TheLadders Blog

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.

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

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

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

Take a look:

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

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

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

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

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

If you were taking a road trip from New York to Miami, you wouldn’t start the trip by heading northwest for the first few hours, would you?  Probably not. It doesn’t make sense and would take you away from your goal. You’d be much more strategic – planning your route, mapping out possible detours and even forecasting layover spots along the way…and heading due south.

A strategic job search is much like a roadmap for a trip.  Your career goal serves as the ultimate destination, and the strategies and tactics you employ comprise your roadmap and itinerary.

Have you considered your job search in light of an overall strategy?  Sometimes, job seekers expend precious time and energy on activities that don’t get them closer to their goal.  When I speak with job seekers, I almost always use the phrase ‘strategic job search’ as each day’s and week’s tasks should align with a larger plan. This strategic job search plan then informs the overall search process.

On January 10th, I shared seven job search tips in my presentation at The Ladders’ Job Central event at Grand Central Terminal in NYC (for more information, read Forbes columnist Jenna Goudreau’s article, “Seven Strategies To Reboot Your Job Search In 2013”). As you develop your strategy, consider these tips and how they can support you as you move closer to your career goal.

With a strategic job search plan in place, commit to working your plan and moving closer to your goal each and every day. In this competitive employment landscape, working strategically, smartly and steadily are essential to your success.

 Carol Camerino, CCMC, CTTCC                  Back to Work Strategist, Resume Writer &  Career Coach www.LookingForTheOnRamp.com

Job Central, presented by TheLadders, on January 10th was quite the event! Hundreds of professionals made their way to New York City’s Grand Central Terminal to hear from a lineup of guest speakers and meet with dozens of recruiters to help them with their job search.

I enjoyed my opportunity to share my 15 + years of corporate recruiting leadership experience, including my past 3 years with Hewlett-Packard.  My goal was to share real-life stories and examples to help candidates identify their brand, leverage their experiences, and improve their interview skills.  If attendees took one thing away from my presentation, I hope it was the importance of preparation. Prepare to articulate your brand.  Prepare for the interview.  Prepare for the post-interview.  Being fully prepared brings you one step closer to being hired.

After my presentation, I had an opportunity to spend a couple of hours meeting with potential candidates to provide one-on-one guidance. It is my hope that I helped at least one job seeker get closer to his or her next career goal.

If you weren’t able to make it to Job Central but want to learn how to improve your job search, check out the speaker presentations and videos at www.TheLadders.com/JobCentral.

Mitch Schwartz, Global Talent Acquisition Leader, Hewlett-Packard

The backbone of every high-growth company is its people. In the knowledge economy, a strong team is the foundation for success and top talent is the driving force. As Jim Collins said in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, “Get the right people on the bus.”

At TheLadders, we will be celebrating our 10-year anniversary this summer. For the past decade, we have hired more than 500 people, constantly focusing on getting the “right person on the bus,” and constantly ensuring that they are sitting in the right seat on that bus. We always strive to hire the best and get the most from our staff. Coaching, just like in sports, is the key to empowering employees to reach above-and-beyond. Just as with Sir Roger Bannister, we want TheLadders to break the four-minute mile; achieve what they might perceive to be unachievable.

Not surprisingly, TheLadders alumni network in New York City is strong and vibrant. When we ask them what they miss most about working at TheLadders (besides Bagel Friday!), they say it is the people. Over and over, we hear from our current and former employees that what makes the difference are the incredible colleagues they have worked with or are working with.

At TheLadders, we do not expect our staff to work here forever. Eventually, we know that people will leave. Furthermore, we know that as much as we enjoy promoting from within, we cannot possibly promote every great hire to a Vice President or C-level position. That said, one measure of our success is to assess where our alumni end up, post-employment with us. It is always a great sign when one of them lands a top job. That is the way that Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, looked at his company. In the 90s, when a company needed a loan, it went to a bank. When a company needed a CEO, it went to General Electric, which minted business leaders the way that West Point mints generals.

Last week, I was thrilled to read in All Things Digital that Ware Sykes, TheLadders’ former VP of Sales & Services, became the CEO for NoWait, the OpenTable for restaurants that don’t take reservations. Ware joined TheLadders in 2006 as an MBA intern from Columbia Business School and worked his way up the executive rank.

Last month, when I heard that Jake Levine, General Manager at Digg, made Forbes’ iconic “30 under 30” list, I tweeted and posted the following link: http://onforb.es/Ws5iRZ. Prior to joining Betaworks/Digg, Jake did strategy work at TheLadders, directly reporting to TheLadders’ Founder Marc Cenedella and me.

Here are several other alumni who became CEOs and entrepreneurs after working with us:

• Derek Pilcher, Managing Director and owner, TheLadders.co.uk

• David Carvajal, Founder and CEO, Dave Partners, LLC

• Michael McCurdy, Co-founder and CEO, TestingMom.com

• Thilo Semmelbauer, President and COO, Shutterstock

• Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Founder and CEO, Care.com

However, not everyone wants to be a CEO. We also have alumni who are function leaders at other successful New York City tech firms:

• Alain Benzaken was Vice President of Technology at TheLadders for five years. He is now the Senior Director of Software Engineering at Buddy Media Salesforce.

• Ofir Shalom was Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders for five years. He is now the CTO at Group Commerce.

• Angela Romano Kuo started as a recruiter with TheLadders, working seven years before becoming Vice President of Human Resources. She now is the Vice President of Human Resources at SecondMarket, Inc.

• Leslie Semegran started as a marketing manager at TheLadders in 2005 before working her way up to Vice President of Marketing and Engagement, reporting directly to me. She is now Vice President of Marketing at Care.com.

As previously mentioned, TheLadders also proudly promotes from within. For instance, I promoted two leaders to the executive rank, just last month:

• Kyri Sarantakos was promoted to Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders. He joined the company in 2005 as a software engineer. During the past seven years, he has moved up the ranks to become a manager of core architecture and development, an application architect, and, most recently, a principal software architect.

• Selena Hadzibabic was promoted to Director of Product and UX at TheLadders. After graduating from Dartmouth College, she joined the company in 2006 as a junior community associate, an entry-level position. Subsequently, she was promoted to product manager in our U.S. operation, and then became the sole product lead for two years in our former UK operation, where she was based in London before returning to New York in 2011.

If you are a tech professional in New York City and are looking for your next challenge to enhance your skills and your career, join TheLadders! Why?

You may say: “My friend is starting a company and I can be the VP of Technology and get a lot of options.”

Yes, that may be true, but is your friend giving you the leadership training necessary to succeed in that job? Will you be out of a job in six to 12 months because the company did not raise sufficient capital or you do not possess the skills required to lead and drive performance from a team? You will learn that skills on the job at TheLadders.

You also may say: “I have a generous cash offer from Amazon, Google, or Facebook.”

What is going to make you successful are the people you work with, the challenges you will face, the opportunity you have to influence the strategy, and your access to leadership. As a software engineer in New York working for Amazon, Google, or Facebook, you may never be exposed to Jeff, Larry, or Marc. At TheLadders, you will get frequent exposure to the CEO. At TheLadders, we won’t give you the answer to a problem. We will give you a problem statement and will ask you to determine the answers that fulfill our shared vision.

At TheLadders, your last interview will be with me, the CEO. You will hear directly from me that during the next four years of your life, you will experience tremendous professional growth. That is a guarantee that TheLadders offers. Your experience with us will take your career to the next level.

So, is TheLadders a CEO factory or are we just lucky? You be the judge.

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

Usually after the holiday season, the last thing you want to hear is that you have doubled in size. But here at the TheLadders, we are ecstatic to learn that we are twice as big as we were a year ago, meaning the number of recruiters on our site — not our waistline.

Over the course of 2012, our mission was to increase the volume of meaningful conversations between our recruiters and job seekers in three ways:

• Offering our service as a free resource to recruiters and employers
• Learning from our users to create new functionality for our recruiters and job seekers
• Providing compelling content about the recruitment process and how to best navigate it

However, in the end, we went back to what we learned in school and just did simple math: if we increase the number of recruiters, we will increase the connections with our job seekers. So, we did just that. Over the past year, our product, marketing, and recruiter relations teams were steadfast in their efforts to increase the population of recruiters on TheLadders. And succeed they did. I am happy to report that as of last week, TheLadders boasts more than 30,000 recruiters on our site.

What this means for you, our valued job seekers, is MORE conversations, MORE active job-postings, and MORE recruiters who are dedicated to your specific function.

Although we are proud of this milestone, please know that 2013 will be no different. We will continue to work tirelessly to increase recruiter activity and help you take the next step in your career.

Thomas Murphy is the manager of recruiter experience at TheLadders. Tom works with his team to understand how recruiters use technology to help them find the best candidates. When not talking shop about HR, he is trying to get back in shape so he does not embarrass himself at the team triathlon next year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iPhone 4S

iPad 2

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