TheLadders Blog

Job Central, presented by TheLadders, on January 10th was quite the event! Hundreds of professionals made their way to New York City’s Grand Central Terminal to hear from a lineup of guest speakers and meet with dozens of recruiters to help them with their job search.

I enjoyed my opportunity to share my 15 + years of corporate recruiting leadership experience, including my past 3 years with Hewlett-Packard.  My goal was to share real-life stories and examples to help candidates identify their brand, leverage their experiences, and improve their interview skills.  If attendees took one thing away from my presentation, I hope it was the importance of preparation. Prepare to articulate your brand.  Prepare for the interview.  Prepare for the post-interview.  Being fully prepared brings you one step closer to being hired.

After my presentation, I had an opportunity to spend a couple of hours meeting with potential candidates to provide one-on-one guidance. It is my hope that I helped at least one job seeker get closer to his or her next career goal.

If you weren’t able to make it to Job Central but want to learn how to improve your job search, check out the speaker presentations and videos at www.TheLadders.com/JobCentral.

Mitch Schwartz, Global Talent Acquisition Leader, Hewlett-Packard

The backbone of every high-growth company is its people. In the knowledge economy, a strong team is the foundation for success and top talent is the driving force. As Jim Collins said in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, “Get the right people on the bus.”

At TheLadders, we will be celebrating our 10-year anniversary this summer. For the past decade, we have hired more than 500 people, constantly focusing on getting the “right person on the bus,” and constantly ensuring that they are sitting in the right seat on that bus. We always strive to hire the best and get the most from our staff. Coaching, just like in sports, is the key to empowering employees to reach above-and-beyond. Just as with Sir Roger Bannister, we want TheLadders to break the four-minute mile; achieve what they might perceive to be unachievable.

Not surprisingly, TheLadders alumni network in New York City is strong and vibrant. When we ask them what they miss most about working at TheLadders (besides Bagel Friday!), they say it is the people. Over and over, we hear from our current and former employees that what makes the difference are the incredible colleagues they have worked with or are working with.

At TheLadders, we do not expect our staff to work here forever. Eventually, we know that people will leave. Furthermore, we know that as much as we enjoy promoting from within, we cannot possibly promote every great hire to a Vice President or C-level position. That said, one measure of our success is to assess where our alumni end up, post-employment with us. It is always a great sign when one of them lands a top job. That is the way that Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, looked at his company. In the 90s, when a company needed a loan, it went to a bank. When a company needed a CEO, it went to General Electric, which minted business leaders the way that West Point mints generals.

Last week, I was thrilled to read in All Things Digital that Ware Sykes, TheLadders’ former VP of Sales & Services, became the CEO for NoWait, the OpenTable for restaurants that don’t take reservations. Ware joined TheLadders in 2006 as an MBA intern from Columbia Business School and worked his way up the executive rank.

Last month, when I heard that Jake Levine, General Manager at Digg, made Forbes’ iconic “30 under 30” list, I tweeted and posted the following link: http://onforb.es/Ws5iRZ. Prior to joining Betaworks/Digg, Jake did strategy work at TheLadders, directly reporting to TheLadders’ Founder Marc Cenedella and me.

Here are several other alumni who became CEOs and entrepreneurs after working with us:

• Derek Pilcher, Managing Director and owner, TheLadders.co.uk

• David Carvajal, Founder and CEO, Dave Partners, LLC

• Michael McCurdy, Co-founder and CEO, TestingMom.com

• Thilo Semmelbauer, President and COO, Shutterstock

• Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Founder and CEO, Care.com

However, not everyone wants to be a CEO. We also have alumni who are function leaders at other successful New York City tech firms:

• Alain Benzaken was Vice President of Technology at TheLadders for five years. He is now the Senior Director of Software Engineering at Buddy Media Salesforce.

• Ofir Shalom was Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders for five years. He is now the CTO at Group Commerce.

• Angela Romano Kuo started as a recruiter with TheLadders, working seven years before becoming Vice President of Human Resources. She now is the Vice President of Human Resources at SecondMarket, Inc.

• Leslie Semegran started as a marketing manager at TheLadders in 2005 before working her way up to Vice President of Marketing and Engagement, reporting directly to me. She is now Vice President of Marketing at Care.com.

As previously mentioned, TheLadders also proudly promotes from within. For instance, I promoted two leaders to the executive rank, just last month:

• Kyri Sarantakos was promoted to Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders. He joined the company in 2005 as a software engineer. During the past seven years, he has moved up the ranks to become a manager of core architecture and development, an application architect, and, most recently, a principal software architect.

• Selena Hadzibabic was promoted to Director of Product and UX at TheLadders. After graduating from Dartmouth College, she joined the company in 2006 as a junior community associate, an entry-level position. Subsequently, she was promoted to product manager in our U.S. operation, and then became the sole product lead for two years in our former UK operation, where she was based in London before returning to New York in 2011.

If you are a tech professional in New York City and are looking for your next challenge to enhance your skills and your career, join TheLadders! Why?

You may say: “My friend is starting a company and I can be the VP of Technology and get a lot of options.”

Yes, that may be true, but is your friend giving you the leadership training necessary to succeed in that job? Will you be out of a job in six to 12 months because the company did not raise sufficient capital or you do not possess the skills required to lead and drive performance from a team? You will learn that skills on the job at TheLadders.

You also may say: “I have a generous cash offer from Amazon, Google, or Facebook.”

What is going to make you successful are the people you work with, the challenges you will face, the opportunity you have to influence the strategy, and your access to leadership. As a software engineer in New York working for Amazon, Google, or Facebook, you may never be exposed to Jeff, Larry, or Marc. At TheLadders, you will get frequent exposure to the CEO. At TheLadders, we won’t give you the answer to a problem. We will give you a problem statement and will ask you to determine the answers that fulfill our shared vision.

At TheLadders, your last interview will be with me, the CEO. You will hear directly from me that during the next four years of your life, you will experience tremendous professional growth. That is a guarantee that TheLadders offers. Your experience with us will take your career to the next level.

So, is TheLadders a CEO factory or are we just lucky? You be the judge.

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

Usually after the holiday season, the last thing you want to hear is that you have doubled in size. But here at the TheLadders, we are ecstatic to learn that we are twice as big as we were a year ago, meaning the number of recruiters on our site — not our waistline.

Over the course of 2012, our mission was to increase the volume of meaningful conversations between our recruiters and job seekers in three ways:

• Offering our service as a free resource to recruiters and employers
• Learning from our users to create new functionality for our recruiters and job seekers
• Providing compelling content about the recruitment process and how to best navigate it

However, in the end, we went back to what we learned in school and just did simple math: if we increase the number of recruiters, we will increase the connections with our job seekers. So, we did just that. Over the past year, our product, marketing, and recruiter relations teams were steadfast in their efforts to increase the population of recruiters on TheLadders. And succeed they did. I am happy to report that as of last week, TheLadders boasts more than 30,000 recruiters on our site.

What this means for you, our valued job seekers, is MORE conversations, MORE active job-postings, and MORE recruiters who are dedicated to your specific function.

Although we are proud of this milestone, please know that 2013 will be no different. We will continue to work tirelessly to increase recruiter activity and help you take the next step in your career.

Thomas Murphy is the manager of recruiter experience at TheLadders. Tom works with his team to understand how recruiters use technology to help them find the best candidates. When not talking shop about HR, he is trying to get back in shape so he does not embarrass himself at the team triathlon next year.

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.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may have seen me tweet about Job Central. Here at TheLadders, we’ve been hard at work for months planning a one-of-kind job-search extravaganza, and in less than one week, it will all come to fruition!

On Thursday, January 10^th, we will bring together the best employers, recruiters, and career experts at Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall to host a comprehensive job-search experience for professionals looking to make their next career move.

So, what’s so special about Job Central, you ask? For starters, it’s FREE and open to all professionals! I will be there all day answering questions and sharing tips on how to conduct a successful job search in 2013. Additionally, we’ve lined up an impressive roster of industry experts to speak on a wide range of topics, including how to leverage social media in the job hunt and navigating job-search uncertainty.

Whether you’re looking for a job now or considering a change further down the line, if you live in the Tri-State Area, this is an event worth attending. In addition to learning how to get a jump-start on your search, you also will have the opportunity to meet and network with dozens of recruiters and hundreds of fellow job seekers, and possibly receive a free, three-month Premium membership (a $75 value) to TheLadders.

What to wear

Don your best business-casual outfit for the event. For gentlemen, I suggest a pair of slacks with a button-down shirt. For ladies, consider a flattering blouse paired with slacks, or a dress. Make sure the neckline is workplace-appropriate and that the skirt falls to your knee. Afraid your outfit will raise a red flag at the office? Check out these wardrobe tips for job-seeking on the sly.

What to bring

Bring a stack of business cards, at least five copies of your resume, a pen, a notebook (or your iPad) for taking notes during the presentations, and your game plan. Review the list of speakers ahead of time and come prepared with specific questions. Most importantly, arm yourself with a smile and be prepared to network.

What to expect

Not only will you have a chance to speak with recruiters, employers, and other professionals, but you’ll also learn valuable tips to help you compete in this tough job market. Use these next few days to practice your elevator pitch, update your resume, and clean up your online presence so it aligns with your job goals.

For more information, including the full speaker line-up, visit theladders.com/jobcentral and join the event on Facebook. If you’re out of the area but want to participate virtually, join the Twitter conversation on January 10^th, with the hashtag #JobCentral.

I look forward to seeing you on January 10^th!

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! 

If you’ve been following TheLadders Blog, you know that we are a company driven by entrepreneurialism, innovation, creativity, and food! From bake sales benefiting City Harvest to catered lunches helping local downtown restaurants plagued by Hurricane Sandy, our company knows that fueling the mind starts with a full stomach.

However, I was unprepared for what greeted me this morning. Sure, yesterday we received an email alerting us that we generously would be having breakfast – delicious made-to-order crepes:

• Meat Crepe (ham, Swiss, tomato & herbs)
• Vegetarian Crepe (Swiss, greens, walnuts, & Roquefort cheese)
• Sweet Crepes
  • Nutella, strawberry & banana
  • strawberry, balsamic reduction & raspberry jam

Sigh. Decisions, decisions.

So, along with more than 100 of my colleagues, we showed up at 9AM sharp to place our orders and see who this mystery chef was.

You can imagine my surprise when I was greeted by our CEO, Alex Douzet, wearing an apron and swinging a spatula. He’s French and he’s full of surprises…I should have known better.

With two sous chefs, his eight year-old twin daughters Giselle and Gabriella, he swirled, cooked, flipped, and garnished crepes for the whole company for two hours.

Here’s what my colleagues at TheLadders had to say:

• Mike Deissig
• Luis Rodriguez
• Kathleen Yanolatos 

Who knew that the “C” in CEO could stand for cook? It was the perfect kick-off to a pre-holiday weekend, and just another way that TheLadders is keeping us on-our-toes…and fueled for success.

Happy Holidays!

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.

Wishing you a happy and healthy holiday.

I first discovered TheLadders through my participation with StreetWise Partners, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income individuals overcome employment barriers and obtain better jobs. When I began my career, I was working 40-hour work weeks in a customer service position that didn’t utilize my skills or compensate me properly. I then took a position in accounting, which, due to circumstances beyond my control, led me to doubt my capabilities in the workforce.

After that experience, I turned to StreetWise Partners, a bit scarred and needing to rebuild my natural confidence. With hard work and commitment, I made it through the program with aspirations of finding a job that would suit me and support my intentions of continuing my college education. My resume was already adequate but definitely needed an update to combat this ailing job market.

At the Career Boot Camp, hosted by StreetWise Partners and TheLadders in June 2012, I was lucky enough to win a resume rewrite, which I used immediately. To my extreme delight, my rewritten resume was a perfect representation of my career history and potential. Beaming with confidence and acceptance of change, I left my customer service position and decided to hit the ground running for my bright future. Within two weeks of leaving that position, I was able to acquire a temp-to-perm office coordinator role with Success Academy Charter Schools.

This was made possible by my burning drive for accomplishment, a great phone interview, an amazing resume and a glowing cover letter (that I can also thank TheLadders for). Just two weeks into my new job, I was offered a permanent position. TheLadders gave a woman with so much promise an extra boost in the game of life.

- Octavia Thompson