TheLadders Blog

Last week, TheLadders hosted The Ladders Connect, the first in a series of events featuring a dynamic panel of industry thought leaders. Hosted at Helen Mills, one of New York City’s most unique venues, nearly 150 guests gathered for a thought-provoking panel discussion about the challenges faced when hiring a multi-generational workforce.

Moderated by TheLadders Job Search Expert Amanda Augustine, the panel included:

• Tom McElroy, Global Head of Recruiting Operations & Systems, Bloomberg
• Anne Molignano, SVP of Human Resources, Sony Music Entertainment
• Sara Patterson, Head of Talent Management, Condé Nast
• Mitchell Schwartz, Director of Staffing, Hewlett-Packard

The special evening kicked off with an introduction and product announcements from Alex Douzet, COO & Co-Founder of TheLadders. He proudly alerted the audience that we are now a free resource for recruiters and employers, which was met, not surprisingly, with huge applause. In fact, we currently offer:

-          Unlimited Search

-          Unlimited Post

-          Unlimited Targeted Hiring Alerts

After the presentation and panel discussion, guests mingled with their industry colleagues over cocktails and conversation. Reflecting the event’s theme of meaningful connections, everyone received an all-device, solar-powered charger to stay connected with TheLadders’ more than 5 million, on-the-go members.

Save the date for our next event, taking place on January 10, 2013, at Grand Central Terminal. Details to follow!

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.

Last Tuesday, I was a keynote speaker at the Digital East 2012 conference, where I presented “CEO or Ironman: Driving Success at the Bottom Line and Finish line.”

Here are my 7 Rules for Successful Entrepreneurship:

1. Fear: The odds are against you; most start-ups will fail. However, passion will prevail. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. If you are passionate about your endeavors, you are more likely to succeed.

2. Dream: Dreams become goals; goals become projects. If you don’t first have a vision, your plans are less likely to succeed.

3. Commit: Commit first plan second. Quit your day job now!

4. Resilience: Decide to finish what you start. Stick with it. Get up again…and again. Expect that things will go wrong, but persevere in the face of adversity.

5. Aim High: If you aim low, you’ll land low. Aiming high will not guarantee your success, but it increases its likelihood.

6. Hours: Expect to put in the time to succeed. If you want to work a 40-hour week, being an entrepreneur may not be for you.

7. Leadership: The vision — the idea — is yours. Only you can convince others to join your effort, and only your vision and leadership will attract top talent to your cause. Colin Powell said, “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”

Either/Or versus And: The Either/Or paradigm involves the mindset of “constraints” – time, funding, workforce, etc. How do you manage to find 20 additional hours per week to train for the Ironman when you are a husband, father, and business executive? Learn to say the most powerful word in the world: AND.

Ironman and Entrepreneurship reveal your DNA. After completing my first Ironman competition, I understood that I really can do anything. Going from “Either/Or” to “And” involves a mind-shift. As I said in the presentation, I am Alex Douzet. I am a husband, and a father, and a COO, and an entrepreneur…and an Ironman.

 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.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to travel out to beautiful San Francisco for the CouchConf World Tour. The one-day, three-track event was presented by Couchbase, a Silicon Valley-based enterprise software company that offers NoSQL products for mission-critical systems.

More than 400 architects and software engineers from the United States, Europe and Asia convened at Bently Reserve, the West Coast’s premier destination for technology-based social gatherings, to learn about the recently released beta of Couchbase Server 2.0. Additionally, speakers from world-renowned companies including Orbitz, McGraw-Hill, IBM, Reuters, LinkedIn and of course, TheLadders, led fact-packed sessions about real-world applications of NoSQL technology.

After a morning of thought-provoking presentations, I used my lunch break to take pictures of historical buildings and landmarks in downtown San Francisco. When I returned to the conference, it was my turn to do the talking. I sat alongside developers from Reuters and XO group in a panel discussion on caching, led by Matt Ingenthron of Couchbase.

We shared our production deployments with the audience, and spoke about challenges of scaling websites and caching tier implementations. I had an opportunity to present our cache invalidation solution based on Clustrix/MySQL binary logs processing, and the audience was quite receptive to my advice about solving cache coherence problems. My hope is that they walked away with some practical guidance that will help them solve real-time complications.

After the session I hung out in the Couchbase Lounge and provided curious attendees with more detail on our database solution.

No doubt about it, the conference was a great success and I would like give a big “thanks” to Couchbase folks who organized it. Kudos!

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.

Last Friday, as I read The Wall Street Journal article, “Apple Makes a Wrong Turn as Users Blast Map Switch,” I could not help asking myself: Is this really a major strategic error by the world’s most valuable company or is it simply an execution blunder in a highly visible case of a prisoner’s dilemma?

To answer the question, I went back and read a post from Bill Gurley, one of technology’s top dealmakers, to better understand why Apple introduced its own turn-by-turn navigation app. Then I read this paragraph:

“Here was the big punch line – because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the ‘less than free’ business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally ‘less than free’ price point, Symbian or Windows Mobile would need to subsidize.”

Double ouch!

The “less than free” business model that Gurley describes is a truly disruptive innovation.

I am big fan of game theory and its application. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s book, “The Predictioneer’s Game” defines game theory as a “fancy label for a pretty simple idea: that people do what they believe is in their best interest.”

So, here is the answer: it is in Apple’s best interest to introduce its own version of the turn-by-turn navigation app.

But why? Google Maps is a superior product, and it is free. Similar to a prisoner’s dilemma, Apple’s hand was forced by Google to introduce its own turn-by-turn mapping system. Otherwise, the company was at risk to be left out of the game or compromise on its own margin with the iPhone and iPad devices. How great would the iPhone5 be compared to the Android-based Galaxy S3 without a map application? What are the chances that Google would have pulled the plug on iPhone the way it disconnected NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas?

However, Apple overlooked the fact that the product execution needs to be good (in Apple’s case, great). Supporting my claim, Gurley states, “Naysayers of these assertions will likely have the same retort – quality is key. They will argue that Google’s turn-by-turn apps are inferior to their well-honed, market-leading products. With regard to Android, Google will lack the user interface or embedded software expertise necessary and will deliver a subpar product. Plus, because the Android OS will be so splintered, QA testing will be difficult and incompatibility issues will abound. In the short run, these issues will exist.”

Today, we are seeing that Apple had the right strategy, but failed in execution. However, it may not hurt the iPhone 5 sales because when a product is completely free, consumer expectations are low, and consumer patience is high.”

The good news for Apple is that their loyal customers will be patient and wait for superior subsequent versions of the mapping system app.

The key takeaway is that a free or “Less Than Free” business model can really be an industry game-changer. Let’s analyze how Facebook did it in the social media industry.

For Facebook, Zuckerberg’s brilliance was to bypass Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, all by using the free model. Gurley states, “We noted in our take on the free business model, if a disruptive competitor can offer a product or service similar to yours for free, and if they can make enough money to keep the lights on, then you likely have a problem.”

Borrowing the words from my co-founder Marc Cenedella, “The key point with Zuckerberg’s success is even more profound. Free allowed him to ‘outsell’ the competition. Free freed him from the wrong customer requirements. My claim is: free made the product features better by eliminating customer requirements and that’s because pricing put the focus on the wrong customer.”

Harvard had Facebook before Zuckerberg came along. In the late 90s, graduates of Harvard Business School tried to sell the university their own version of Facebook. For Facebook, the university was the wrong customer. Building university requirements into a product and having a long sales cycle would never have allowed Facebook to exist. Bypassing them entirely was an ingenious move.

So, a subsidiary claim would be: pricing forces you to choose a customer. Choose well, and you have a fantastic product. Choose wrong, and you get stuck.

Have you chosen your customer carefully? Can you leverage a free or “less than free” business model to change the game on your competition? One of the most successful ways for small private companies to gain the upper hand over large incumbents is to change the rules of the game.

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.

At TheLadders, we have been a pioneering, lean UX Agile shop for a few years. As we continue to optimize the job seeker’s online experience by ramping up our mobile efforts, my team and I recently completed a comprehensive review of our product performance. I seized this opportunity to re-read the insights from thought leaders of the Agile Lean UX community…and then it hit me: there is an Achilles’ heel to the Lean Agile UX methodology.

Before I go on, please don’t misunderstand my epiphany. I am not dropping the axe on the entire methodology nor start a holy war on the UX community. Rather, my goal is to share my experience and learnings with other CEOs, entrepreneurs, heads of engineering, design and product development, so that they can extract the best value from Agile.

Here is an abbreviated list of my recommended reading:

• slideshare.net/pathf/lean-ux-agile-putting-it-all-together
• andersramsay.com/2012/04/24/agile-ux-vs-lean-ux
• jeffgothelf.com/blog/
• theleanstartup.com/
• slideshare.net/venturehacks/the-lean-startup-2

What becomes apparent is the absence of the following principles:

• Goal-setting
• Commitment
• Leadership

Even in this presentation, unfortunately, there is only slight attention devoted to these principles.

You may argue that these presentations simply attempt to educate the community about the process and you may say, “Of course you need goal-setting, commitment and strong leadership. That is obvious, so there is no need to mention it.” However, I would counter-argue that if one really understands goal-setting, commitment and leadership, that it is imperative to include these principles in any presentation.

For example, I recently read a great conversation on Quora about what makes a good engineering culture. Lau hits the nail on the head when he discusses optimizing interaction speed:

“Team-wise, fast iteration speed means having a set of strong leaders to help coordinate and drive team efforts. Key stakeholders in a decision need to decide effectively and commit to their choices. To borrow a phrase from Bill Walsh, a leader who coached the 49ers to three Super Bowls, strong leaders need to ‘commit, explode, recover,’ which means committing to a plan of attack, executing it, and then reacting to the results. A team crippled with indecisiveness will just cause individual efforts to flounder.”

In one paragraph, he covered all three principles.

As Colin Powell said, “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”

Without strong leadership, how did a team of 11 at Instagram take on the mighty Facebook and its 5,000 employees in the mobile photo war?

In my recent post on TheLadders Blog, Chief Executive or Ironman?, I explain how to build a successful start-up and convert it into a lasting enterprise.

My friend Dave Carvajal, CEO & founder of Dave Partners, a premier executive search and advisory firm, has hired the best in New York City, and is a three-time successful entrepreneur and a two-time Ironman. He also talks about these principles in a recent blog post:

Goal Setting, Discipline, Performance Metrics, and Achievement:

Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” We need goals in life, big and small, to move forward. Measuring and training in specific heart-rate zones is the fastest way to athletically increase your VO2 max and lactate threshold. Both in business and athletics, being data-driven in your goals and execution is the best way to measure your progress and increase performance. The most successful entrepreneurs and athletes are masterful at setting and achieving performance metrics.

Last month, I was at a gallery opening in New York City, the first for the featured artist. Twenty beautiful landscape oil paintings were displayed, most of which sold by the end of the evening. You can imagine my surprise when I heard the artist’s husband say something that made me think about the Agile UX process. He asked, “Can you believe that she created most of the 20 paintings during the two weeks leading up to the show?”

Deadlines create urgency, as well as provide a map. I designed my 30-week training program for Ironman knowing that the deadline was August 11, 2012. It was an Agile process, not a waterfall.

If you allow your scrum team to perform staggered, two-week sprints without a map or a deadline, where do you land? Without proper leadership how do you ensure that you won’t end up with an aggregation of half-baked features?

What applies to artists, entrepreneurs, and athletes also applies to engineering, Agile, and Lean UX.

Applying the above principles of the Agile Lean UX methodology will avoid process for the sake of a process, while maximizing ROI.

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.

Last week, I participated in a webinar hosted by Jack Chapman, author of “How to Make a $1,000 a Minute.”

The webinar, “Surviving the Coming 2013 Double Dip Recession,” focused on the “Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” providing attendees with a lesson in basic economic theory and explaining why recessions and inflation occur. The bottom line: he believes 2013 is going to be a hard year on our economy, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

But what does that mean for the average professional or job seeker? Jack recommends the following strategies:

• Enjoy the good old days. Take a moment and appreciate what you have today, and be prepared for inflation in the future.

• Be the best in your field. Focus on making yourself as valuable as possible to your organization – “the top 10 percent are always employed.”

• Build your “networld.” In other words, maintain and continue to grow a strong professional online presence. Remain visible among those in your field. Participate in group discussions, write articles, and attend events – all of these activities will help you learn of new opportunities, and put you on the radars of recruiters and hiring managers.

• Consider a second income.  What other talents and passions do you have that could be used to secure a side job? For retirees, consider taking up an “encore career” to maintain a steady source of income.

• Follow the money. Explore opportunities in industries that will still be in high demand, even during tougher times. Jack recommends researching roles within regulation, healthcare and telecom, and shying away from  the luxury industry, which he believes is still on the decline.

• Negotiate COLA. COLA stands for Cost Of Living Adjustment. Request a COLA when negotiating your compensation package with a new employer. This will prevent your compensation from losing its value because of inflation.

For someone who doesn’t know a lot about the “ins and outs” of economics, the presentation was interesting. However, I wish we had more time to dive a bit deeper into Jack’s job-search strategies. Judge for yourself – you can check out his presentation here.

If you’re currently on the job hunt, I recommend picking up a copy of Jack’s book. Personally, I think it’s the bible for salary negotiations. What I love most is how easy it is to follow – he gives actual examples of what to say in different scenarios, along with possible responses. He even provides a cheat sheet on negotiations at the beginning of the book for readers who need a quick refresher right before an interview.

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert at TheLadders. Always on the go at work and away, Amanda trains and competes in races and triathlons in her spare time.

This past Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending a Step Up Women’s Network Power Breakfast with Banana Republic’s Chief Marketing Officer and SVP Catherine Sadler.

For those of you unfamiliar with the group, Step Up Women’s Network is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to “igniting women and girls to fulfill their potential.” They provide after-school and weekend programs to help teenage girls from under-privileged communities become confident young women prepared for college. Their members gain access to social networking events, professional development panels and hands-on volunteer opportunities. If you live in Los Angeles, Chicago or New York, I highly recommend checking them out.

The event, which was held in Banana Republic’s Fifth Avenue location, was packed! Catherine discussed the journey she’s taken throughout her career, from her early days in publishing, to leading the marketing groups of renowned retail companies, including Ann Taylor and Coach. She also led her own creative and marketing agency, and worked with Donna Karan on her Urban Zen Foundation.

Catherine then answered a myriad of questions from the audience on all aspects of her career, from how she balances family and work, to what she looks for in candidates when hiring. Here are a few key takeaways:

On marketing: Catherine says that, as a marketer, it’s vital to a company’s success to integrate marketing efforts with other divisions of the organization. Additionally, if becoming CMO is your goal, take an active role in all marketing functions, from public relations and advertising, to branding and visual merchandising.

On hiring: In looking for prospective employees, Catherine is interested in the person who, in addition to having the required skills, possesses a genuine curiosity about the business and its direction. She looks for people who have the right level of engagement, interest and passion, who’ve researched the brand and industry, and come prepared with questions.

On career: When asked what three words she’d put on a t-shirt, Catherine gave these options: “Dreaming the Dream,” “Follow your Bliss,” and “Find your Passion.” However, she also warns that work shouldn’t define you completely, and you need to keep that in mind when trying to strike that perfect balance between work and life.

I think she’s spot-on. You spend a large portion of your life at work. Shouldn’t you be doing what you are great at and passionate about? I know that I have, and hope the same for all of you!

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert at TheLadders. Always on the go at work and away, Amanda trains and competes in races and triathlons in her spare time.

I had the privilege of participating in an event called Straight from the Source: Employer Representatives Mentor Women, hosted by Women@Work in Westport, Connecticut, yesterday.

Women@Work, co-founded by Eliza Shanley, is a great organization that is “dedicated to Keeping Women at Work Through All of Life’s Ages and Stages.” They offer a wide range of services which help mid- to senior-level women professionals advance their careers and find jobs. Often times these women took time off to raise their families and are now faced with reentering the workforce in a tight job market.

Every month or so, Women@Work holds an event where they ask individuals from various corporations to meet with its members to discuss two major topics: where they see opportunity in the marketplace, and what key advice they’d give professionals looking to reenter the job market.

I was very excited to attend this event because I could offer a unique perspective – not only could I talk about how I see the job market in the internet space, but I could discuss what job trends TheLadders sees across multiple industries and functions, as well as provide some practical tips to make every person at the event a more effective job seeker.

Eliza opened the event by moderating a short panel discussion with me and representatives from home furnishings retailer Pottery Barn and financial services firm Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.

Although we all came from very different industries and company cultures, a few themes seemed universal:

A positive attitude goes a long way. When you’re going in for an interview or even an initial phone screen, you need to be in a good mood and show the interviewers that you want the job. No one wants to work with a Negative Nancy!

Research is key. Employers want to know you took the time to read their website, recent news articles about the organization, etc., and that you have a good understanding of how they work and what’s going on in their world. Prove in your cover letter and during the interview that you’ve done your homework. Whenever possible, find someone you know who works at the company and grab a cup of coffee with them to learn more about the organization and its culture.

It’s more than just skill set. When a hiring manager gets a job requisition approved, they want someone who can not only do the job, but also fit in with the company and team culture. Assume that a portion of every screening and interview is devoted to determining how well you will fit in with the company’s culture and the make-up of your specific team.

After the panel discussion, we broke out into smaller groups where the attendees could sit with each panelist and ask and every question they had about the job market and the search. A lot of this time was devoted to going over the dos and don’ts of resume writing and networking.

This was a really great event. The attendees were very enthusiastic and each speaker brought something different to the table.  Thanks again to Eliza Shanley and Women@Work for putting together such a polished event! I look forward to working with this group again.

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert at TheLadders. Always on the go at work and away, Amanda trains and competes in races and triathlons in her spare time.

Mother’s day is here, and I wanted to talk to you guys about something I call Mom guilt. I’m not talking about the guilt trips our Moms all treated us to when we didn’t clean our room as a kid, or now when we don’t call as often as they would like. I’m talking about the massive guilt every working Mom feels every day. Guilt that we are not spending enough time with our kids, coupled with guilt that our work may be suffering from not having our undivided attention 24 hours a day.

The author, Holly, and her daughter, Juliet.

TheLadders recently released a survey to more than 250 women who are, or soon will be, working mothers. The results had me nodding furiously while answering a work email, changing my daughter’s diaper and submitting my sales forecast all at the same time (yes, moms multi-task). Balancing a career and a family is a huge struggle for 87% of respondents, with 55% admitting that “excelling at both is overwhelming.”

In addition, when it comes to balance, 13% “struggled at first, but now it’s under control,” 16% “always put family first and work has suffered for it,” and 3% “always put work first and family has suffered for it.” I can only assume that the other 13% that said they “Successfully manage both aspects” actually slipped on baby drool and tripped into the computer, selecting the wrong line by mistake.

Either way, the survey results are enlightening, and while I still feel that pang of guilt when missing little milestones in my daughter’s life or needing to run out of work early once in a while, at the very least this survey assures me that I am not alone.

You can read the full survey results here. And don’t forget to call your Mom!

Click here for a PDF version of the info-graphic › 

Holly Esposito is a Senior Account Manager at TheLadders, and Juliet’s mom. If you see her running down Canal Street in New York, please make way… she needs to get home to relieve the baby sitter by 7pm.