TheLadders Blog

We’re proud to announce the launch of TheLadders RecruitBlog! You’re obviously already familiar with TheBlog, your resource for everything going on inside TheLadders offices. The more we were discovering great stories from inside our company, the more we were realizing how much great content we had to share directly with the recruiting community. That’s why we’re starting RecruitBlog as a place to provide unique content specifically geared for recruiters and HR professionals. Here we’ll be able to share our favorite recruitment articles, whitepapers, event updates and interesting trends from around the web. Make sure to check back regularly to see what’s new as we’ll be updating often to bring you the latest in recruiting from TheLadders community and beyond.

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.

Last Thursday evening TheLadders hosted the latest New York Semantic Web Meetup, a gathering of local technology professionals specializing in various areas of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Information Extraction. The members are especially focused on issues having to do with markup that enables better extraction and retrieval through entity identification and linking of various types. The so-called “semantic web” community is basically a consortium devoted to data standards suited to various use-cases in industry – for example, we have a special markup for Resume data known as Human Resources eXtensible Markup Language (HRXML). This is arguably a “semantic web” markup despite the fact that it does not represent “linked data” by itself but could certainly enable applications that did. The “semantic” part is really about the inferences that can be drawn through utilizing the linked data.

A big issue in getting search and information retrieval to the “next level” is data normalization. This was a theme throughout the evening of talks and one that is central to improving everything from job matches to expanding triple-stores.

Marco Neumann is the organizer of the group and does an excellent job of gathering attendees and attracting top-notch talent from around the area as speakers. It was a pleasure to host this Meetup and the reviews were some of the best that recent meetups have had. Go Ladders!!!

Click here for the presentation ›

Leslie Barrett is the Senior Search Architect at TheLadders. Leslie has worked making enterprise search software for companies large and small for many years. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University in Computational Linguistics, is a frequent speaker on issues in Search and Sentiment Analysis and is the author of over 20 academic papers on language technology. 

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.