TheLadders Blog

In my last post,  I wrote about why it’s important to challenge your existing assumptions when you build products for mobile devices. As I explained in that article, it is not enough to merely copy (web) functionality and make it look nice on a smaller screen; you have to first re-think what functionality is necessary for a mobile platform. Today, I want to talk about finding inspiration in new places.

When we started our competitive research early in 2013, we investigated every major job-search app within Apple’s app store. We wanted to see how they dealt with the unique challenges of mobile devices and, more importantly, solved the problems of their mobile customers. To be frank, we were disappointed. Most apps just replicated their trusted web experience: login, search for jobs, save or email jobs, and sometimes (if you already had a resume on file), you were allowed to apply using your phone.

Not only do these well-known job-search processes require significant time, they are tasks better managed on a desktop or laptop where you have lots of screen space –which is something you don’t have on your phone.

When we started wondering who else was trying to solve similar underlying problems, it didn’t take long for us to draw correlations between the online job search and online dating. After all, they are based on the same premise of matching people and putting them in touch with each other. If you stop thinking about resumes, job descriptions, cover letters and applications, job search is exactly the same thing as dating. We want to put the right job seeker in front of the right employer. In dating, matching is based on things like height, weight, interests, hobbies etc. In the job search, matching is based on experience, skills, career desires, etc.

So, we did some investigating to see if there was any innovation happening in the dating space. To our surprise, there was. One app that has gotten quite a bit of attention lately is Tinder.

Tinder reinvented online dating with simplistic mobile functionality

At the core, Tinder matches people based on their profiles, and then establish a connection between two people that “heart” each other (think “hot or not”). With that simple functionality, Tinder broke the conventions of countless other dating apps that require users to spend substantial time searching through dating profiles and sending messages to each and every person who appeared somewhat promising. Sound familiar? Yes, that’s exactly how most job-search sites function.

Now think about this paradigm in the job-search space. Why shouldn’t we first match job seekers with jobs and then ask whether they consider themselves a perfect fit for the positions? Then, once job seekers identify a couple of well-suited positions, we approach the employers to see if they agree. If both parties are in agreement, a connection is established, followed by resume (and possibly cover letter) exchanges if necessary.

See what’s happening? We take the work out of the job search. Let us do the heavy lifting and present you with initial matches so that all you need to do from your mobile device is tell us which opportunities you’re interested in. If the employer agrees, you two can take it from there.

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).

The era of the PC is over. Apple has been saying this for a while and they are right. Sales of tablet computers and smartphones combined have overtaken PC sales. The once #1 PC manufacturer in the country, Dell, just announced that they are going private in order to take radical measures necessary to survive the post-PC era without the harsh glare of shareholders. Even Intel has started killing off its own PC business.

Of course, the change in devices owned and used by consumers has a profound impact on millions of other businesses. Big news outlets report that traffic from mobile devices now reaches and exceeds 50% of their overall traffic at certain hours of the day. Facebook is now a mobile company. Latest reports show that 25% of Americans now use their smartphone, not computers, for the majority of their web surfing.

So how has the move to mobile changed your ability to find the right job? In short: Not much…yet.

Yes, there are apps that support searching for jobs, and maybe some of them even let you apply. But in reality, they are just transferring an online (PC) experience to a smaller screen without adapting it to the mobile world. And that is a problem. What works on a big screen doesn’t necessarily work on a small screen. The when, where and how you use a smartphone should define the experience of the job search the same way it defines the experience of, say, consuming media. The fact is that no company has done the mobile job search right…yet.

We know that. We are talking about it. For starters, our new website is optimized for being viewed on any device. No more frustrations when you pick up your iPad and look at your job matches. Checking out the competition with Scout on your mobile phone? A breeze! Yet, as I said before, if you truly want to create a mobile experience, you have to re-think how job seekers will use their mobile devices to find the perfect job. Different platforms fulfill different needs. For example:

• Do you have access to your resume on your mobile phone? Probably not.
• Do you want to compose your cover letter on your iPhone 5? Not really.
• Do you have time to construct search queries on the go to get perfect job matches? I doubt it.

This is why we started 2013 with a new goal: build an iOS app from scratch.

Our goal is to create an app that is tailored to your mobile device that you can use on the go. This means that we have to find new solutions to problems already solved on the web.

So while you are reading this, we have a team at TheLadders working hard to come up with new solutions for your mobile needs. We are talking to job seekers, observing how they use their mobile devices and testing paper prototypes with them. It’s a new and exciting learning experience for all of us. Every day, we are surprised by the new things we discover, and we question things that we once took for granted. In the end there is one goal: to get the mobile job search right! Stay tuned for more to come.

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).

“You must be the change you wish to see….” -Gandhi

Eight years ago today, I joined TheLadders.

Back in January 2005, we were a small startup with only 25 employees. My first job was working on building a new version of TheLadders.com. At the time, there were only a few hundred lines of code and we spent the next few months working around the clock to deliver a new and improved website. When we were done and the site was launched, I remember my father asking me, “Now what? The site’s done; do you still have work to do?”

We certainly had more work to do then and we still do now. Today, our mission is the same as when we started: finding the right person for the right job. As long as our customers face frustration with their job search, we will be hard at work trying to help job seekers find their next job or employers their perfect candidate.

As we embrace 2013, I am seeing the same kinds of change and excitement that I saw in 2005. Over the past eight years, we’ve learned a lot about the job search, and we’re making big moves to reflect a new way of discovering job opportunities and candidates.

Fundamentally, we have changed the way we work. We threw long backlogs and task-lists out the window, and started working towards shared themes and goals among the whole company; not just technology, not just a single Scrum team. Themes shared by the CEO, marketing, sales, finance, customer service, product, tech and UX groups. With this approach, we have abandoned a traditional team structure previously set by executives and, instead, empowered our staff to determine how best to organize themselves to achieve our shared goals. We try and gather the right people in a room to solve a problem and we know they will make something great.

Have we figured out the magic formula for software-development success? Perhaps. We are closer to being agile with a lowercase ‘a’ than we ever before. We are making better decisions about how to best deploy our collective brainpower and talents. We are shipping value to our users faster. We are learning to say ‘no,’ affording us more time to focus on the work that best serves our users.

Almost 20% of our traffic is coming from phones and tablets, so the new website for TheLadders is completely responsive. It renders well on desktops, tablets and mobile phones. And, we are not stopping with just some fancy CSS; more is coming on the mobile front in the next few months, so stayed tuned.

Because finding the right job should be less tedious than searching through a database of titles, our team of data scientists and engineers work relentlessly to pair our users with the jobs that suit them best. You can still search if you want, but you do not have to be an expert on crafting keyword searches and filters to find relevant jobs; based on what you tell us, and also what you actually do online, we will find you those jobs.

Matching is easy to say and hard to do well. We have to deal with a host of technical challenges, such as classifying jobs into our taxonomy, and we are employing machine-learning to do that. But, that is a topic for another blog post. If you are one of our more-than 5 million members, you may have noticed some of our job- matching efforts with our new Targeted Hiring Alerts.

Job descriptions are becoming a commodity; everybody’s got them.  So, what data do we have to augment them and provide our users with relevant job information they cannot get anywhere else? We’ve launched TheLadders Scout, an innovative (and addictive) way to get a deeper understanding for the job market and your competition. It is a start towards giving our users the data they need to make faster and more-informed decisions in their job search. Here’s our founder’s take on it.

We’ve grown a lot in the past eight years. With more than 5 million jobseekers and 31,000 recruiters and employers, we have embarked on a large infrastructure rebuild, launched powerful caching with Varnish for our web-services layer, and we are leveraging Storm for processing our long-running match and email tasks. Our move from MySQL to Clustrix continues, and dozens of DB slaves are going offline as we increase our load on the Clustrix database. And, most significantly, we are refactoring away some of the most fiddly bits of our codebase.

Additionally, we are rebuilding our data center with shiny hardware, as well as a new network and level of resource flexibility that gets the bits from us to you, that much faster. Our DevOps team has been busy designing the new data center and ramping up for a smooth transition over the upcoming months.

To celebrate our accomplishments so far, and to share our excitement about what is to come, we are re-launching our development blog, because the best decisions stand up to the harshest light of criticism. There are exceptionally talented people on this team, and you should meet them.

Want more from the product and development team? Visit the Engineering Stories blog!

Kyri Sarantakos is Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders.  When he’s not playing around with iOS development, he can be found hacking all things radio-controlled.

We live in a mobile world where business never stops. Most of us read emails, send texts, and engage with coworkers, friends and family on our mobile devices. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s makes us more productive wherever we are.

So why are recruiters still reduced to staring at their monitors as they try to find the perfect candidate?

We asked our product and development teams that same question. During a “hackathon,” a few of them answered it: Recruiters can go mobile, too. With a lot of hard work, a mobile app was born.

Today, TheLadders is proud to launch our first mobile app for recruiters: “Recruitable™.”

TheLadders Recruitable mobile app will instantly connect recruiters to fresh “recruitable” candidates that match their job posts, so recruiters can contact great candidates instantly, wherever they are.

This is great for TheLadders recruiters and job seekers alike. It means more frequent—and faster—connections.

(For now, Recruitable is only for recruiters on TheLadders who have a full RecruiterLicense, and only available for the iPhone. Download Recruitable from the app store now.)

So what does Recruitable bring to the table for recruiters?

Instant notification of great candidates.
We spend a great deal of time away from our desk: waiting for the next train, buying special order lattes, or jumping between meetings. Recruitable aims to make these moments more useful.

Recruitable compares every new candidate who joins TheLadders to a recruiter’s existing job posts, and immediately sends the recruiter a push notification when there’s a match. Recruiters don’t need to keep checking email or even run a search. Recruitable simply hands them great candidates.

Key candidate info.
Recruitable provides the candidate’s name, location, title, company, and dates of current and previous roles. According to our recent eye-tracking study, that’s what recruiters need to make a decision on whether or not to connect with a candidate.

Recruiters quickly see new matches for their open positions, and job seekers are given a jump start on a job. Win, win.

Instant communication.
First impressions are important, but being first is more important. Recruitable gives recruiters the chance to send a personalized message to matching candidates at the moment they join TheLadders. That means both the job seeker and recruiter have a competitive edge.

We’re excited about Recruitable. We can’t wait to help both recruiters and job seekers find the right match, at any time.

Download Recruitable from the app store now or read the press release.

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.