TheLadders Blog

There are lots of buzz words flying around in product development these days, but what they are and how they are applied can be hard to grasp. I’d like to pull the curtain back and share how we’ve been applying “Lean UX” in product development at TheLadders.

My team has been working on an iPhone application for our job seekers, which is due to launch in the coming months. As Lead User Experience Designer on the project, I have collaborated closely with my team, applying a “Lean UX” approach – which TheLadders is known for, thanks to the great work of Jeff Gothelf and Will Evans, my predecessors here. In this multi-part series, I’ll share with you how we got through the early, foggy stages of product definition quickly; how we built out the guts of our app while constantly testing with users; and a cutting-edge long-term study we’re running with real users for the last two months of development, while we refine the last set of features.

First: What is this “Lean UX” you speak of? 

Inspired by Eric Reis’s Lean Startup, in a nutshell, “Lean UX” is an approach to design that emphasizes cutting waste by experimenting your way toward results as quickly as possible. “Results” are often defined by some indicator of business viability or customer satisfaction – so this often means getting something in front of customers that we can learn from. In traditional (“waterfall”) design, a problem is defined, then a solution is thoroughly designed and specified before anything is built. With Lean UX, the problem is defined, reduced to its core, and then we sketch, talk, and prototype in quick succession to make something to get in front of customers for feedback. We bring these learnings back to the shop, retool what we need to, then put it out there again, iterating like this until we have enough information to go back and take a real stab at the larger solution.

WEEK 1

The Foundation

We began with a hypothesis, an understanding of constraints, and some overall design principles.

Our hypotheses were simple: we thought that users want to know when new, relevant jobs become available, regardless of where they are. We also thought that once they find a good job, they want to reach out to the employer or recruiter – from their phone – with ease.

Because any good app is usable within the first 30 seconds – and it can be hard to get people to come back once they put it down – we identified other important problems we’d encounter, and broke the entire problem into 3 parts: First use by a new member, core functionality, and re-engagement. We decided to focus first on the core of the application – discovering jobs and taking action on them – and created some ideas.

Creating Ideas

Design studio is a (fun!) team exercise, where everyone in your cross-functional team (in our case: engineers, product managers, designers, and stakeholders) generates ideas in the form of sketches of the actual interface. The process is preceded by declaration of the problem you are solving, who you’re solving it for, and any guardrails, or constraints, you must work with.

In our case, we drew ideas for Rashad, a “proto-persona,” or sketch based on institutional knowledge from years of customer outreach, who we felt may reflect real user needs. We painted a picture of Rashad using the app: he was in his car at lunch time, scanning the list for new jobs. He finds some he sort of likes and wants to look more closely at later. But he sees one in particular that he wanted to get a lead on now, so he takes action.

Before starting, we also reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of the designing for the iPhone:

Advantages

• Users are often interrupted, and must complete tasks in short bits
• It’s easier (and preferred) to consume than create
• Instead of keyboard/mouse, users have other ways to input information:
  • Gestures + Multi-touch
  • Location information (compass, gps, accelerometer, gyroscope)
  • Bluetooth
  • Still + video capture
  • Microphone/speaker (speech to text)
  • Integration with native apps – contacts, email, calendar, reminders, iCloud, phone, text messaging, twitter, passbook, maps, voice memos

Disadvantages

• Small processor size
• Small screen size (difficult for older folks and fat fingers)
• Lack of tactile feedback (another reason typing is hard)
• May not have internet – (users can be offline i.e., in a subway tunnel)

With this, we drew. And we created lots of ideas.

We reviewed them all, and selected a few, which, thanks to POP app, we were able to photograph and organize into a simple, tappable prototype to share with users on a phone.

TheLadders was conducting a public event the next day, so we had a great opportunity to do exactly that. We wanted to know: (1) Do job seekers need to know about jobs on the go, and if so, what sort of support do they need? and (2) Would reaching out to a recruiter about a job they’re interested in, on their phone, solve a need they have?

Learnings

Through conversations with a handful of users, we learned a few things. First, both of our hypotheses were true – users were pretty excited about the possibilities of learning about new job matches on the go, and most of them said they would expect to be able to reach out to the job poster via phone. However, we also learned that they had a high level of skepticism that they’d actually hear from anyone, and that their most desired feature would be an ability to save the jobs.

To be honest, these weren’t mind-blowing learnings; we had anticipated these needs. But hearing them from users helped us understand the severity of the needs, and unified the team around empathy for the user, rather than seeing these as simply features in a backlog.

Within a week, we had defined our problem, created a common understanding of possible solutions (and heard everyone’s voice), validated our hypotheses, and gained valuable insight that would help us prioritize and focus the development of our app.

We took this information back to the office and imagined what the recruiter side of things would look like – after all, we work in an ecosystem, where what happens on one side affects the other.

In the next part, I’ll share how we explored this part of the problem, and then took all these early experiments into higher-fidelity product development.

Michelle Zassenhaus is a Lead User Experience Designer at TheLadders.  When it comes to design and photography, her eye for detail and artistic talent make her a natural.

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).

Last Thursday, I presented at the Clustrix NYC roadshow. Technical executives and leaders from two of the world’s largest database groups on Meetup, New York City’s MySQL and NewSQL groups, were treated to an in-depth presentation about our direct experience with Clustrix, a leading scale-out database. The event, hosted at our SoHo office, drew attendees from companies like SMBC Capital Markets, Getty Images, Pythian, Pixable, M-Square, and ACES.

Historically, databases were the bottleneck in any system, and in the web world, often the primary cause of website downtime and bad user experience. We wanted to keep the downtime as low as possible, so we looked for different ways to scale our database. We also wanted our developers to focus on adding value to our product, rather than spending time working on a database layer. The goal was to scale the system smoothly and economically as requirements increased. A new database system would be able to handle large numbers of concurrent users, provide continuous availability, and process extremely large data sets.

We had several options to scale our database: break it to smaller databases called shards, migrate to a simple key-value or a document store, buy a big iron database, or adopt a modern internet-scale database solution called NewSQL.

The term NewSQL was first introduced by The 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in a 2011 research paper discussing the rise of new database systems as challengers to established vendors.

“NewSQL is used to describe… new relational database products and services designed to bring the benefits of the relational model to distributed architectures, or to improve the performance of relational databases to the extent that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity.” - The 451 Group

TheLadders became one of the first adopters of NewSQL database technology, which is why I was invited to present at the Clustrix NYC Roadshow. I spoke about scalable database solutions, costs and benefits, comparison, selection, implementation process, and a little bit about the future of the NewSQL database market.

The presentation explained the rigorous evaluation and decision-making processes my team undertook to choose a scale-out primary database and captured the audience’s attention right away. Clearly, we understood how critical it was to put the right database solution in place to help power our business. And we left no stone unturned in our evaluation of alternatives. Several attendees mentioned that the depth and detail of the evaluation were highlights for them. The audience walked away with first-hand insight about the strengths and weaknesses of the many alternative products and approaches evaluated by my team.

Of course, what they ultimately wanted to know was why TheLadders chose Clustrix and what results we experienced. Several attendees took notes as I walked through the specific, detailed criteria and performance results that led to Clustrix as the clear choice. Wrapping up with details about the implementation process brought it all home for attendees, as there’s nothing like learning from real-world implementation experience.

Sergei Tsarev, Clustrix CTO and founder, followed up with an overview of the Clustrix solution, use cases, and architecture. He then closed the session with a live demo of Clustrix on Amazon Cloud (AWS), demonstrating the simplicity of starting up the Clustrix scale-out SQL database on AWS in 6 easy steps, and under 10 minutes.

As expected with the technical experts in the crowd, the Q&A session got fairly deep on the inner workings of Clustrix and how it has performed and evolved at TheLadders. The informal networking after the presentations prompted even more thought-provoking questions and insightful discussions.

Overall, it was a great event and the Clustrix team was grateful to TheLadders for hosting and presenting our story. Perhaps the clearest sign of the event’s impact was that multiple attendees stated that they were “convinced,” and wanted to start testing Clustrix right away. I think that speaks volumes to the clarity of the presentation and the credibility of the Clustrix database solution.

Dmitri Mikhailov is the Principal Database Architect for TheLadders. Prior to TheLadders, Dmitri worked for Fortune Global 500 companies in Europe and the United States. He’s worked with big data for over two decades, designing and developing efficient solutions on every major database platform.

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.

As director of consumer marketing at TheLadders, I receive daily exposure to the world of job seekers. Industry data suggests that, while not everyone is actively looking for jobs, the majority of us would be open to new and interesting opportunities. Basically, between wintry economic times and passive job seekers, it has never been harder to conduct a competent job search.

A typical job seeker may wonder, “Who is my competition, and how do I stack up against them?” or simply, “Should I even bother applying for this job?” While that decision is ultimately up to the job seeker, it is fundamental enough to our customers’ satisfaction that we attempt to help them do so. In a post-web 2.0 world, it is not enough to provide the ability to apply to great jobs; a superior experience will bring its community together (with all the data it creates) to add value for everyone.

This is why we’re kicking off 2013 with our newest product, “Scout.” For the first time, we are giving job seekers a behind-the-scenes look at the other candidates who have applied for the same position. Based on your profile, you can see how you compare to other applicants in five categories: years of experience, education level, areas of expertise, current title, and current salary. All this information is anonymously aggregated and displayed in Scout, providing instant insight into the competition.

Take a look:

This is a powerful for three main reasons: competition, differentiation, and communication. For the job above, you can see that competition is on the high side, with 50 applicants, but how do you fair against the bulk of them? Take a look at their backgrounds, current jobs, and areas of expertise to determine how you differ from the competition, which will help you identify unique skills to showcase. Additionally, Scout alerts you when others apply, and when recruiters provide feedback.

Does Scout stop working when you are not at your desk? Of course not! We’ve designed Scout to give our Premium users on-the-go information in a slick mobile-responsive interface, as well. Savvy online marketers know that across the web, people are accessing the Internet from mobile devices outside of typical work hours more frequently and making Scout even timelier.

The job search has become much more cluttered over the past few years. As a job seeker, you should be utilizing tools that save you time and stress, and give you a more targeted approach to your search. Scout is one of these tools.

All Premium members of TheLadders will have access to Scout by summer 2013.

Daniel Cronyn is the director of consumer marketing at TheLadders. Besides a passion for creative direct-response campaigns and analysis, he spends his time tracking down obscure music events and even more obscure food choices across New York City.

What a way to kick off 2013: launching a new product, demoing it to thousands of NYC job seekers at Job Central, and receiving invaluable on-the-spot feedback!

Last year, as the online world started to rapidly shift away from PCs and desktops and towards the mobile world of smartphones and tablets, our product and tech teams sat down to examine how well we were serving job seekers in this new era. The answer? Not very well. So, we rolled up our sleeves and revamped the product from the ground up, focusing on three goals:

1. TheLadders should be accessible and usable anytime, anywhere.

2. The platform needs to be efficient and save job seekers’ valuable time.

3. Leveraging the knowledge and data we have about the job search, the product needs to shed light on what happens with job applications. It must reduce the “black hole,” what we’ve come to call the recruiter and company unresponsiveness many job seekers have encountered.

Scores of prototypes, dozens of usability tests, and several releases later, here’s what we are now able to offer:

(1)   Job matches tailored to the desired next step in your career. So much time is wasted running searches over and over, trying to determine how the search interface and algorithms work so you can get it to display the jobs that actually interest you. We wanted to cut out the unnecessary work, and deliver you relevant jobs on a daily basis.

Job Goals, shown in the left column, drive the job matches you will receive. As you use TheLadders, we continuously learn about your preferences, and optimize the matching algorithms to be more relevant to your specific needs.

(2)   TheLadders Scout gives you an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look into the job market and reveals what happens with job applications. Scout shows you who else is interested in the same job, as well as who already has applied. For each applicant, you can see an anonymous profile, showing you their previous experience and areas of expertise. To better understand how you compare to the other applicants, we also aggregated the information about their current salary, years of experience, and education level, and indicated where you rank within the group. As I spoke with job seekers at Grand Central about this game-changing feature, it was clear this type of information can have many uses:

• See your competition for a position. There may be “50 applicants,” but are they equally as qualified as you? You can use this information to gauge whether you want to apply to the position.
• If you choose to apply, you can use Scout to tailor your application and cover letter to highlight the ways in which you stand out from the competition and confirm why you’re the best fit for the job.
• After you apply, Scout will continue to provide updates with information about other applicants, and will include any feedback they’ve received from recruiters. So again, there may be 50 applicants, but if half of them were told by recruiters that they’re not the best fit, then they’re not competition you have to worry about. And, if you haven’t gotten any feedback yourself, Scout can illuminate why – are there already too many applicants for this opening? Are you perhaps under- or over-qualified compared to other applicants?

The anonymous profile on the left provides a sense of other applicants. On the right, you can see the aggregate information, with the orange carrot indicating where you rank.

(3)   Last but not least, TheLadders is now accessible anytime, anywhere. In the screenshots below, you can see how Scout can be as easily accessed and consumed on your smartphone or tablet as on your desktop.

iPhone 4S

iPad 2

Selena Hadzibabic heads up the Product team at TheLadders. Having worked on both the job seeker and recruiter side of the product, she is no longer cheer-leading either side: she just wants to put the right people in touch with each other.

What a day!

I’m glad I had the opportunity to speak at Job Central, Presented by TheLadders. The event, which was held in Grand Central Terminal’s beautiful Vanderbilt Hall, brought together thousands of professionals to network and gain valuable advice from dozens of career experts in the Tri-State Area.

As many of you know, I normally provide job-search advice through my weekly column on The Career Chronicles, and on Twitter and Facebook. So, it’s always a great privilege when I get the chance meet professionals face-to-face and answer their questions.

While I presented on one side of Vanderbilt Hall, the other side was occupied by a phenomenal speaker series. Among the industry experts was our CEO & Co-founder Alex Douzet, who announced exciting updates to TheLadders’ suite of products. Not only is TheLadders now device-agnostic, meaning it can be viewed from a computer or any mobile device, job seekers on TheLadders will soon be able to size up their competition using “TheLadders Scout.” Available only to Premium members, TheLadders Scout will provide job seekers with competitive information about anonymous fellow candidates in five categories:

1. Years of experience
2. Education level
3. Areas of expertise
4. Current title
5. Current salary

With all the advances in technology, the recruiting process has become more mobile, competitive and cluttered. It’s TheLadders’ goal to give job seekers the tools they need to target their search and find their perfect match.

Thank you to everyone who made it to Job Central yesterday. For those of you who couldn’t make it, please visit www.theladders.com/jobcentral to see what you missed.

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert for TheLadders, the online job-matching service for career-driven professionals. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC) and Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) who provides job search and career guidance for professionals looking to make their next career move. Have a question for Amanda? Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered in her weekly column, and be sure to follow @JobSearchAmanda on Twitter and “Like” her on Facebook for up-to-the-minute job-search advice.

Recruiters frequently have days when they don’t have a spare minute to find new candidates for open positions, which is usually because they are busy meeting with employers to talk about MORE open positions that need to be filled. This is where a Talent Specialist comes in handy!  Recruiters with TheLadders have access to FitFinder, which is a service executed by a team of Talent Specialists that sources candidates for you.  In the last two years, the FitFinder team has worked with hundreds of recruiters, on thousands of job openings, to identify the most qualified candidates for their open positions.

While our service was saving recruiters time sourcing candidates, it wasn’t uncommon for the selected job seekers to decline interest or become unresponsive once contacted by the recruiter. So, we took it a step further and are now “pre-screening” qualified job seekers to confirm their interest in job openings before submitting their information to recruiters.

Now, within 72 hours, we are able to provide recruiters with job seekers who are not only a fit for their openings, but have confirmed interest in their jobs! This gives recruiters more time to build relationships and schedule interviews with the right job seekers.

Having piloted this service for more than six months, we are extremely satisfied with the positive feedback we have received from our recruiters and members alike. So, if you are a recruiter and haven’t experienced FitFinder, what are you waiting for!?

Carrie Markworth is the Jr. Manager of the FitFinder team at TheLadders. She has spent the last two years mastering Boolean search and helping recruiters find the perfect match for their open positions. When she’s not working, she is out exploring Manhattan and trying to find the best burger in the city! 

This week, I am in Las Vegas at the Onrec Global Recruiting Trends Conference 2012, speaking about “Building Meaningful Relationships between Job Seekers and Employers” and “The Value of Information: Strategy for Innovation.”

Additionally, we are seizing this unique opportunity to announce to the community that we are now a free resource for recruiters and employers. In fact, we are proud to announce that we offer:

-          Unlimited Search

-          Unlimited Post

-          Unlimited Targeted Hiring Alerts

In a nutshell, TheLadders now offers for free what LinkedIn, Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, Dice and the rest of the industry offer for a fee.

So, why are we giving away our unparalleled services for free when recruiters and employers are willing to pay for them? Here are five reasons:

• As of last year, we no longer focus only on $100K+ jobs; instead, we target all professional job seekers. Candidates on TheLadders can pay $25 per month to gain full access to our network. However, we also offer a freemium model for job seekers, which afford the ability to apply to targeted hiring alerts, as well as be searchable and contacted by recruiters and employers.

• The revenue we generate from job seekers enables us to continually optimize the job-matching experience, enabling us to fulfill our mission of matching “the right person for the right job.”

• As I mentioned in my recent blog post “Introducing the ‘Less than Free’ Business Model,” free enables us to improve product features for job seekers. Free is also exciting for recruiters, as they are just as essential to our success as job seekers.

• Free enables us to embrace and migrate our ecosystem to the next generation of job search — mobile — empowering us to re-envision our business with a “mobile-first” approach.

• Having recently reached a milestone of 25,000 recruiters and employers, free will enable us over the next three years to provide access to our network to more than 100,000 active recruiters and employers in the U.S., positioning us as the leading platform for professional jobs.

Mobile is disrupting the way job seekers interact with content, and we are contributing to this disruption.

Over the coming months, we will release several new innovations for both job seekers and recruiters. Our next milestone will be our job-seeker app launching in early 2013, followed by native iOS apps for iPhone and iPad. Stay tuned…the future of jobs is coming and TheLadders is pioneering the trail!

Download Alex’s OnRec Presentation — Building Meaningful Connections ›

Download Alex’s OnRec Presentation — The Value of Information ›

Alex Douzet is Co-Founder and COO of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.