TheLadders Blog

When we think about Valentine’s Day, romantic images of chocolates, flowers, and candlelit dinners may come to mind. However, being happy in the workplace may just be our greatest gift. In fact, only 12% of Americans have found the right corporate chemistry and are “really happy with this job,” according to a new study we’ve conducted. Of the 255,000 job seekers surveyed, an astonishing 88% confirmed varying degrees of dissatisfaction with their workplace.

In the poll — which is illustrated by our awesome new infographic — 61.3% of job seekers who were asked to describe the way they feel about their current job admitted they are ‘actively looking for a next job.’ Another 19.0% claimed their ‘job isn’t awful, but not great,’ and 3.9% ‘don’t know how much more of this gig can be tolerated.’ The most unhappy? Unfortunately, 4.1% ‘want out of this job now.’ Talk about a bad romance.

Whether in your love life or in your work life, finding the right match is all about chemistry, and feeling motivated and appreciated in the workplace is paramount for being successful in your career and life. That’s why we suggest workplace satisfaction be determined by the following factors: corporate culture, opportunity for growth, sense of challenge, work-life balance, and compensation package.

That’s why we come to work every day: to help professionals find the right job matches, so their story can have a happy ending.

Read the press release.

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.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new homepage for recruiters. The product, marketing and user experience teams here at TheLadders have been working hard to optimize our sites and services for professionals and recruiters alike. The new recruit.theladders.com is a big step toward putting the right professionals in the jobs that are right for them.

Not only does this new homepage ease the search process for employers and recruiters who are new to TheLadders, but it also makes it that much faster to match them with the right professionals for their jobs straight from the start. Our new design puts search first, allowing recruiters to dive right into Passport—our free recruitment solution—while providing them with a comprehensive chart of our other solutions and full suite of products. Staffing and HR pros can view product videos and even request a one-on-one demo with one of our account executives to see all the ways we can help them fill their open seats.

Our aim is to make it quick and easy for employers and recruiters to promote their jobs, advertise their brands and send updates to interested professionals. This makes it quick and easy for our job-seeking community to start connecting with the right recruiters and applying to the right jobs. Hear that sound? I think it might be the black hole shrinking.

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.

If you are a Lead Java Engineer (code monkey or hands-on manager)…or…a Senior Front-End Architect…or a wee bit less senior Java Engineer, I want you to know about TheLadders – both our development environment and our social mission (to help people manage their careers).

But first I’d like to talk about the 3 types of technology companies who hire developers…one of them is TheLadders:

One type is those with a sexy name, lots of funding, and a great social buzz; everyone wants to work at one of these “west coast”-like firms and discussions about the stack often produce religiously fervent comments. This isn’t TheLadders – although we do have many of the same perks.

Then there are those where the product or service doesn’t set the tech world on fire; the stack isn’t a featured discussion on code forums and programming is as essential as plumbing is to a house. But the programming challenges aren’t going to be ones that set the code forums on fire either. This is definitely not TheLadders.

TheLadders is the final type of tech organization. Despite the stack not receiving top public billing, it is architecture, programming, and SQA that enable our job-seeking customers to receive highly customized career content. Everyone knows someone who is looking for work or simply a better career opportunity; these are our customers and our mission is to help them succeed.

In a nutshell, there are three types of developers TheLadders is interested in:

• Those with a keen interest in the scientific end of programming. You will be charged with designing and developing software to make content recommendations to users (AKA customer merchandizing).

• Those with a keen interest in UX programming. This is where the customer merchandizing piece becomes interesting and focuses on the architecture and building of lightweight mashups.

• Those with a keen interest in “plumbing” programming. Here the work revolves around architectural patterns and scalability particularly SOA.

Do you fall into one or more of these buckets and have a desire to architect and build a high-volume, SaaS platform that helps people identify and achieve their career goals? Are you the kind of engineer who wishes you were also a product manager? Do you prefer to work in a fast-paced, open environment where innovation and participation is encouraged through blogging, custom tool development, hack-day events and other out-of-the-box techniques?

If so, you will love it at TheLadders.

Our Software Development Story

To know where you will go when you pick TheLadders, it helps to know how much we improved. During 2011, our technology team:

• Implemented the groundwork for SOA

• Successfully modeled the core domains (jobs, jobseekers, recruiters) that will be incorporated into 2012 front-end/back-end development efforts

• Developed a Continuous Deployment Roadmap that shortened deployment cycle time from every 2 weeks (requiring 6+ hours) to 2-3 times per week (requiring 30 minutes-1 hour)

• Increased overall test coverage from fully manual to fully automated during development

• Introduced Scala into the stack

In 2012, technology will continue to drive improvements in our product development environment and will likely involve new architectures, stack changes, and delivery platforms. Perhaps you’ve been part of large scale efforts to make these changes happen; if so, then you’ll like what you’re going to read next.

Although the stack is heavily oriented towards Java leveraging Spring and built upon Soir/Lucene, MySQL, and Avro – meaning you know Java, the JVM and the ecosystem of supporting tools and libraries – we’re becoming more code agnostic (you will probably have a say in what stack will become).

On the front-end, it’s JQuery, HTML5, CSS3, JS, JSTL, JSP tags, and associated frameworks not to mention the potential use of Backbone, Ember , Less, Sass, Node, Mustache, Handlebars, haml-js, Coffeescript, and Sinatra. What else should we be looking at?

What’s important to us is that you’ve embraced and are active in the open source community; you’re willing to debate and discuss architecture and stacks; your coding style is best described by others as “craftsman”-like in style and quality.

The Positions

Hands-on Front-end Architect

You must be a natural-born problem-solver with exceptional hands-on technical skills. We’ve moving to a REST service-based architecture which will be a large factor in our applications future capabilities.

This role is all about leading us into the future, and we are definitely open to change. This role will be charged with guiding our front-end architecture as we grow and build new products. You will be a decision maker on what frameworks we use, how we build web applications, and ultimately determine what web app development at TheLadders looks like in the future.

Your job will be to help us build highly interactive, visually compelling solutions that will guide our customers to the right opportunities or individuals, and surface and merchandise candidates and careers in the most flattering and authentic light.  This is not a job-board development role; this is a chance to create a new product in a category with a solid social mission – helping people manage their careers by delivering them with customized career content.

You will be working in a young team that will appreciate your wisdom, experience, and creative problem-solving skills but also likes to debate, push back, and discuss options. You’ll be given the autonomy to make the important decisions that will drive front-end development; you will not work for a boss who hovers over you.

Lead Software Engineer (could be a Manager)

You are already a real software development leader in your Scrum and you are comfortable with challenging your team – and yourself – to make better strategic and tactical decisions. You have shipped large projects working as part of a cohesive team…and you can point to them online.

You enjoy mentoring younger team members in an XP environment and take pride in seeing them mature into future engineering leaders. You abide by the “best tool for the job” approach to selecting technologies and languages. You are known for the beauty of your code and are an evangelist for craftsman-like programming.

Your job will be to contribute to the end-to-end implementation of our highest profile projects especially those that focus on the ultra-complex goal of making content recommendations to users.

As a leader in the group – again, you can be a code monkey or a hands-on manager, you will suggest tools and best practices that will continuously improve the quality of design and implementation as well as site performance.

Finally, you’ll have the chance to leave your mark by helping us to staff, grow, and cultivate a very-high performing engineering team.

Java Engineers

Both front-end and back-end teams are also looking for less senior developers who enjoy the Scrum, thrive in technology-driven environments, and are looking for places to make a mark (TheLadders is a meritocracy – you are recognized for what you do not how many years of experience you bring). I’ve written about the contents of the stack and the development environment earlier; interested?

Next Step?

Email me about your interest; send a resume if you’d like. There’s no relocation per se because frankly the New York Metro area has plenty of incredible Java programmers. I’ll be happy to talk to you about the role of interest and answer all your questions.

In the end, TheLadders is all about high-tech meeting high-touch and making a difference. If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing this is what you’re looking for…

Steve Levy is Principal of outside-the-box Consulting and works as the Lead Technology Recruiter at TheLadders. He’s focused on recruiting, career counseling, social media, and organizational development consulting; he has been referred to as “the recruiting industry’s answer to Tom Peters”.

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. 

It’s been a busy summer here at The Ladders. Over the past five-plus months, we have been working hard to extend our product offering to service all professionals during their job search. The Product, Technology and Customer Support teams approached the project with two core objectives:

• Simplify the job search for everyone. We constantly hear from job seekers that the process of finding the right job has gotten harder, not easier. In fact, because the Internet has made it simple to publish jobs, it has created a cluttered and confusing landscape for job seekers. Using a mixture of people and technology, we sort through millions of jobs a year to make sure real jobs are presented to our members. Now that we are serving all professionals, we have taken our screening process a step further to sort jobs into the correct pay scale.
• Efficiently surface relevant candidates to recruiters. The pressures and time constraints of a recruiter’s day demand that only relevant candidates are delivered to their desktop. We have been doing this for years to help recruiters hire $100K+ candidates. This experience has taught us a lot about the technology and human processes required to sort candidates for recruiters. We have taken that learning and extended it to cover all professional job seekers. Thus recruiters can now expect to see candidates correctly segmented by function and pay scale.

We are very proud of the online tools we have developed. In fact, we want to get them in the hands of all professional job seekers and recruiters. To this end, over the coming months, we will be making some of our functionality free in a new basic product. Simply go to www.theladders.com and give it a shot. I hope you enjoy the experience.

Eric Burd

Eric Burd is Vice President of Product for TheLadders.com. He brings extensive experience in the management of product marketing and development to the company. At TheLadders, he leads the product and creative teams in the development and execution of the long-term, customer-focused vision of the company.