TheLadders Blog

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.

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.

We often talk about landmarks here at TheLadders, and with good reason. Successes should be shared and celebrated when all the hard work pays off. The 18th April 2011 was another such landmark for us over this side of the Atlantic, and was the day that we moved in to our brand new shiny office.

I am one of a select group who can remember what it was like to squeeze into our windowless shared office in Camden back in 2008 and have seen the company grow to the point it is now.

Hard work and effort has finally got us the office I think we deserve.

Now that we have had almost a month to settle in and make the place feel like home, we wanted to share a feel of it with you. We look forward to having as many of you visit as possible to see it in all its glory!

Managing Director Derek Pilcher holding court (and yes, that is a pool table in the background).

Shyam and Selena at just a small section of the “Product Wall.”

Lola, Jack, Ben and Adam busy responding to our job seekers.

Looks like Katy, one of our CV analysts, has found something amusing on a CV.

Luke, closing a big one perhaps?

Tamsyn, one of our new corporate sales team members, hitting the phones.

Matt, crunching the numbers!

Look at all that space!

Even after a hard day at work, some are now reluctant to leave!

Philip Cottrell is the Online Editor at TheLadders.co.uk. A history graduate, he has worked his way up through the company to his current position. He’s a stalwart of TheLadders UK office who remembers what it was like at the beginning of the journey

As PR Manager here at TheLadders, I deal with a lot of questions each day. “What is TheLadders?” “How many employees do you have?” “What exactly do you do all day?” But the most significant question I get, the one that ties back for our entire raison d’etre, is, “How many job seekers do you really help?”

Searching for a job is an emotional process – it’s not like buying a pair of shoes. The transaction isn’t finite. While many people (especially me) are passionate about their shoes, if you get the wrong pair, it’s probably not going to alter the course of your future. Our customers are making a decision that affects whether or not they can pay the mortgage next month or if they need to pack up and move their family across the country.

I work with 400 talented people, but some of those I admire most are the members of our Job Search Support Center – they are in the trenches each day loving our customers and helping them deal with significant, life-changing experiences. Our members tell us every day about the value we add to their job search. To quantify just how many people we’ve touched we turned to an external authority and one of the world’s leading market-research firms, Harris Interactive. New research released today by Harris Interactive and TheLadders.com shows that over half a million $100K+ job seekers used TheLadders.com to find a new position in 2010.

You can read the entire press release here, but don’t just take it from us. Take a look below to hear Carolina, a satisfied customer of TheLadders, tell you her success story in her own words.

Check back here and on our Facebook page each week for great new stories about how we are helping to match the right person with the right job.

Dara Cothran is PR Manager at TheLadders.com. She’s a self-proclaimed media junkie and probably the last person in the office who needs another cup of coffee – but she’ll drink one anyway.

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.