Mother’s day is here, and I wanted to talk to you guys about something I call Mom guilt. I’m not talking about the guilt trips our Moms all treated us to when we didn’t clean our room as a kid, or now when we don’t call as often as they would like. I’m talking about the massive guilt every working Mom feels every day. Guilt that we are not spending enough time with our kids, coupled with guilt that our work may be suffering from not having our undivided attention 24 hours a day.
The author, Holly, and her daughter, Juliet.
TheLadders recently released a survey to more than 250 women who are, or soon will be, working mothers. The results had me nodding furiously while answering a work email, changing my daughter’s diaper and submitting my sales forecast all at the same time (yes, moms multi-task). Balancing a career and a family is a huge struggle for 87% of respondents, with 55% admitting that “excelling at both is overwhelming.”
In addition, when it comes to balance, 13% “struggled at first, but now it’s under control,” 16% “always put family first and work has suffered for it,” and 3% “always put work first and family has suffered for it.” I can only assume that the other 13% that said they “Successfully manage both aspects” actually slipped on baby drool and tripped into the computer, selecting the wrong line by mistake.
Either way, the survey results are enlightening, and while I still feel that pang of guilt when missing little milestones in my daughter’s life or needing to run out of work early once in a while, at the very least this survey assures me that I am not alone.
You can read the full survey results here. And don’t forget to call your Mom!
Holly Esposito is a Senior Account Manager at TheLadders, and Juliet’s mom. If you see her running down Canal Street in New York, please make way… she needs to get home to relieve the baby sitter by 7pm.
Money isn’t the only “green” candidates care about when considering a job offer. Professionals are more concerned with the eco-friendly practices in the workplace (or lack thereof) than hiring companies may think. In a recent survey we found that 72% of respondents would choose the more eco-conscious company if they had two equal job offers. When asked how important it is that their company is green, the majority of professionals said it was very or even extremely important to them.
Being green isn’t just important for attracting new talent. Your current employees might be unhappy with you lack of your eco-conscious practices, as well. Some 35% of respondents would not consider their most recent company to be green. An additional 17% were not sure whether their company can be considered green, which leaves only less than half of respondents considering their company “green enough” for their standards.
It’s not all bad news, though. Given a small incentive, we also found that a whopping 75% of respondents would change their daily routine to contribute to a greener company environment. We also found that it actually doesn’t take that much to make your workplace just a little bit greener. While many companies already reduce their paper usage and recycle and reduce trash, there is an opportunity to buy greener supplies, encourage employees to turn off their computers and lights and turn down that AC when not needed.
Benjamin Grohé is the Product Manager for new consumer products at TheLadders. When he is not coming up with innovative ideas to delight our customers, he is celebrating his European heritage by cruising the streets of New York City on his new Vespa or playing football (the REAL football).
How do recruiters and hiring managers actually make decisions about candidates?
One thing we know they use is your resume. But how? What is it about one resume that gives a recruiter the information they need to make the right call?
In order to find out, we needed to see how recruiters reviewed resumes. To do this, we conducted a comprehensive eye-tracking study of recruiters while they reviewed resumes.
If you’re not familiar with eye tracking, it’s a line of research that uses technology to record and analyze where and how long someone focuses when digesting a piece of information or completing a task.
We brought in recruiters and recorded them as they viewed online profiles, different types of resumes, and other forms of candidate information.
Here’s some of what we discovered:
How much time does a recruiter spend reviewing a resume?
Unfortunately, not much. Most job seekers think recruiters spend 4 to 5 minutes reviewing a resume. The truth: recruiters spend about 6 seconds before they make the initial “fit/no fit” decision. That means prioritizing information is essential.
Does a professionally written resume make a difference in what a recruiter learns about the candidate?
The results of the study revealed that the recruiters were able to easily find and focus on the important information they were looking for in a professional resume much faster than regular resumes or an online profile.
Are online profiles effective?
No. Online profiles have pictures, and unfortunately, recruiters tended to focus on them for the simple reason that pictures naturally draw the eye. We found they kept recruiters from locating the most relevant information, like skills and experience.
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.
I’m proud to announce that TheLadders was featured in USA TODAY for the second time this month! You can find our Candidate Insight question “What size company do you prefer?” in the March 19, 2012, Money section’s Snapshots®.
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.
USA TODAY, the widest-circulated newspaper in the country, cited TheLadders in the Money section cover’s popular Snapshots® on March 7, 2012. Stemming from one of TheLadders Candidate Insights questions — “Does your next job have to be a promotion?” – the story will reach more than 1.7 million readers.
A big thanks to USA TODAY and TheLadders Product and Marketing teams for revealing this important and innovative information about Job Seekers.
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.
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, Operationsand 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 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.
Nearly every year around December, TheLadders freezes development and releases around the holidays to stabilize the site in preparation for the expected spike in site traffic from professionals hoping to make good on their New Year’s resolutions to find a new job. A colleague of mine, Ed Cudahy, had the idea to use this time for an internal Hackathon and it’s been our pre-holiday tradition ever since.
This annual event has been hugely valuable for our product development teams allowing us to build and test innovative new tools and techniques. Reaching a little bit beyond their technical comfort zone is something that we want our teams to embrace all the time. Encouraging that creativity during the Hackathon is a great way to help incorporate innovation into our everyday process and get everyone involved in the process of innovating at all stages of implementation.
This year, we extended the event to four days total to make sure there was time to trace a full product development arc: from ideation to selection of tools to the crunch-time that hits just short of the finish line. With just a little direction and a lot more freedom, I think this was the most successful Hackathon yet. In our experience, a strict set of requirements can stifle some good ideas—and the whole purpose of this event is for people to stretch their brains a little.
To create little breaks and make good use of some of the ridiculous (i.e. awesome) toys we’ve accumulated on the floor here, we added a number of side competitions as well. Really, these were just for fun to build team morale and release a little energy. In the true spirit of a Hackathon, all of our awards and trophies were hacks in and of themselves. We had a few golden mice, a golden keyboard, and the grand prize, a lego trophy with an Arduino and an LED sheild embedded in the front scrolling the word “WINNING”. Taking a little inspiration from the television show “The League,” we expect that this year’s winning team will modify the trophy and present it to the team that wins next year’s Hackathon.
Dustin Lucien is the Director of Engineering at TheLadders with 15 years of product development experience. When not planning flying fish races as a fun diversion for internal hackathons, you can find him at home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Clinton Hill.
