TheLadders Blog

Ask a customer service representative if s/he likes his/her job. Chances are that the answer will be some form of “no” (and may contain expletives). Here at TheLadders, that’s not the case. Our Job Search Support Center is staffed with highly qualified, extremely helpful, pleasant people. We’ve known our team to be top-tier for years, but as of yesterday we can now call TheLadders customer service team “award-winning!”

The Stevie Awards have named TheLadders Job Search Support Center as the recipient of their prestigious Contact Center of the Year award*. Helping support and engage our customers during a time when they need it most is gratifying work and we’re thrilled to be recognized by industry peers for our hard work and devotion.

Our Job Search Advisors are unmatched in their energy, intelligence, and dedication and I’m grateful to have such a talented team to lead every day. Having started at TheLadders as a customer service agent (we were called Community Associates way back then), I can speak firsthand to how much we’ve learned and grown over the past several years. Much of what we’ve become is a result of our forward-thinking leadership – industry trailblazer Anita Samojednik (VP, Customer Operations) has brought us to new levels of innovation and we are delighted to bring this award home to her. Anita and the entire management team work tirelessly to make sure that we are listening to our customers and improving our services for them.

Here’s to all the new and exciting things we have in the works for our customers in 2012!

*(Up to 100 Seats)

Niccos Andrade is Manager, Operations and has been with TheLadders since 2007, in the Job Search Support Center. When he’s not working on ways to the best customer experience for our members, he’s working on his backhand on the tennis court.

This past Saturday, the first Agile User Experience (AgileUX) conference, sponsored by TheLadders, was held at the SVA Theater in Manhattan. The conference brought together leading voices from within the New York City design and technology community to discuss strategy and tactics for delivering world class software products.

The conference was organized by Jeff Gothelf, formerly the Director of User Experience at TheLadders, and myself, current head of UX at TheLadders. Todd Hoza, who is the Creative Director for TheLadders, provided creative leadership for the conference.

The speakers we chose came from a cross-section of disciplines including product, venture capital, customer research, and consulting. Speakers representing TheLadders included Eric Burd, VP of Product, who discussed organization change to align the entire business — from sales, marketing, finance and customer support — to an agile mindset.

Eric Burd - VP Product at TheLadders

Also representing TheLadders was Jennifer Gergen, Associate Creative Director, who discussed strategies for better integrating design into an Agile process. I spoke about the importance of continuous, rapid-cadence customer research and usability testing and delved into the details of how to conduct that research and feed it back into product delivery. Finally, Jeff Gothelf argued for demystifying design and the importance of transparency for greater team collaboration.

Will Evans, Manager, User Experience Design at TheLadders

The event drew close to 400 attendees, some from as far away as Japan, who gathered to learn and share ideas for designing greater product experiences faster. The general consensus was that it was a great learning experience exploring the most recent thinking in product design, and many people left energized and excited to bring those ideas back to their organizations. TheLadders was proud to sponsor such an event and continues to be an active member of the New York City Technology and Design community.

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.

Wow! We have come a long way. This week, TheLadders surpassed five million members. That’s five million people that we are helping with their job search. We work to help these members find their next calling in life however we can, whether it’s through our job matching expertise, our personalized products and services or our world class career advice.

We’ve been working for nine years to learn the science of the job search and share that insight with our members. More importantly, we’re happy that we can deliver results for our customers. In 2010 alone, a Harris Interactive study* showed that over 500,000 $100K+ professionals credited TheLadders with helping them find a new job. Most recently, we launched our Signature program, which offers members personalized help navigating their job search and a guaranteed job offer within six months or their money back. That’s how strongly we believe in the program.

We certainly have come a long way as a company and have a lot to be proud of. When I started at TheLadders in 2004, we had just reached 9,000 members. Since then, not only have we grown our member base to 5 million, we’ve expanded to all professional level jobs and have grown our jobs onsite by 3x just in the last 6 months alone. We’ve attracted over 17,000 new recruiters to our site to connect with job seekers and launched countless products and features for users to take advantage of during their job search.

I’m proud to be part of a company committed to finding the right person for the right job – and helping so many members move their careers forward. Great job, team!

Leslie Semegran is Vice President of Marketing and Engagement and has been with TheLadders since 2004, in various capacities across Marketing and Sales. When she’s not endlessly searching for ways to engage and help members, she’s at home running around after her nine-month-old daughter.

At TheLadders, we’ve always believed strongly in the providing you with the right piece of career advice. After all, writing the perfect cover letter or asking the right questions in an interview can make all the difference in your job search.

You’ve always had access to our original and exclusive career advice on TheLadders.com, but in 2011, we decided to bring our advice right to you.

That meant Twitter, and @TheLadders.

It’s not just working, it’s crushing. We put a superstar copywriter, Kate Addicott, in charge, and @TheLadders now has over 20,000 followers! Not only have we been able to help our customers, but the relationships we’ve developed with job seekers, recruiters, employers and industry experts have been invaluable to us, too.

We hope you’re enjoying @TheLadders and all of our original career advice and job search content. You can check it out on our Twylah page.

Great work, Kate!

And if you’re not already, you should follow us on Twitter here.

Bill Beard is the Associate Creative Director of Copy for TheLadders. He (obviously) loves to travel, always has ESPN.com open, and always takes the cheese option when it’s offered.

Let me try a phrase on you:

Unlimited Vacation.

That’s right. I said unlimited vacation. I’m sure you can’t wrap your brain around that. I couldn’t either, at first. But it’s true. When you work at TheLadders, you get unlimited vacation days.

It’s a groundbreaking philosophy. But… how can we do it?

Simple: We don’t hire slackers. We hire people who want to do awesome work, and want to come in every day and kick some ass. TheLadders HR and executives know that we’re not going to abuse that policy.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t use it. I recently took advantage of our unlimited vacation and headed off to Australia and New Zealand.

For a month.

A whole, consecutive four weeks. I’m not a tenured professor on sabbatical—but I took three consecutive weeks last year, too. So I wrapped up my projects and assigned coverage to my amazing team (thanks guys!), and packed my bags.

Not to sound trite, but it was the trip of a lifetime. I started with two weeks in Australia: First, the cultural capital of Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road. Next, the diverse neighborhoods and iconic sights of Sydney—take an $11 ferry ride to Manley Beach if you ever go, you’ll get great shots of the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House.

Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge, from the Manley Ferry. Sydney, Australia.

I capped off my Aussie visit with a dive on the Great Barrier Reef that opened my eyes to a breathtaking world, and was an experience that I will remember for the rest of my life.

My best shot from the dive on the Great Barrier Reef. Nemo!

I followed that up with some family time, as my sister currently lives in New Zealand. She’s a doctor at a small hospital in a remote—but very friendly—town called Balclutha.

My mom also flew in—it was Thanksgiving week, after all! From Queenstown to Dunedin, we toured the whole South Island, stopping at my sister’s house to celebrate the holiday—turkey was actually hard to find!—with some other Americans that worked with my sister. (And some new Kiwi friends!)

As we toured, we drove past skyscraping mountains and rolling, grass-covered hills and pastures reminiscent of the Scottish countryside. (The running joke in the car: Look! Sheep!) A boat cruise through the idyllic glacial fiord of Milford Sound—complete with a pod of dolphins who took a liking to our boat—was the highlight.

Milford Sound National Park, on the South Island of New Zealand.

Then we flew up to the North Island. We visited Rotorua, which everyone in New Zealand calls “RotoVegas.” (Kiwis are super nice and Rotorua was fun and beautiful, but clearly not many Kiwis have been to the real Vegas.)

Eventually, I ended my trip in the beautiful harbor city of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest, with 1.2 million residents. (As we drove past sheep farm after sheep farm, I had to remind myself the whole country had less than half of New York City’s population.)

I’ve only been back to work for two days. But I definitely understand the real reason we have unlimited vacation: It’s the way I feel right now. I’m rested, re-energized, ready to get back to work and kick some ass.

Bill Beard is the Associate Creative Director of Copy for TheLadders. He (obviously) loves to travel, always has ESPN.com open, and always takes the cheese option when it’s offered.

You may be walking around your city/town wondering to yourself — have I traveled back in time to 1977?

Nope! It’s Movember. Movember is a campaign to raise awareness and funds to support the fight against prostate/testicular cancer. The movement began in Australia (where the nick name for moustache is “Mo”) and is now a global force.

During month of November men around the world grow moustaches and gather sponsors to donate to the cause. It’s a fun way to generate awareness for a sometimes forgotten issue — men’s health.

Here at TheLadders, a group of 24 proud and brave men to rock the ‘stache for the entire month. So far we’ve raised $5,200 and are almost at our lofty goal of $6k. As capitan of the team, I can tell you it’s no easy task walking around for a month with a ferret on your upper lip. Mothers hide their children, girls shoot dirty looks and I keep getting offers to be a Burt Reynolds stunt double. The point is that a moustache is quite ostentatious accessory and everyone has an opinion. But, that’s the point! Every glare, every snarl, every fleeing old lady is a chance to spread the word. It’s a living billboard for men’s health, and the 24 men of TheLadders have done a smashing job of generating funds and fun to kick cancer’s butt.

We’ve even created a calendar to memorialize our efforts. A beautiful desk calendar available for only $10. Every person purchasing the calendar will not only be contributing to a worthwhile cause but, ensuring a 2012 full of daily creepiness!

If you’re interested in donating click here.

1. Click “Donate to team” on the left hand side or find your favorite moustache dude on the right hand side of the page to donate individually
2. Fill out the required information
3. Give the ‘stache and cancer research a monetary boost

If you would like this alluring desk calendar, just email me and I’ll make the magic happen for you!

JP Russo is a sales executive for the enterprise sales team. When he’s not creeping people out with his moustache he is making sure recruiters and HR directors across the country get the most qualified candidates in the least amount of time.

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.