TheLadders Blog

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.

Here at TheLadders we are constantly working to find the best way for you to land your next position. Whether it’s improving the tools you are using, such as your resume or your cover letter, or offering valuable job-seeking strategies, we want to help you go about your search in the best way possible. What that boils down to is that, if we think that our members could be doing something better, we don’t wait for them to ask.

One of the first things we do is let our members know the importance of having an up-to-date profile and resume searchable on TheLadders. We recently went through our database and found thousands of members that had old profiles and resumes, or no resumes at all. There is no doubt that routinely updating your resume and membership profile on TheLadders greatly increases the attention you receive from recruiters and hiring managers.

To help our members get the most value from our services, we hit the phones to relay the importance of an up-to-date resume. And the message was well received! Within the first few weeks, 7,000 members went from unsearchable to searchable on TheLadders by completing their profiles and uploading their resumes. Most importantly, these 7,000 members are now closer to landing their next position.

Remember, we are here to answer your questions by phone, email or live chat, but as we come across tips to improve your job search, you may get answers from us before you even know the question.

Drake Naples is the Team Lead of the Job Search Support Center (JSSC) at TheLadders. He strives to ensure members of TheLadders are using the website as efficiently and effectively as possible to land their dream job.

Most companies look at customer service in a silo. Service personnel are expected to regurgitate talking points, call scripts and marketing spin over the phone, email, chat, or in person to ticket numbers. The unfortunate result: Customer service is perceived as a cost center whose sole purpose is to keep customers quiet.

At TheLadders, we wholeheartedly reject this notion of customer service. The purpose of our customer-service team is to help people find the right job as quickly and painlessly as possible. We believe this so strongly that we’ve even named our customer-service department the Job Search Support Center.
This philosophy has led us to do things that would cause the leaders of many customer-service departments to shudder in horrified disbelief.

Every Premium member is assigned to a Job Search Advisor. Your Job Search Advisor is a real human being who works out of our Lower Manhattan office and helps you succeed in your job search.

Job Search Advisors participate in ongoing training – close to 1,000 hours of classroom training last year alone! The job search as it exists today is frustrating and confusing, and accepted best practices are in continuous flux. Our calling at TheLadders is to learn the right way to search for a job and pass that knowledge on to you. Rather than go with our gut and guess, we have a research department that’s tasked with building data-based best practices. The Job Search Support Center training team takes the output of those research studies and develops trainings to pass that knowledge on to your Job Search Advisor, so he or she can pass it on to you. In addition, we have 50+ certified career expects on staff and 35 percent of Job Search Advisors are Certified Professional Career Coaches (CPCC), and that percentage is continuously growing.

Job Search Advisors’ primary goal is to make you successful. Most customer-service departments try to decrease the amount of time they spend speaking with customers. We do the exact opposite. Your Job Search Advisor is encouraged to spend as much time as is necessary to learn about your goals and help you find the right job.

Every job is hand-screened before being placed on the Web site. In an effort to help you find the right job as quickly and painlessly as possible, we have a team of Job Analysts whose goal is to ensure the quality of the jobs you see. Since most companies aren’t willing to divulge specific salary information, we’ve developed strict criteria based on factors such as job function, required education and experience, and industry. We’re proud of the criteria we’ve developed because they’ve enabled us to achieve 99 percent accuracy while continuing to post tens of thousands of jobs every month.

Although we don’t come to work every day in an effort to win awards, it’s always a good feeling to have your hard work recognized. For the fourth consecutive year,TheLadders Job Search Support Center is a finalist for the American Business Award’s Customer Service Department of the Year!