TheLadders Blog

Last week, we held our third annual Career Day at Richard R. Green High School of Teaching. Career Day is an afternoon when professionals from across the city come to the school to speak with our students in small classroom settings about their career paths and industries. The big idea, of course, is to expose our students to careers they may never have even heard of through a compelling personal connection, in hopes of inspiring them to pursue whatever it is that they really love and are excited about during and after college. What’s unique about this event is that every single one of our 550 students, regardless of academic standing or self-motivation, gets to participate.

Given that many of our students have had limited exposure to different careers and have faced challenges and stifled opportunities throughout their education, Career Day has the potential to be a truly transformational moment in their lives, opening them up to a future they simply could not have imagined before.

Career Day is my favorite project, and each year I try to come up with ways to make the event more meaningful and engaging for students. It has grown tremendously from 19 speakers in the first year to 48 speakers this year.

Additionally, we added a Career Fair, in which Amanda Augustine, job search expert for TheLadders, spoke with students about their individual passions and dream jobs. At the fair, students had the chance to speak with representatives from a variety of professions, including the military (Navy and Marines) and AmeriCorps (Vista, NCCC and CityYear), as well as non-profits that offer internships to high school students.

The speaker series featured professionals from non-profits (including Russell Simmons charities), magazine journalism (the editor and art director from US Weekly magazine), graphic design, product design, music entertainment, system design, cinematography, social media, law, nursing, fitness, software engineering, architecture, broadcasting (Terrence McKnight from NPR & WQXR), finance, healthcare management, and education. A week later, students are still talking about the speakers they met and spoke with at Career Day. In high school time, that’s an eternity!

To learn more about Career Day, or to volunteer next year, please visit the website at wix.com/rkessous/rrgcareerday.

Rachel Kessous has been a public school teacher in NYC for 9 years. In addition to being a teacher, Rachel is also the Director of the Liberal Arts Academy, where she coordinates career preparedness programming for students and mentoring programs focused around finding students passions and preparing for college.

In growing tech companies, the time we spend out of office together can be as important as the time we spend in the office together.  Building good relationships and a shared sense of fun about our future make longer hours and the winding road to success feel like a victory in itself.

At TheLadders, we’ve always made time to get out of the office together.  And while we’ve never been into trust falls or rope bridges, we have enjoyed paintball and bowling and competitive triathalons — or even just picnicking in the park with each other — over the years.

But this fall, I decided to try something new.  We’ve all heard the expression “you eat what you kill”, but what if your team had to, you know, actually eat what they kill?

I took my team, by bus and boat, to find out on the swirling seas around Montauk.

Now at TheLadders, which I co-founded with my friends Andrew and Marc almost a decade ago, we’ve always been a nimble company.  Our mantra from the early days was “We’ll make it even if we never raise a dime!”

Being resilient has served us well.  We’ve only raised $8 mm in equity capital and we pioneered a new industry, signing up over 5 million job-seekers and 25,000 recruiters to our professional job-matching service.  After our first raise in 2004, we never raised another round. Success with that type of bootstrapping means always being resourceful.

Which leads me to last Tuesday and a bus carrying me and twenty of my top colleagues to Montauk.  We boarded the 85-foot Marlin VI Princess for a five-hour fishing trip. With a twist.

You see, “eat what you kill” is a common saying in our tech community, but tonight, it was also our bill of fare.  I told my team that that night, dinner was our responsibility:

“Tonight, we will be eating what we kill.

Fish is the only item on the menu, but not just any kind of fish.  It will be true, locally sourced, line-caught, fresh fish, right off of this boat.

Caught by you.

So, if you want to feast, let’s catch a lot of great fish.  If you want to go home hungry, let’s come back empty-handed.  The choice is yours.”

So we fished…

 and fished…

and fished…

and fished.

And took in the scenery.

We had a blast.

And we caught 22 fish: four large striped bass, several bluefish and few tuna.

And they were tasty.

And we learned a lesson, in the way that only “doing it yourself” can really teach you.

If you want to learn about bootstrapping your business, my saying is:

“Eat what you kill!”

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.