Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of participating in Mediabistro’s first-ever Career Breakfast, a Google + hangout where a small panel of HR professionals and career experts gave their insight into various aspects of the job search process. This week’s topic was “What Really Happens After You Submit Your Resume.”
There’s a lot of advice floating around about standing out from the crowd during the application process. I’ve always believed, and my fellow panelists agree, that the best ways are the simplest. First, be qualified. The fanciest song and dance routine won’t get you anywhere if you can’t do the job. Second, have an easy-to-read resume that quickly conveys your experience and skills. A study done at TheLadders revealed that your resume has about six seconds to make a good first impression.
Whether you submit your resume through an advanced applicant tracking system or directly to a human being, the goal is the same. You want to submit a resume that lays out why you’re right for the job. It should be clear and clean: as free of bells and whistles as possible. A great resume won’t guarantee you a job, but a solid, well-timed, customized resume will likely get you an interview, and that’s the first step.
According to the responses I received, our audience got real value from the conversation. I love the opportunity to give insight from the recruiter/hiring manager side. I look forward to participating in many more of these events and helping more job seekers navigate the often frightening and confusing realm of the job search.
David Gaspin is the Manager, Talent Acquisition at TheLadders. When he’s not busy hiring amazing people for TheLadders, he keeps busy by trying to sound important – whether to his team, job seekers, or (for a real challenge) his 5-year old son.
TheLadders Enterprise team was on the move this week. We headed down to National Harbor, Maryland, for the SHRM Talent Management Expo. This wonderful Expo gives us the opportunity to meet with today’s most influential HR professionals—not to mention, get some very cool swag! We were able to showcase our various product offerings, including “Recruitable,” our new mobile app that connects recruiters on TheLadders to fresh candidates instantly.
There was also a buzz around TheLadders Passport, where we treat recruiters to a free posting and offer them limited search access. Since we always try to go above and beyond here at TheLadders, anyone who signed up for Passport at the Expo was also entered into a drawing to win $500. As recruiters came to our booth, they’d ask, “How do you get me closer to the finish line?” For those of you who weren’t at the booth, they weren’t talking about a track meet. They were reading our signage.
“TheLadders starts recruiters closer to the finish.” In other words, TheLadders delivers accurate, qualified, interested candidates with almost no effort on the part of the recruiter. We put you in a position to discover the best candidates right at the beginning of your search. If you missed this expo, make sure to visit us at the SHRM 2012 Annual Conference & Exposition, where we will be providing more solutions to get you closer to the finish line!
Eliverta Nika is an Enterprise Marketing Associate at TheLadders, and she absolutely loves getting out and meeting our recruiter customers at events like SHRM.
When our VP of Public Relations, Lisa Hagendorf, first asked me if I wanted to work with AMC’s The Pitch, I broke out in a cold sweat. It wasn’t the show’s fault — it was that simple phrase: The Pitch.
See, before I started my successful career here at TheLadders, I was an agency guy. I’ve worked at some of the biggest and best advertising agencies — Ogilvy, Euro RSCG, Draft and McGarryBowen. Throughout my agency days, I’ve worked on over 50 pitches. They can be exhilarating and they are always exhausting. Late nights. Bad take-out dinners. Intense discussions. Strategies. Concepts. More intense discussions. New strategies. New concepts. Arguments. Sometimes there was crying. Too many calls home, saying you’re still working. Finally, we’d finalize the concepts and send them off to production. There would be a light at the end of the tunnel.
But wait! Emergency meeting!
The new Executive Creative Director took a shower and now has a new strategy and creative idea. Swearing. Lots of swearing.
As soon as I became a Creative Director, I vowed to respect my teams and make sure I understood how they felt. But that goes out the door after a few late nights and the pressure you feel to win. No other professional business gets close to the insanity and pressure of “the pitch.” You have to be willing to put everything you have into it. No one wins because they brought in work they could do in one day. They might have done the work in one day but that’s because they only had a day to do it.
As I watched The Pitch, I felt the pain and excitement of the teams. A part of me wanted in. The competition showcased is really addictive and brought up old competitive feelings. The rush.
And it’s on AMC. Who doesn’t love AMC right now? They’re the most Emmy-recognized network on basic cable. Many of you know it as home to your favorite shows, including Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Killing and The Walking Dead.
TheLadders is happy to collaborate with The Pitch. How do we fit in? We’re experts on the elevator pitch, one of the key aspects of career advancement, and an essential part of a strong personal brand. The Pitch reached out to us because they know we can help professionals give the perfect Elevator Pitch and move their careers forward.
Todd Hozais Director of Creative & UX at TheLadders. When he’s not busy helping build the brand from the inside out, he’s taking credit for all the great work his talented team creates.
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).
If you are looking for innovative ideas for driving revenue for your organization, a regional user group is the perfect format. You get an opportunity to get answers to the top questions on your mind and network with other experts in the field to find out about their methods.
This week TheLadders is hosting the first Marketo Regional User Group in New York. More than 20 marketing professionals from several companies are joining for a discussion about their experience with the solution. The topics include lead scoring and qualification process, nurturing programs and using Sales Insight tools to maximize the impact on the top line.
TheLadders just recently launched the solution while rolling out marketing campaign functionality, lead scoring and nurturing programs. Our biggest challenge was to tie all the data environments together to make Marketo tools effective so we reached out to the CRM team to create the infrastructure. Everything needs to work in synchronicity with each other. Currently our focus is partnering with Sales Leadership to refine our scoring logic, build process and drive adoption. With Marketo, it’s easy to set up reporting and the marketing team can execute campaigns with less manual effort enabling us to be more strategic, and focus on driving higher marketing and sales ROI.
Marketo Highlights
Allows the marketing team to pass highly qualified, prioritized leads to the sales force at the right time
Enables marketing to measure effectiveness of its campaigns in real time
Gives sales team better visibility into marketing programs and to get tips and talking points on customer behavior
Launched the solution in five weeks, immediately pushed several key campaigns to help achieve corporate KPIs and set records on site visits and all-time site engagement
We’re confident the Marketo Regional User Group will be a success, and we’re excited to share with the attendees—and learn from them—so we can all reach our customers more effectively.
Inga Romanoff is Director, Enterprise Marketing for TheLadders and the Marketo Regional User Group Leader in New York City with over ten years of marketing experience in the U.S., Russia, Europe and Asia PAC. Inga is responsible for strategic initiatives in developing the B2B platform at TheLadders.
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.
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.
