We’re expanding, and today we say “bye bye” to helping only those over $100,000 and “hello” to helping all career-minded professionals. TheLadders now takes all salary levels and shows the right jobs to the right person. So while we’re saying goodbye to our narrower segmentation, we are not saying “goodbye” to keeping your job search on TheLadders relevant, focused, and targeted.

So, for example, you won’t see jobs that pay half (or double) what you’re currently making. You won’t see jobs outside of your field — we still won’t show sales jobs to finance professionals, or marketing jobs to technologists. And we won’t be letting in scammy jobs, work-from-home schemes, or commission-only opportunities — we’ll still be vetting every job and every recruiter before we allow them into our community.

So what’s the big change for you? Should be not too much… on the surface.

You’ll still be seeing great $100K+ jobs, and the recruiters who post them.

Behind the scenes, though, by making it easier for companies and recruiters to fill all of their professional jobs at TheLadders, you’ll find that we’re getting more, and an even wider variety of, jobs at the right level for you.

We’ve been out talking to our friends in HR departments and recruiting shops across the country these past few months talking about our expansion and we’ve found widespread enthusiasm and support. The standard ways of doing things are too expensive, too time-consuming, and too frustrating for them, too.

This expansion has been a long time in the making. From the beginning in 2003, when we set out to become the “Society of the Nation’s Top Talent” to our first appearance in the New York Times in 2007, we’ve talked about preparing for the day when we would expand to cover all professional jobs.

We’ve worked hard at becoming experts at modern recruiting. We’ve underwritten research at universities. We’ve spent over a million dollars re-writing the playbook for job search advice. We published our Amazon Top 100 best-seller: “You’re Better Than Your Job Search“. And we’ve studied the history of the job search through the past two centuries.

We also launched Signature, our historically unprecedented program that guarantees you a job offer — or your money back — when you follow our program of weekly or bi-weekly calls over six months.

And based on our expertise in understanding what employers want, we’ve built the largest resume writing service in the country.

It’s that excellence in helping job-seekers like you that has propelled us to become leaders in the business, and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve tripled the number of recruiters and HR professionals in our community this year alone.

And so now that we’ve grown to almost five million members in the United States and 43% of high-end professionals used TheLadders in their job search last year, we’re expanding to serve all career-minded professionals and all professional jobs in the country.

I thank you for your support these last eight years and look forward to eight, or eighteen, or eighty more years helping you succeed in the job hunt!

There are a lot of reasons why you might not want to be a kickboxer.

You could be timid, you could not enjoy fighting, you could prefer kung fu, and so on.

But let’s take one really obvious reason why you can’t be a good kickboxer:

You only have one arm.

You know, it’s great to have dreams in life, but, hey, you also need to be realistic.

Because half of kickboxing is boxing, sometimes you have to realize that you actually can’t do it; that it’s better to lower your expectations so that you don’t get your hopes up and wind up disappointed.

Sometimes, when your fantasies are unrealistic, you need to be reasonable. You need to be prudent. You need to let your dreams — let’s admit it, they were “crazy dreams” — pass on by, so that you can grow up and be an adult and be responsible.

Like, for example, if you wanted to be a kickboxer, but, during a difficult childbirth, your right arm had been entangled with your umbilical cord and been amputated below the elbow.

And that left you with just one hand.

Then, you know, it’s pretty obvious that you… well, you just can’t be a kickboxer, y’know?

And maybe it’s even really disappointing to you because that was your crazy goal in life, and you were willing to do anything — work out in any gym, run any number of miles on the back roads of Winnipeg, jump as much rope as your father would turn for you — you were willing to do anything to be who you wanted to be.

But it’s important that you trim your dreams in life to match your abilities.

So let’s just face it and talk straight:

If you only have one arm, you can’t be a kickboxer! That’s so obvious that I can’t believe I have to keep on telling you this…

You. Can’t. Be. A. Kickboxer!!!

That is, unless you’re my new hero, Baxter Humby, and you think that’s all a bunch of bummer that other people are trying to push on you and you don’t care that you only have one arm because you were born, and you breathe, and you beat, not just the opponent, but every excuse we ever tried to weigh down on you…

You know, in some ways, it’s a totally unfair fight.

Sure, the other guy’s got more hands, but Baxter’s got more heart.

Guess who wins in life?

Now, if you would be so kind as to do me the favor of writing down all the reasons that you can’t be successful this week — please, really, right now, take the next sixty seconds to just write down a few of those reasons that you have in your head this morning.

And now take… (lucky you!)… both of your hands, grab that little piece of paper between them, and then rrriiiiiiiiiiippppppppppppppp those terrible little lies into teeny, tiny shreds. You won’t be needing them anymore.

Now go out and be who you were born to be: today, tomorrow, the rest of the week, and the rest of your life.

UPDATE: An even more compelling fact about Baxter Humby is that he is not just “a” kickboxer, he is the World Champion in his weight class! Which is really astounding. For more, you can visit his homepage or check out his Wikipedia entry.

You’re pressed for time, pressed for budget, pressed to just get the position filled.

So why would you use a solution that takes twelve times as long and costs twelve times as much to source a qualified candidate?

We ran a six-month test across 33 recruiters — all paying clients of both TheLadders and LinkedIn — and asked them to record their results in a head-to-head comparison.

The outcome?

TheLadders’ community is superior for filling your jobs quickly and cost-effectively:
- 5 mm career-minded professionals
- Interested in keeping abreast of the market
- Not just a modern day “phonebook” of contact info
- Full resumes where available enable easier screening for you
- Emotional profile questions let you know more about what the candidate is looking for
- Talent Specialists at TheLadders stand ready to do the work for you

All of which means your total costs of recruiting could be 12x lower and your time spent sourcing could be 12x less when you use TheLadders.

So, sure, cold-calling and spamming candidates might seem to work in the short run, but it takes too much time, too much money and is too much of a risk to your employment brand.

And in this kind of economy, you can’t afford any of those risks. Give us a call, or better yet, give us another requisition, today, and we’ll help get you there faster…

Good Labor Day morning to you!

Well here we are at Labor Day!

When it’s time to get back into the swing of things, we can take a page from The Beatles.

It was January of 1969, and The Beatles were a mess. The recording of an album tentatively titled ‘Get Back’ was meant to be a ‘back to the basics’ return to their roots, but personal problems between the Beatles escalated and culminated in George Harrison’s walking out on the band.

After letting feelings calm down a bit, they got together again at their company’s headquarters on Savile Row in London. On the afternoon of January 30th, 1969, the Beatles walked out onto their roof and into history with a 42-minute gig that brought central London to a standstill.

With Billy Preston joining on keyboards, the Beatles played a great “Last Concert” that re-energized them and got them through the rest of the year. Featuring now-classic songs such as “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down”, the videos are a wonderful look at the last live performance of the 20th century’s greatest music phenomenon.

And I think the experience is instructive.

As the Beatles did, when it’s time to get yourself re-energized and re-enthused, it’s a great idea to break with the past and throw yourself into the new.

Well, with summer almost behind us, and Labor Day upon us, what can you do this week to get your job, or your job search, reinvigorated? Get out of your den, go for a run, shake your head in the breeze, grow a groovy beard like Paul, and change your routine. It will give you a fresh perspective and a new outlook on things.

Oh, and be sure to be as polite as the always-sly John Lennon when he addressed the audience at the end, saying, “I’d like to say ‘Thank you’ on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”

I hope you’ve had a great summer… dig a pony, this week, Readers!

The internet means you can keep tabs on grandma’s vacation, the kids’ soccer schedules, and your college friends’ loves, losses and lives with ease. It is so easy to find out anything about anybody you know!

What’s tougher is your job. Sure, it’s getting easier for everybody to find anybody, but the trouble is… how do you know who will take the open position you’re looking to fill?

That’s why TheLadders’ career network gives you closable candidates:

1) Career-minded. Our almost 5 million subscribers have made a decision to keep themselves up-to-date on their careers. In the modern world, you’re a fool if you’re not thinking about how the bigger picture — the economy, industry trends, your company’s performance — could impact you and your family. So if you’re looking for professionals who are wise enough to know they’ll never know when opportunity might knock, we’re here to help connect the two of you.

2) “Inside Scoop”. With our Candidate Insights feature, you get the inside scoop on whether candidates are looking, whether they’re happy in their current job, and how they think about the trade-offs between cash, title and responsibilities. For talent pros, this additional data — the “emotional profile” of a candidate — is like having a secret ally whispering in your ear.

3) Resumes. Details, details, details. Sure, it’s great to know title and company, but you’ve told us over and over again that you want the details about the “what” and the “how” and the “how much” and the “how well” candidates performed their duties. That’s why we offer resumes for our candidates whenever available.

4) Easy connections. Rather than playing the e-mail hokey pokey, we offer you 1-click connections that let you and the candidate figure out quickly whether you want to speak by phone or connect by e-mail. It’s just one more benefit in getting the process out of your way so that you can get the position filled and the candidate closed.

OK, folks, hope you’re ready for a great September!

Well it’s the last week of summer, which means it’s getting time to put the boat away, send the kids back to school, get the grill ready for tailgating, and get ready for football season!!! (Can you tell I’m excited?)

It also means that it is time to Google yourself.

You see, with the Web being the first place that people go to search for things to buy, places to fly, or new things to try, it’s also where recruiters and hiring mangers go to learn about you “on the sly.”

Marc Cenedella

Marc Cenedella TheLadders

Marc Cenedella New York

Marc Cenedella 10013

Marc Cenedella Harvard Business School

It’s the first page of results that’s most important, so it’s the first page of results that you really want to focus on and understand.

Go through each of these searches and check, carefully, each of the links on the first page to understand how you are being presented or referenced on the Web.

If all you find is glowing praise and adulation, fantastic for you and congratulations!

But if you find material that might put you in the wrong light, it’s important to try and do something about it:

Patch up: If you control the site or page that has the troubling information or photos, patch up your online reputation quickly by removing or deleting the questionable material.

Push it down: If you do not control the site, another way to improve your online reputation is to push the offending material down in the results. By expanding your presence on social networks, blogs, and community forums, you can generate new web content that could get ranked higher in the search results than the bad information.

This means making sure you have a presence on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Quora, Meetup, About.me, LinkedIn, etc. Each of these sites allows you to have a public profile on a highly ranked website that is regularly ranked highly by Google. By creating a consistent presence across multiple properties, you improve your chances of controlling the first page of results.

Petition: It’s a long shot, but if you’re unable to remove the offending information, you can petition the site owner or webmaster to remove it. You are asking for a favor, so never approach a website proprietor with outrage, incredulity, or legal posturing. I can guarantee that won’t work, and it usually backfires when said proprietor posts your communications for future visitors to read and ridicule.

You best bet is to humbly seek their help… “I’m looking to clean up my online reputation so that my family, friends, and business colleagues won’t get the wrong idea about me. There is some unfortunate information on your website, and I’d really appreciate it if you would consider removing this particular bit. I know you have the right to have whatever you want on your site, and perhaps you didn’t even put everything up there yourself. So I would really appreciate it if you could help out a guy who is in a little bit of a jam.”

Again, the anonymous Internet seems to make e-mail arguments much easier, and many website operators can be very prickly about preserving their independence, so never, ever take a high-handed or aggressive approach.

Prepare: If patching, pushing and petitioning don’t work, that means you’ll have to prepare for the question in your job interview. Simply and clearly state the circumstances that led to the bad information and then stop. Don’t go into a long or tortured conversation about implications, how it makes you feel, or how unfair it is. By being open, honest and sensible, you may actually be able to come out ahead…

“Yes, during the downturn I was required to let go over 350 people in my division. Unfortunately, several of the impacted people shared their negative viewpoints of my performance in that role online. I can understand and sympathize with their anger, but I thought that preserving the ability of our company to survive very difficult economic times was in our best interests.”

“Is there anything specific I can address for you?”

If you forthrightly answer the question, show an openness to further inquiry (the appetite for digging through dirty laundry is actually much smaller than you’d imagine), and then move on, you’ll be doing the best to put a positive spin on an unfortunate situation.

OK, Readers, I hope you have a great last week of the summer, and let’s “get back” to work next week!

The modern job search has created a problem for job-seekers and recruiters alike: there’s too much noise and not enough humanity in the system.

When we speak with HR professionals and recruiters like you, we hear time and again: “I’d like to give feedback to candidates but there’s just no way to do it sensibly.”

Well, we’re taking the problem off your hands.

TheLadders has launched a new candidate feedback system that enables you to give feedback — humanely — while realizing that you’re a busy person and any system needs to take that into account when giving feedback — sanely.

So here’s how it works

When you give a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” on a candidate, we let them know… gently. We don’t show them the thumbs up or thumbs down, we just give them the information they need so that they know the result.

A thumbs up from you means that they will receive this message in their inbox: “Yes, you’re a fit.” Every job-seeker that’s a fit gets an opportunity to follow up with a three-hundred character note to let you know when’s best to contact them.

And a thumbs down from you means that they will receive this very simple message in their inbox: “Sorry, not a fit.”

By creating a mechanism for you to give feedback without getting into an e-mail exchange, we’ve made it possible to give candidates what they need — humanely and sanely.

The problem with e-mailing candidates back and forth is that it opens you up to a feedback / counseling / or grievance session that you don’t have the time for, and that your boss and the legal department have no doubt told you is counterproductive.

So while it’s always been your goal to be as much of a “people person” as you could be, the unfortunate reality has been that the rise of internet recruiting has made it just about impossible for you to carry through. The saying “no good deed goes unpunished” comes to mind.

Further, what’s great about this system is that by providing a tiny bit feedback, you allow us to provide a great deal of feedback.

When we see a candidate getting a half-dozen, or a dozen “no”s on a particular type of job, we can intervene. We can re-direct their search. We can help them think through if their strategy is the best one for getting ahead.

So by being a part of TheLadders, you’re making the world a better place, a nicer place, and letting us help professionals find jobs faster.

And all it takes is that little click!

Have a great week, Talent People!

Last week I mentioned that companies are hiring. This week I’ll remind you that… they’ve already hired!

Even though we’re entering the “dog days” of August, companies are hiring and gearing up for September.

In the interest of “show, don’t tell”, here’s just a sample of 50 of the jobs accepted already this month by your fellow subscribers here at TheLadders:

OK, Readers! Good luck in your search this week!

As you probably know, I write a weekly newsletter to our 4.7 mm subscribers here at TheLadders, and have been doing so for eight years now (phew! time flies…)

Well, next week, I’m going to be plugging you in the newsletter, but I need your help.

When your profile photo looks like this:

or this:

or even this:

…You’re not going to be attracting many followers who view you as the path to their future success, or as a thought leader in the social world that we now live in.

You know, it looks strange if everybody else has a reasonable, professional photo and you don’t.

So double-check your profile, update your photo, and make sure you’re not standing out for the wrong reasons.

Here are 16 of our recruiters and HR professionals from across the country to give you an idea of what good headshots can be.…

Thanks and have a great week!

The unemployment report came out on Friday and it showed a slight drop in the unemployment rate to 9.1%. Of course, 9.1% remains too high, as having almost a tenth of Americans that want to work sitting on the sidelines is a tragedy. As I mentioned on Fox NEWS on Wednesday, the remarkable story is that there is no remarkable improvement in the economy at this point in the recovery.

Despite that, what you need to remember for your job search is that companies are hiring!

As just an example, here are twenty top companies posting that just this week posted their jobs with us (click on the name to see all of their jobs):

• Starbucks
• ADP
• Kellogg’s
• Accenture
• Oracle
• MetLife
• Microsoft
• HP
• AT&T
• The Home Depot
• Honeywell
• Citigroup
• Bank of America
• Paychex, Inc.
• Wells Fargo
• Smith & Nephew Inc.
• The McGraw-Hill Companies
• Amazon
• NaviSite
• Pitney Bowes

How can that be? With the unemployment rate at such a high level, how can it be that these companies are hiring?

Well, it’s two things, Readers.

First off, you have to remember that most hiring is replacement hiring. It’s not companies saying that they’re going to grow their workforce by leaps and bounds, rather, it’s companies replacing routine attrition that occurs as employees flow in and out of any organization.

Think of it this way. Even though the level in your bank account probably doesn’t change *too* much in a particular year, and you may be more or less happy with where it is, a lot of new dollars come into your account each year from your current job (and then go out to expenses). So the vast majority of activity in your bank account is the addition of dollars to replace the ones you’ve already used.

Same thing in the employment market. We may be more or less happy with the overall rate of employment or unemployment, but the changeover from new employees coming in and old employees going out is far, far greater than the change in overall level.

Yep, most hiring is replacement hiring. Which means that most companies are hiring all the time.

Second, companies are always expanding. There are always sectors of the economy that are growing while others shrink. As an example, if your company has anything to do with Apple Inc. right now, you’re growing. Man, are you growing!

And that’s whether or not your company has anything to do whatsoever with technology. If you sell cardboard boxes to Apple, you’re growing. If you sell real estate maintenance to Apple, you’re growing. If you sell the little plastic biodegradable forks that the geniuses who design iPads use to eat their arugula salads at their gorgeous headquarters… guess what?… you’re growing.

So part of the job search is figuring out where’s the growth and where’s the shrink, and allocating your time accordingly.

So, folks, I hope you’ll enjoy perusing the companies above and all the companies hiring on TheLadders this week, and that you have a great week in the hunt!

I’ll be rooting for you,