best. You can still search if you want, but you do not have to be an expert on crafting keyword searches and filters to find relevant jobs; based on what you tell us, and also what you actually do online, we will find you those jobs.

Matching is easy to say and hard to do well. We have to deal with a host of technical challenges, such as classifying jobs into our taxonomy, and we are employing machine-learning to do that. But, that is a topic for another blog post. If you are one of our more-than 5 million members, you may have noticed some of our job- matching efforts with our new Targeted Hiring Alerts.

Job descriptions are becoming a commodity; everybody’s got them.  So, what data do we have to augment them and provide our users with relevant job information they cannot get anywhere else? We’ve launched TheLadders Scout, an innovative (and addictive) way to get a deeper understanding for the job market and your competition. It is a start towards giving our users the data they need to make faster and more-informed decisions in their job search. Here’s our founder’s take on it.

We’ve grown a lot in the past eight years. With more than 5 million jobseekers and 31,000 recruiters and employers, we have embarked on a large infrastructure rebuild, launched powerful caching with Varnish for our web-services layer, and we are leveraging Storm for processing our long-running match and email tasks. Our move from MySQL to Clustrix continues, and dozens of DB slaves are going offline as we increase our load on the Clustrix database. And, most significantly, we are refactoring away some of the most fiddly bits of our codebase.

Additionally, we are rebuilding our data center with shiny hardware, as well as a new network and level of resource flexibility that gets the bits from us to you, that much faster. Our DevOps team has been busy designing the new data center and ramping up for a smooth transition over the upcoming months.

To celebrate our accomplishments so far, and to share our excitement about what is to come, we are re-launching our development blog, because the best decisions stand up to the harshest light of criticism. There are exceptionally talented people on this team, and you should meet them.

Want more from the product and development team? Visit the Engineering Stories blog!

Kyri Sarantakos is Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders.  When he’s not playing around with iOS development, he can be found hacking all things radio-controlled.