TheLadders Blog

When we think about Valentine’s Day, romantic images of chocolates, flowers, and candlelit dinners may come to mind. However, being happy in the workplace may just be our greatest gift. In fact, only 12% of Americans have found the right corporate chemistry and are “really happy with this job,” according to a new study we’ve conducted. Of the 255,000 job seekers surveyed, an astonishing 88% confirmed varying degrees of dissatisfaction with their workplace.

In the poll — which is illustrated by our awesome new infographic — 61.3% of job seekers who were asked to describe the way they feel about their current job admitted they are ‘actively looking for a next job.’ Another 19.0% claimed their ‘job isn’t awful, but not great,’ and 3.9% ‘don’t know how much more of this gig can be tolerated.’ The most unhappy? Unfortunately, 4.1% ‘want out of this job now.’ Talk about a bad romance.

Whether in your love life or in your work life, finding the right match is all about chemistry, and feeling motivated and appreciated in the workplace is paramount for being successful in your career and life. That’s why we suggest workplace satisfaction be determined by the following factors: corporate culture, opportunity for growth, sense of challenge, work-life balance, and compensation package.

That’s why we come to work every day: to help professionals find the right job matches, so their story can have a happy ending.

Read the press release.

Lisa Hagendorf is the Director 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.

Today, TheLadders was proud to play host to “World to NYC,” an event organized by the New York City Economic Development Corporation to introduce more than 40 international entrepreneurs and business executives to the vibrant New York startup community.

Members of the delegation were welcomed by TheLadders Vice President of Sales and Services, Ware Sykes. Ware introduced the audience to our Soho offices and provided a brief overview of our company history, including why it’s co-founders chose to base the company in New York. He told the story of how TheLadders has grown and thrived over the past eight years in an environment of constant change.

Nick Rockwell, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, continued the presentation. Nick focused on the challenges and opportunities of locating, growing, and staffing a technology startup. After all, competition is fierce – New York is now the second-hottest market for venture capital funding in the world.

Next, the guests were divided into breakout sessions with members of our product, design, and development teams. Selena Hadzibabic, Kat Yanolatos, Kai Brinker and Will Evans gave tours of the office while discussing TheLadders’ culture, Agile product development methodology, data-driven design and our usability process. The tour guides fielded plenty of questions from the very engaged and thoughtful NYCEDC group.

The morning ended with a group Q&A session with company leaders. Then, everyone went to lunch at local hotspot (and our next door neighbor), City Winery.

Will Evans is Manager, Experience Design for TheLadders in New York City with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy.

AgileUX NYC 2012 — How to create great design experiences in an Agile development environment.

Saturday, February 25th from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM (ET)
School of Visual Arts Theater, 333 West 23 Street, New York NY 10011

This conference is for stakeholders, product managers and user experience designers passionate about building products that delight their customers, whether you work for a lean startup or a large organization. You’ll learn from the thought leaders in the AgileUX community about the entire lifecycle of software development, including:

• Organization and cultural change
• Team building
• Process design
• Customer research
• Design studios
• Transparent design
• User story writing
• Mid-stream rapid cadence usability testing
• Getting a seat at the table

Motivation. It’s the key driver for taking an action. What motivates a person to change careers? What motivates a hiring manager to select one job candidate over another? We care deeply about UX research – we do it more than just about any startup you will ever work for. If finding the underlying drivers for customers’ decision making motivates you, then listen up.

As a Lead UX Designer here you will lead efforts to create, concept and design new ways for our community of jobseekers and recruiters to interact in meaningful and engaging ways.

We work quickly, nimbly, and collaboratively. We are an AgileUX team, which means that you will not be designing high fidelity deliverables. You thrive concepting with a team, using sketches and wireframes as conversation starters to explore possible solutions. You must bring your top-notch interaction design, information architecture, and user research skills as well your opinion. Most importantly, bring your passion.

The Skinny:

• Develop a deep, empathetic understanding of our customers
• Create iterative, lightweight prototypes to concept solutions
• Lead cross-functional teams to solve business problems
• Design elegant, efficient and sophisticated solutions
• Prototype, Usability Test, and then Prototype some more (we do testing weekly)
• Be able to defend your design decisions with well-structured arguments
• Thrive in an environment of constant change

The Specs:

• 10+ years experience as an information architect, interaction designer, and user experience designer
• Thorough understanding of design principles
• No fear of speaking with customers (we do that a lot)
• Usability testing – you’ve done it, you love it, you want more of it
• Love of data. We have tons of it. Use it wisely.
• Proof (we’ll ask you to demo it) of taking an idea from concept to implementation.
• Be able to speak to your work clearly and succinctly (we value brevity)

**Note: This is not a graphic design role nor a front-end coding role but should you bring those skills along with solid IA/IxD chops, that’s just more of you to love.**

Email me to apply (wevans@theladders.com)

Will Evans is Manager, Experience Design for TheLadders in New York City with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy. His experiences include Director UX for social network analytics and terrorism risk modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new homepage for recruiters. The product, marketing and user experience teams here at TheLadders have been working hard to optimize our sites and services for professionals and recruiters alike. The new recruit.theladders.com is a big step toward putting the right professionals in the jobs that are right for them.

Not only does this new homepage ease the search process for employers and recruiters who are new to TheLadders, but it also makes it that much faster to match them with the right professionals for their jobs straight from the start. Our new design puts search first, allowing recruiters to dive right into Passport—our free recruitment solution—while providing them with a comprehensive chart of our other solutions and full suite of products. Staffing and HR pros can view product videos and even request a one-on-one demo with one of our account executives to see all the ways we can help them fill their open seats.

Our aim is to make it quick and easy for employers and recruiters to promote their jobs, advertise their brands and send updates to interested professionals. This makes it quick and easy for our job-seeking community to start connecting with the right recruiters and applying to the right jobs. Hear that sound? I think it might be the black hole shrinking.

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

If you are a Lead Java Engineer (code monkey or hands-on manager)…or…a Senior Front-End Architect…or a wee bit less senior Java Engineer, I want you to know about TheLadders – both our development environment and our social mission (to help people manage their careers).

But first I’d like to talk about the 3 types of technology companies who hire developers…one of them is TheLadders:

One type is those with a sexy name, lots of funding, and a great social buzz; everyone wants to work at one of these “west coast”-like firms and discussions about the stack often produce religiously fervent comments. This isn’t TheLadders – although we do have many of the same perks.

Then there are those where the product or service doesn’t set the tech world on fire; the stack isn’t a featured discussion on code forums and programming is as essential as plumbing is to a house. But the programming challenges aren’t going to be ones that set the code forums on fire either. This is definitely not TheLadders.

TheLadders is the final type of tech organization. Despite the stack not receiving top public billing, it is architecture, programming, and SQA that enable our job-seeking customers to receive highly customized career content. Everyone knows someone who is looking for work or simply a better career opportunity; these are our customers and our mission is to help them succeed.

In a nutshell, there are three types of developers TheLadders is interested in:

• Those with a keen interest in the scientific end of programming. You will be charged with designing and developing software to make content recommendations to users (AKA customer merchandizing).

• Those with a keen interest in UX programming. This is where the customer merchandizing piece becomes interesting and focuses on the architecture and building of lightweight mashups.

• Those with a keen interest in “plumbing” programming. Here the work revolves around architectural patterns and scalability particularly SOA.

Do you fall into one or more of these buckets and have a desire to architect and build a high-volume, SaaS platform that helps people identify and achieve their career goals? Are you the kind of engineer who wishes you were also a product manager? Do you prefer to work in a fast-paced, open environment where innovation and participation is encouraged through blogging, custom tool development, hack-day events and other out-of-the-box techniques?

If so, you will love it at TheLadders.

Our Software Development Story

To know where you will go when you pick TheLadders, it helps to know how much we improved. During 2011, our technology team:

• Implemented the groundwork for SOA

• Successfully modeled the core domains (jobs, jobseekers, recruiters) that will be incorporated into 2012 front-end/back-end development efforts

• Developed a Continuous Deployment Roadmap that shortened deployment cycle time from every 2 weeks (requiring 6+ hours) to 2-3 times per week (requiring 30 minutes-1 hour)

• Increased overall test coverage from fully manual to fully automated during development

• Introduced Scala into the stack

In 2012, technology will continue to drive improvements in our product development environment and will likely involve new architectures, stack changes, and delivery platforms. Perhaps you’ve been part of large scale efforts to make these changes happen; if so, then you’ll like what you’re going to read next.

Although the stack is heavily oriented towards Java leveraging Spring and built upon Soir/Lucene, MySQL, and Avro – meaning you know Java, the JVM and the ecosystem of supporting tools and libraries – we’re becoming more code agnostic (you will probably have a say in what stack will become).

On the front-end, it’s JQuery, HTML5, CSS3, JS, JSTL, JSP tags, and associated frameworks not to mention the potential use of Backbone, Ember , Less, Sass, Node, Mustache, Handlebars, haml-js, Coffeescript, and Sinatra. What else should we be looking at?

What’s important to us is that you’ve embraced and are active in the open source community; you’re willing to debate and discuss architecture and stacks; your coding style is best described by others as “craftsman”-like in style and quality.

The Positions

Hands-on Front-end Architect

You must be a natural-born problem-solver with exceptional hands-on technical skills. We’ve moving to a REST service-based architecture which will be a large factor in our applications future capabilities.

This role is all about leading us into the future, and we are definitely open to change. This role will be charged with guiding our front-end architecture as we grow and build new products. You will be a decision maker on what frameworks we use, how we build web applications, and ultimately determine what web app development at TheLadders looks like in the future.

Your job will be to help us build highly interactive, visually compelling solutions that will guide our customers to the right opportunities or individuals, and surface and merchandise candidates and careers in the most flattering and authentic light.  This is not a job-board development role; this is a chance to create a new product in a category with a solid social mission – helping people manage their careers by delivering them with customized career content.

You will be working in a young team that will appreciate your wisdom, experience, and creative problem-solving skills but also likes to debate, push back, and discuss options. You’ll be given the autonomy to make the important decisions that will drive front-end development; you will not work for a boss who hovers over you.

Lead Software Engineer (could be a Manager)

You are already a real software development leader in your Scrum and you are comfortable with challenging your team – and yourself – to make better strategic and tactical decisions. You have shipped large projects working as part of a cohesive team…and you can point to them online.

You enjoy mentoring younger team members in an XP environment and take pride in seeing them mature into future engineering leaders. You abide by the “best tool for the job” approach to selecting technologies and languages. You are known for the beauty of your code and are an evangelist for craftsman-like programming.

Your job will be to contribute to the end-to-end implementation of our highest profile projects especially those that focus on the ultra-complex goal of making content recommendations to users.

As a leader in the group – again, you can be a code monkey or a hands-on manager, you will suggest tools and best practices that will continuously improve the quality of design and implementation as well as site performance.

Finally, you’ll have the chance to leave your mark by helping us to staff, grow, and cultivate a very-high performing engineering team.

Java Engineers

Both front-end and back-end teams are also looking for less senior developers who enjoy the Scrum, thrive in technology-driven environments, and are looking for places to make a mark (TheLadders is a meritocracy – you are recognized for what you do not how many years of experience you bring). I’ve written about the contents of the stack and the development environment earlier; interested?

Next Step?

Email me about your interest; send a resume if you’d like. There’s no relocation per se because frankly the New York Metro area has plenty of incredible Java programmers. I’ll be happy to talk to you about the role of interest and answer all your questions.

In the end, TheLadders is all about high-tech meeting high-touch and making a difference. If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing this is what you’re looking for…

Steve Levy is Principal of outside-the-box Consulting and works as the Lead Technology Recruiter at TheLadders. He’s focused on recruiting, career counseling, social media, and organizational development consulting; he has been referred to as “the recruiting industry’s answer to Tom Peters”.

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

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

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

Click here for the presentation ›

Leslie Barrett is the Senior Search Architect at TheLadders. Leslie has worked making enterprise search software for companies large and small for many years. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University in Computational Linguistics, is a frequent speaker on issues in Search and Sentiment Analysis and is the author of over 20 academic papers on language technology. 

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1 – persona creation

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

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

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

Example of ad hoc persona

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

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

The bottom left quadrant was for demographics.

The bottom right quadrant was for needs and goals.

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

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

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

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

The team voting with planning poker cards

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

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

Spectrums with names mapped on them

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

Completed persona

Day 2 – Persona verification and design studio

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

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

Reviewing the consolidated personas

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

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

The design studio in progress

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

Big sketchin’!

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

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

Persona cards – front

Persona cards – back

Learnings

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

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

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

This article was first published at jeffgothelf.com

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

There seem to be a lot of questions out there lately about what it’s like to work at TheLadders – especially on the product and technology teams. A recent photo of the company we sent to our members revealed that over 400 people work here. A significant chunk of that group works in product and technology. What do those people do? How do they work? Here are a few interesting insights that may help answer the question:

1. There are more than 30 people working on the Product team at TheLadders. Their focus is getting to the core of the conversation happening offline between job seekers and recruiters and translating it into a compelling online experience.
2. Of those 30 Product people, 13 work in User Experience. Yep, our UX team is bigger than most startups.
3. Nearly 60 people are in the technology organization. The work they do spans everything from front-end dev to database administration to CRM system maintenance.
4. We have three people focused on nothing but improving search functions. We affectionately refer to them as “Sergey”; “Larry”; and, um, one other name.
5. We’re an Agile shop. Have been for more than two years now. Like Brad Pitt in “The Devil’s Own,” we’re not going back (to waterfall).
6. We run six Scrum teams that are each focused on solving an explicit business problem.
7. Each Scrum team has at least one representative from each discipline – Product management, user experience, dev and QA.
8. Like most folks, we run two-week sprints. We tried to get it down to one week, but for us, that didn’t provide enough time to bring the awesome each sprint.
9. We have 0 cubicles in our space. Why? Because cubicle walls stifle conversation, which is the lifeblood of our innovation. So, yeah, it gets a little noisy, but it’s nothing Dr. Bose or Dr. Dre couldn’t help out with.

10. The products we create help nearly 5,000,000 people advance in their careers.

So what do all of these folks work on? We focus on collapsing the black hole that persists between job seekers and recruiters. Relevant, meaningful communications between these two groups produce quick hires. The more we can help initiate those conversations, the faster people get jobs. It’s not easy, though. Our data sets are in constant flux, the content in our systems is not standardized, and our user base is not familiar with the intricacies of a 21^st century job search. We work to overcome these challenges so that when the right person comes across the right job, it’s obvious to both parties. We work fast, test a lot of our ideas, fail quickly, learn and iterate  Eric Ries would be proud.

We learn a ton, and we share that knowledge. In the past year alone, TheLadders employees have spoken at SXSW, Startup 2011, Agile 2010 (and 2011 too) and countless local tech meetups. In fact, we host a lot of them in our Hudson St. office. It’s pretty inspiring to work with such smart folks every day.

If any of this sounds appealing to you, there’s good news: We’re hiring! Drop your resume in there and come solve problems, learn new things, and do some good.