TheLadders Blog

When baked goods are in the office, it’s a guarantee that I’ll be close by! You can count on me to make some, eat many, and finish whatever my co-workers cannot. So when TheLadders organized a bake sale to benefit City Harvest, I signed up to help organize the event.

City Harvest is an organization that exists to end hunger in communities throughout New York City. They distribute food to many food programs and educate individuals, families, and communities on the prevention of diet-related disease. Due to Hurricane Sandy, our baking and eating efforts were delayed by two weeks. Still when the day came, I arrived with my strawberry cheesecake, an insatiable appetite, and most importantly, my equally hungry and generous colleagues. We devoured cupcakes of all sorts – Red Velvet, Guinness, and Pumpkin Spice. There was also an assortment of cookies, pumpkin bread, cream puffs, and pumpkin pie!

As a company, we raised $358 for City Harvest. To top it off, TheLadders will make a matching contribution to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund, along with all of our individual contributions, to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Who ever said that a sweet tooth would only lead to cavities and a few extra pounds?

Mary Frances Usher is a Lead Talent Specialist at TheLadders.  When she isn’t sourcing top talent for recruiters on site and organizing food related events in the office, Mary can be found eating cupcakes, candy, cake, and Chipotle.  

As a talent manager, the job search is something that I take very seriously. I spend lots of time researching companies, verifying medium salaries based on the economy and market trends, and preparing for candidate interviews. The fact that 7% of our job seekers “do not send thank you notes” is extremely surprising and begs the question, how important is the job search to you?

In the time I’ve spent interviewing candidates, working with hiring managers, and being a job seeker myself, I’ve found that sending thank you notes is always beneficial. For me, the job-search process has multiple steps, all which require critical attention. I try to truly understand the role I am applying for, confirm that it’s the best fit for my background, prepare for my interview, and send a timely and thoughtful follow-up.

Personally, I have always sent thank you notes to everyone I’ve interviewed with. It requires time and effort out a person’s day to bring you in for an interview, why not be appreciative of that? As a recruiter, I don’t expect a long-winded, detailed description of why you want the role; it needs to re-emphasize your ability to fill the role and show gratitude to the interviewers who spent time with you. I know hiring managers who have passed on hiring candidates strictly because they failed to follow up.

Long story short, sending a thank you note goes a long way and impacts your potential of getting hired, both now, and in the future. Send them!

Download TheLadders’ Giving Thanks Infographic

Mike Deissig is the Talent and Technology Development Manager at TheLadders.  Mike is constantly trying to improve the recruiting process and evolve technology integration with recruiting. In his spare time he enjoys watching football, being with friends, and trying all of the food this world has to offer! 

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been two weeks since I reported on Hurricane Sandy’s impact to TheLadders office in downtown Manhattan. Since then, we’ve relatively returned to business as usual, but we fully realize that many people and businesses are still suffering from Sandy’s devastation.

I feel a deep sense of compassion for the loss of homes and, most tragically, lives. As a business owner and entrepreneur, I am empathetic for other business owners who have experienced damage from the storm.

I thought long and hard about what our company could possibly do to help with hurricane-relief efforts. We are an online job-matching service for career-driven professionals – how can we leverage our expertise to best assist job seekers affected by the hurricane? After some discussion with my talented and supportive team, we came up with the following plan:

• Donate $300,000 worth of Premium job-search services to those impacted by the hurricane
• Donate $10,000 to Hurricane Sandy relief efforts for those who have been heavily impacted and cannot take advantage of the above benefits
• Support our neighborhood restaurants that were affected by the hurricane by fueling TheLadders’ hard-working employees with free lunch until Thanksgiving

Hurricane Sandy left a path of destruction in its wake, impacting Americans all along the East Coast. The responsibility of rebuilding and helping those in need is one that is shared among everyone. Skip your morning coffee and donate to the American Red Cross. Clean out your closet and put a pile of clothes together for those who have lost everything. Volunteer to distribute emergency-relief supplies to affected families. If everyone chips in, just a little bit, we can rebuild together.

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.

For a Monday morning, I had never been more excited to get to the office than on November 5^th. TheLadders had been closed for nine days without electricity because of the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and our 150 employees had been working remotely – from home, friends’ homes, Starbucks and libraries. Although our office finally had electricity, phone and Internet restored, we sat at our computers bundled up in coats, hats and scarves, still without heat. However, our inconvenience was minimal compared to the loss for so many others, and we were simply grateful that we all were safe and sound.

On that first day back at work, we received an encouraging email from our COO and Co-founder, Alex Douzet:

We will be catering lunch every day until Thanksgiving so that you do not have to run outside in the cold. Here is our tentative menu for the next 13 days:                          

• Monday, November 5: Little Italy Pizza & Deli
• Tuesday, November 6: Subway
• Wednesday, November 7: Chipotle
• Thursday, November 8^: Grand Sichuan
• Friday, November 9: Nagomi
• Monday, November 12: Getting Hungry
• Tuesday, November 13^: Five Guys Burgers & Fries
• Wednesday, November 14^: Ellen’s Deli & Grocery
• Thursday, November 15^: Bricklane Curry House
• Friday, November 16^: P.J. Charlton’s
• Monday, November 19^: Thanksgiving Potluck
• Tuesday, November 20^: Mae Mae Café
• Wednesday, November 21^: Sounds of Brazil

Besides the obvious convenience and cost savings, I discovered that it was also a phenomenal opportunity to patronize Hudson Square’s restaurants, many of which were crippled by Sandy. The response of gratitude has been overwhelming:

From Liz Neumark, CEO of Great Performances, which owns Mae Mae Café:

I salute you on your efforts…we would love nothing more than to provide nurturing and delicious meals for your colleagues.

From Phil Mouquinho, Chef and owner of PJ Charlton:

Thank you so much. I must say that in my 32 years here at PJ Charlton I never completed a lunch deal for 110 people so quickly and so effortlessly. Kudos and many thanks to your organization. Now let me show you on Friday how to bring a smile to 110 hungry folks.

From Diana Urena, Events & Group Sales Director of Sounds of Brazil (SOB’s):

Thank you so much for thinking of us. We would love to bring some SOB’s Holiday cheer to your office!

Who knew that we could do so much for the local community by ordering lunch for our 100+ staff from local businesses daily for three weeks? Free meals for us…and the ability to get a dozen restaurants back to business!

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

TheLadders is happy to announce a new partnership with eQuest, the world’s most utilized job posting distribution solution which enables companies to automatically post their open positions on TheLadders. Effective this week, eQuest clients can automatically post ALL of their professional positions on TheLadders, with no additional effort or cost.

This partnership is a true win-win for both parties. eQuest is able to offer their clients ease of use and free advertisement, and TheLadders can now showcase open positions to its members that historically wouldn’t be published on its site. In the coming weeks, TheLadders will see an increase of more than 50,000 jobs due to this new partnership.

The hard work between TheLadders’ and eQuests’ development teams over the past few months has brought this partnership to fruition. We’re thrilled to bring more job opportunities to our members and give recruiters more tools to create meaningful connections with potential candidates.

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.

Last Thursday, I spent two days in Raleigh, NC, at the Internet Summit 2012 where I spoke on two panels: “Designing and Optimizing for Multiple Screens” and “Internet Entrepreneurship.”

The most exciting part of my trip was that it was the first time in 20 years that I returned to the “scene of the crime.” This is a story that very few people know about me – one that took place long before my time as COO and Co-founder of TheLadders.

In 1993, I was a freshman at the University of Colmar, in Alsace, France, studying economics and business. I quickly realized that as a Frenchman preparing for a career in business, I had to speak English fluently if I wanted to be successful. Since I am not the type of person who can master a foreign language via classroom study alone, I engineered a bold move. I decided that I was going to spend the summer working in the United States and, therefore, learn English there. Like I usually do, I approached it with a sink-or-swim mentality.

Through a student organization’s intermediary, I was able to secure a working permit for the summer. I bought a round-trip ticket between Paris and New York, but first needed to decide on a final destination. As a teenager, I had already traveled with my family to the West Coast, so I targeted the East Coast. Strategically, I decided to avoid cosmopolitan areas for fear of working with too many foreigners, hence limiting my language practice. Therefore, I ruled out New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., Miami and Atlanta. In fact, I narrowed my options to Upstate New York, Vermont or the Carolinas. Because it was the summer, I also was seeking proximity to the beach to enjoy the warm weekends. Raleigh, North Carolina seemed to match everything I was looking for. Even though it’s not right on the water, it’s only a two-hour drive to the beach. I was sold!

In June of that year, I boarded a plane from Paris to New York. When I got to the Big Apple, I spent my first night at Columbia University before jumping on a 12-hour Greyhound Bus to Raleigh. At the time, I had very little: $300 in cash, two bags and a piece of paper saying that the McDonald’s at 3710 Western Boulevard was willing to hire international students for the summer.

When the bus finally arrived in Raleigh, the first thing I did was find a place that I could afford for one night; I knew no one and had no place to go. After I checked in to the hotel, I walked to McDonald’s, letter in hand, and asked the store manager for a job. Because I needed the money to survive on my own, I was anxious to get started and requested a start date of the very next day.

I needed to improve my English before being allowed a customer-facing job at the counter, so I spent a memorable summer in the kitchen flipping burgers and pancakes. When the manager kindly offered to introduce me to other employees, one of them offered me a room to sublet for the summer. I had a job, a summer home and an opportunity to practice English every day with Americans. Life was good.

I ended up spending the whole summer there before returning to school in France. Those two months in Raleigh became a life-changing experience for me, a truly pivotal movement that later gave me the confidence at age 22 to permanently move to New York City. The rest, as they say, is history!

For the past 16 years, I have traveled extensively across the United States visiting many cities and states, but last Thursday was especially meaningful…to come back for the first time to where it all began!

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

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

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

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

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

At TheLadders, we currently have a greater UX goal to incorporate our design process more dynamically and efficiently, so when my boss asked me if I wanted to attend an HTML & CSS workshop at a collaborative workspace called General Assembly, I jumped at the opportunity.

General Assembly is a global network of campuses for people seeking opportunity and education in technology, business, and design. It has locations in most major cities, both nationally and internationally, and its memberships provide private desk space to individuals, along with office space for deserving organizations. Partnerships with major philanthropic companies and corporations help to keep its engine going. They also offer a variety of workshops, covering topics from effective project management to powerful social media techniques, that incorporate hands-on education.

This particular workshop took place over a weekend – five hours on Saturday, and five hours on Sunday.  The instructor, Chris Castiglione, focused on what he called the good parts vs. the bad parts of the language.  He then educated us about the elements were expected to work with, mainly Front-end Web Development:

Front-end Web Development (FEWD): the process of writing code to provide the layout of a site, and how things look and behave in the browser. At its core, there are only three front-end languages: HTML, CSS and JavaS.

• HTML is the STRUCTURE of our page 
• CSS is the PRESENTATION (or style) of our page 
• JS is often referred to as the BEHAVIOR of a web page

We then went into Sublime Text and began to code like crazy!  By the end of the workshop, we were able to create basic sites that ran completely on HTML & CSS. It was a fantastic experience, and I highly recommend General Assembly as a valuable resource for all technology professionals!

Tesia Kosmalski is a User Experience Designer at TheLadders. When she’s not ensuring high quality and meaningful user experiences online, she makes art with wacky things like electronics, sound and sometimes textiles even. 

As Alex Douzet, COO & co-founder of TheLadders, shared with all of our job seekers last week, our headquarters is located in lower Manhattan, which was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. Without power, the office was shut down for 10 days. That said, TheLadders did not falter once!  Besides our site being fully operational for our Job Seekers, we also reached our highest number of jobs on our site EVER – more than 235,000!

In addition, our Job Search Support Team set up remote offices — at home, friends’ houses, Starbucks, or local libraries — to help support our members. In fact, preparation started even before the hurricane; we went old school and compiled a phone tree, just in case there were critical updates and customer service reps couldn’t access their email. Even with the office closed on Monday, the team hit the ground running that morning. TheLadders’ Job Search Support Team began responding to our members’ emails at our normal 9 a.m. start time on Monday, October 29. Because Mondays are one of the highest-volume days, we wanted to make sure we were ready for our Job Seekers’ questions.

By noon on Monday, we had updated our Voicemail, and Help and FAQ sections on TheLadders.com, to provide our Job Seekers with timely instructions for getting support during the hurricane. By Friday, we were up-and-running on Chat and providing live support to our Job Seekers, even though we were all still working from our make-shift offices.

We believe our support plan worked for four reasons:

1. It clearly and quickly answered the most frequently asked questions from job seekers;
2. The message was consistent across all channels: FAQ, Help, Facebook, Twitter and emails;
3. There was consistent internal communication, which allowed us to update our members in real time;
4. Last, but definitely not least, we have amazingly supportive members!

The Job Search Support team would like to say THANK YOU for all of your kind words, prayers, and patience with us last week. We were thrilled to re-open our office on Monday morning and look forward to speaking, emailing, and chatting with more of you throughout the week!

Christina Kane is the Manager of Talent Specialists and our Job Search Support Center at TheLadders. Outside of work she is preparing for her Fantasy Football draft, raving about her adorable Godson and attending A LOT of weddings.

While the worst of Hurricane Sandy is behind us, the Tri-State Area has a long road ahead until relative normalcy is restored. Devastation has wreaked havoc upon our shores, lives and homes have been tragically lost, and cherished times have been etched into our memories forever.

But as Americans continue to prove, tumultuous times bring us closer together. After our COO and Co-founder, Alex Douzet, published his blog post last week, we have received an overwhelming response of concern and well wishes from our members, clients and friends. The comments below, and many like them, have brought us hope and gratitude. We are very thankful for each and every one of your thoughts and prayers.

I’m happy to report that power has been restored to TheLadders’ headquarters in lower Manhattan, and our staff is excited and relieved to be back onsite as of this morning. What’s more, I’m so proud to be a part of a team that, despite their personal experiences with Hurricane Sandy, came together to help each other and service our customers to the best of our ability. While our office at 137 Varick Street remained closed due to loss of power all last week, our IT team worked relentlessly to provide remote access to the entire company, and those who could work, did work – a lot. Customer service remained available to help our customers on both email and live chat and all other departments proceeded as usual, in very unusual circumstances.

Kudos to the entire team for their effort, endurance and determination during, and in the wake of, Hurricane Sandy.

Outstanding Mr. Douzet!! It is people like yourself (and team) that make quality businesses what they are….successful. May God, the father, keep a close watch out over you, your family and your work family at “TheLadders” until this monumental tragedy has subsided, in Jesus name, Amen.

- Todd P.

Dear Alex, My thoughts are with you and your members. Please let me know if I can assist in anyway, really and sincerely.

- S. Rezani

Prayers and thoughts are with all of your team impacted by this unbelievable storm. It is a time for family and taking care of each other. Job searches are small compared to the challenges you all are facing. God Bless and may everyone be safe and comforted soon. I would love to land a new job, but respectfully, I want the lives of your staff to get back on track, as well. Many prayers and thoughts of hope.

- Tony E.

I really appreciate the update. God bless TheLadders HQ team in the lower Manhattan area. Our prayers are with you and your families.

- Rich

To Alex, the Staff at TheLadders and our extended family affected by this week’s weather, Our hearts and hopes go out to you! We empathize with the challenges, inconveniences and the sad losses that you are enduring from Hurricane Sandy’s devastation. It is our hope that you are all safe and your challenges are easily overcome.

- George

Thank you so much for getting in touch with all of us under these conditions and continuing to provide support and help to us. It should be us who live on the West Coast  to provide support to you. My positive thoughts and blessings to you and your employees and company and all those affected by this storm. I know that you can ride this challenge.

- Jolin C.

I just hope all are safe after such a terrible storm.  I live in CA, but grew up in NJ.  My heart is broken to see my Jersey Shore so terribly hit hard.  I feel for all you!!

- Michele S.

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