June 29, 2006

TheLadders.com at SHRM

We were out in force for SHRM (Society of Human Resource Management) 2006 in D.C. this week. Over 12,000 HR professionals in attendance, and, as usual, our team wowed them -- our first time 10' x 20' booth, a great party at Zengo in DC Monday night, and over 3,000 conversations over the 3 days.

Here are some pics:

Our acrobat troupe at our Monday night party.

Acrobats and me.

We sponsored a lunch -- the funny thing about HR people, they are so warm and wonderful and thankful. We must have had 40 people stop by the booth to thank us for lunch! What great folks!

The whole team at the booth.

June 28, 2006

Distractions at Work

Excellent YouTube feed of a TV reporter harassed at the office....

June 26, 2006

Reaching out

I'm at the SHRM 2006 Annual Conference and Exposition in Washington, D.C., today. It's a great venue for TheLadders.com, the world's largest source of $100K+ jobs, to reach out to over 12,000 HR professionals from all over the world and spread our message of a simpler, easier way to find (or fill) your next $100K+ job.

June 23, 2006

Wilson speaks

There's a dearth of informed commentary of the job board space, so it's great when Rob WIlson steps up to the microphone.

Pretty insightful stuff, and a welcome voice in our little recruiting world.

June 21, 2006

We're better than you

Some well-deserved chest-thumping from my product guy. If anything, I would applaud even louder. Our team has changed an industry, launched the first ever Recruiter profile database on the internet, built a job hunt management tool that puts the big boys to shame, and have a LOT more cooking under the hood, lemme tell ya.

OK, enough "Proud Papa" for this afternoon, back to the salt mines!

My review with Bill Gates

An awesome firsthand account of a review with Bill G:

Later I had it explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it's never happened before."

"Can you imagine if Jim Manzi had been in that meeting?" someone asked. "'What's a date function?' Manzi would have asked."

Jim Manzi was the MBA-type running Lotus into the ground.

It was a good point. Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf.

"It's ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!" they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand.

You know, in the same way, I wonder how the guys that run, really run, Monster and HotJobs and CareerBuilder can run those organizations without really and truly understanding the customer. Reading the customer email. Responding to customers. Watching the interactions on the site between recruiters and job-seekers.

Because without truly understanding the guts of what you produce -- whether it be software design, or productive recruiting interactions -- it's impossible to make it better.

Thanks to Kocher for the link.

Fred's not notable

Well, I'm really bugged about this one, having been a Wikipedia fan for the past two years (it's my homepage, God bless).

Fred WIlson, noted venture capitalist and blogger, is Not Notable according to the fellas ultimately in charge over at WIkipedia.

As someone with much better knowledge of the space and subject matter than those involved in deleting it on Wikipedia, I disagree.

As I protested to the Admin's page:

How was the determination made to delete Fred? I've been an avid user of Wikipedia for over 2 years, and, in the scheme of things, Fred is the level of business-person who qualifies under notability.

In addition, the comments in favor, while from many newbies, were from educated, informed people familiar with the space. I agree we don't want sub-groups and communities polluting Wikipedia with vanity pages, but this is not one of those cases. And those arguing against displayed no notable knowledge, education, understanding of this category. So while a majority vote shouldn't carry the day, neither should the votes of those who are not qualified to pass on notability.

To take some of my own favorite entries, who, in my assessment would rank below Fred in notability: Yo la tengo Jeff Jarvis Cesaria Evora

I guess, on the positive side, this made me realize exactly how much I love Wikipedia, and has made me determined to participate more.

So I am going to participate more. Stay tuned....

There are some outstanding comments on his blog post, by the way:

In the past I have considered creating some resources on Wikipedia that would cover my speciality in computer performance and capacity planning. I've written books on the subject, have lots of hits on my name if you google it, but hearing about arbitrary decisions like this makes me feel that its not worth the effort. It doesn't feel right that Wikipedia should promote itself at the start as the place where anyone can create and share useful reference information, and then have arbitrary restrictions be placed on who and what can be described there. Its now a bureacracy that I don't want to deal with. However, the Internet has always "routed around censorship", so if someone sets up a new Wiki based on the original principles of Wikipedia, to hold all the things that the bureaucrats are rejecting, I'll support it....

Fred, are you protesting the that you are notable enough to be included but were unfairly excluded, that the notoriety standard is applied inconsistently and cluelessly, or that wikipedia should lower its standard to include less notable people?

Or simply shedding light on Wikipedia's process? I had the impression you were interested in exploring the inner workings and edges of the process. Perhaps this post is not a protest after all, but simply a statement of fact.

(It was hard to resist making a snide comment about VC egos on this one, but I managed it)

Why not get to the heart of the matter? The criteria for including people in Wikipedia based on their notability are here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notability

June 19, 2006

TheLadders.com in BusinessWeek

Highland Capital Partners is a smart player in "The Search for Talent in Silicon Valley::

LURING THE TALENT. Once the system was up and running, it fell to Gaiss to make sure that the most talented folks in the job market would be directed to it. To do so, he struck deals with job search engines such as Indeed, Simplyhired, and TheLadders. He advertised through links on professional associations' Web sites. And he tested some online advertising strategies using keywords. Gaiss also experimented with a direct-mail campaign and event tie-ins. As these efforts take hold, the number of applicants has risen as high as 150 daily.

Venture capital firms are great sources of connections for great high-end jobs for our 830,000 subscribers; and TheLadders.com subscribers are a huge pool of talent to staff their portfolio firms' ranks.

They really are two great tastes that taste great together.

New look, same great recruiting flava

David Manaster, CEO and recruiting uber-thinker at Electronic Recruiting Exchange unveils his cool new logo.

We like it! We really like it!

Goldman Sachs and the White House's Job Rotation System

Uber-blogger Paul Kedrosky horns in on my turf with this amusing observation that the Centers of Gravity in New York and Washington ought to just formalize their talent-swapping system.

TheLadders.com in WSJ

Jeanette Borzo writes "Move Over, Monster", and we couldn't agree more for the $100K+ job-seeker:

Move Over, Monster

Niche job-listing sites catch on among those looking for more-relevant searches
By JEANETTE BORZO
June 19, 2006; Page R12

Last year, when Craig Lund decided he wanted a new job, the media sales manager chose a common path: He posted his résumé on Internet job boards.

In less than a month, he was named Toronto account director for Aquent Marketing Staffing, a division of Boston-based staffing consultants Aquent Inc. But Mr. Lund didn't land the job through one of the giant boards, like Monster.com or its Canadian equivalent, Workopolis.com. He found it on a much smaller site -- one that targets a select group of job seekers based on salary, profession and experience.

On TheLadders.com, a New York-based employment site geared toward professionals earning $100,000 or more, "the caliber of the jobs was far different from Workopolis and Monster," says Mr. Lund. (TheLadders.com recently entered a two-year subscription-sharing partnership with CareerJournal.com, a unit of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.)

As the online job-listing market matures, niche sites, with their fewer and sometimes more relevant listings, are gaining in popularity. Like Mr. Lund, many job candidates have launched searches on both large and niche sites at the same time and say the niche sites produced faster results that were more targeted to their interests.

Click here to read the whole story (registration required).

June 18, 2006

One More Saturday Night

seersucker, huh?

I'd like to see that it the office sometime Shafron.

June 13, 2006

JWT -- you like us! You really like us!

I'm pretty psyched that the crew at JWT has hopped on board. Since my days at HotJobs, the JWT Employment Communications folks have been known as a class act, and it's nice to travel in such distinguished circles!

TheLadders.com on Gawker

The price of success, snarky, snippy New York insider blog Gawker captures our own Michael Shafrir and DeWayne Martin on celluloid, er... pixels.

June 12, 2006

"Monster Worldwide Gave Officials Options Ahead of Share Run-Ups"

The Wall Street Journal runs an article today that largely explains the precipitous freefall in Monster shares over the past 2 weeks, titled "Monster Worldwide Gave Officials Options Ahead of Share Run-Ups":

The operator of job-search Web site Monster.com frequently granted options to top executives dated ahead of sharp run-ups in its share price, raising questions about whether the grants were backdated or otherwise timed to boost their value to the recipients. The findings, gleaned from securities filings made by New York-based Monster Worldwide Inc., come amid a widening scandal over the timing of executive options."

Monster Worldwide has scored low on corporate governance from major ratings agencies, and some perceive the Board as a rubber stamp for the entrepreneurial genius Andy McKelvey.

Andy has survived all sorts of turmoil at the company -- the share decline from 2000 highs, a margin call that saw 1/3 of his holdings get taken away, management change, etc. But this is the first time he has faced legal trouble, and it is the type of trouble that gets very, very serious, very quickly.

The new team at Monster has been great at putting the company on the right footing, so we'll have to wait and see how this pans out....

June 11, 2006

Some thoughts for commenters on Heather's blog

Lots of commenters over at Heather's "Marketing at Microsoft" Blog regarding TheLadders.com and our visit with Heather.

I've posted the following comments there, but not entirely sure if the comments system will handle such a long post, so here it is again:

Well thank you very much everybody for taking such an interest in TheLadders.com here on Heather's blog!

To take folks' comments in order:
"Layla Davis" the person whose favorite writer disappeared, sounds like it might be a pseudonymn for that writer! We don't have a Layla Davis in our database, and, in any event, I read every single customer email here at TheLadders.com -- it's about 1,000 per week, and therefore about 150,000 over the past 3 years. I haven't had any reader complain about the details of our resume services, or connect the dots between the fact that many of our resume writers also write articles for the newsletter, so I'd have to guess this is one of the disgruntled writers that we opted out of our service. And I really make no apology for that -- we've reviewed hundreds of resume writers over the years to pick our current crop of 12 approved writers. And the ones that don't make it, or that we fire because their service is not up-to-snuff, can engage in this kind of petty, anonymous sniping. If those are the "outrageous slings and arrows" that we have to put up with to serve our customers better, I am glad to do it.

Wine-Oh: Thanks for the general feedback. Recruiter responsiveness is always a perceived issue among job-seekers. In the good old days, you'd actually get a postcard or a phone call acknowledging your application! (Yes, to all the young ones out there, that's how it was in the goold old days). But today, the problem is that recruiters receive, literally, thousands of applications for every spot. We've tried to help them with our system, which leads to an average of about 15 applicants per spot, but it's just not always possible for a recruiter to reply. Our next generation system, called "My Applicants" and due out next month, will make it much easier for recruiters to provide feedback to candidates.

As far as the interface, Wine-Oh, without more specific feedback there's not much I can address point by point. But I will say that we've improved dramatically in the past year, as we've increased our product, tech, and deisgn staffs three-fold. We're only three years old and we're developing this system from scratch, so it does take a lot of listening, learning, and working on our part to keep getting better. The good thing is, we're defintiely getting better! If you want to see for yourself, just take a look at what our site looked like two years ago when I was still doing the design myself!:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040322140732/http://www.salesladder.com/

Eeeek! :)

Matt -- yeah, we get this one a lot. Because we're inventing an industry -- job seeker information services -- a lot of people approach our model with a sense that it is desperate / cheap / pathetic, etc. Which is really kind of funny and sad. In the other major life decisions you make -- buying a car, buying a house, making investments, doing your taxes -- it is of course, understood, and even a little bit expected that you would seek out better sources of information and purchase them. For some strange reason though, it's viewed as an odd thing to do when it comes to the 2nd most important decision in your life -- where you'll work and how you'll earn your daily bread. So we'll continue to try to overcome people's prejudices about our new industry and prove that our subscribers *should* "hire" us to help them in their job search.

Wine-oh, Part 2 -- thanks for coming back with more comments. Screen recruiters -- we do, in fact, hand-screen every single recruiter and every single job before we allow them into our system. Occassionally, stinkers do fake their way thru -- we're currently pulling about 1 recruiter per week off the site for bad behavior (out of 17,000, so they are actually very well-behaved) and find that 10 to 15 non-high-end jobs each week somehow snuck through our filters (out of 7,000 new ones, so, again, I think within our acceptable margin of error).

Only posting exclusive jobs -- yeah, WIne-Oh, I hear you, and you sound like a very diligent sort. But other customers want just the opposite -- they'd like to see all $100K+ jobs in one place so that tehy DON'T have to go looking everywhere on the net. That's why we put the icons there for you, so you can decide for yourself whether you just want to see the exclusive ones or "all" jobs. Building a product in general means compromises and trade-offs, and trying to find the right mix of features that can best satisfy everybody, so while I definitely hear and understand your particular preferences, I hope you'll understand that we try to do our best to maximize the utility for most subscribers.

Wine-Oh, Part 3 -- Hybrid-type gigs are definitely the hardest to find, Wine-Oh, so I can appreciate that your search was a little tougher. We defintely love feedback -- as I've said, I read every single customer email (about 1,000 / week) and that's what drives our product development process. Feel free to write in and mention that you're "Wine-Oh" from Heather's blog and you'll get a reply from me.

Tobin -- thanks for the comments, and glad that you've rejoined! As far as the resume critique goes, it's meant to be a 15-minute "taste test" of what a resume writer can do. As I strongly recommend that any professional get their resume written professionally, we've arranged for this critique to help you better understand the resume writing market. It is definitely NOT a "freebie" resume re-write, for which any good writer will charge $800 or more. And it's important that subscribers be fair to the resume writers -- you wouldn't want a company to have you come in and complete a project for free to take advantage of your desire to prove yourself. Similarly, resume writers can't do all the work for you for free, and then hope that you'll pay them. It's just not entirely fair.

As far as resume writers and more resumes, that's a good idea. As is a rating system. Alas, given everything in our pipeline right now, that's probably a 2007 project, but thanks for the thinking on that!

Paul -- many thanks for your thoughts.

Recruiters -- we're hoping our new system, out next month, will make managing and communicating with applicants about their status MUCH easier.
Eliminate paid ads --we don't accept money from hiring firms or recruiters, and we don't acept paid ads. We work for you, the job-seeker.
Eliminate monthly fee -- not sure how we'd stay in business if we didn't charge our customers! Also, the monthly fee serves as a cover charge; and like cover charges verywhere that helps ensure that the people using the service feel it is valuable and appropriate for them, thereby keeping inappropriate applicants out.
Eliminate paid ads -- we don't have paid ads from recruiters / employers.
Pay to view jobs -- we're really a lot more than this, and, in fact, people can view all of the job titles, locations, etc. for free on the basic free product. The premium product is about *connecting* with recrutiers: through the job listings, through the Bio database, etc. So we're hoping to make the paid version even more useful in terms of, not just viewing job listings, but connecting with real recruiters, hiring managers, and HR groups, in order to get you into that next great role in life as quickly as possible.

Thanks for the other positive comments, Paul!

June 04, 2006

Martha Stewart at 'D'

Hey Readers!

To see the original WSJ article, click here (subscription may be required).

Here's Martha giving the business to Sir Howard:

And here's another photo via Flickr:

And here's the Journal's reporting:

'D' Is for Digital -- Diva, Too
June 1, 2006; Page B1

Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony Corp., had just regaled the audience at The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference with his description of how he runs a Japanese company without speaking Japanese -- "I get plenty of calming silences," he said -- and opened the floor to questions, when an irritated customer stepped up to the microphone.

It was none other than Martha Stewart, founder of Martha Stewart Living Ominmedia Inc., holding up a tote bag filled with all the charging devices she said she needs to power up the electronic gear she packed for her trip. She held up one device for her camcorder, one for her Vaio laptop computer, another for her digital camera and still another for her cellphone -- until she had a handful of electronic spaghetti.

Martha Stewart complains to Howard Stringer about too many chargers.
"Why can't this thing be this thing?" Ms. Stewart demanded of the Sony chief, referring to two seemingly identical objects.

"Check, please," Mr. Stringer interjected, trying to extricate himself.

But the domestic diva wouldn't be stopped. "Then you need all of these things at all of your houses!" she exclaimed. At which point Mr. Stringer quipped, "You need a native bearer." He did, however, offer some insight. "For the last three years, the most profitable division [at Sony] was the components division," he said, adding that he would look into the matter.

While this episode certainly ranked right up there, Mr. Stringer, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and other digital-industry chiefs at this fourth-annual gathering of technology executives, experts and journalists, found themselves at times in an even more awkward position, overshadowed by someone who wasn't even in the room: Apple Computer Inc.'s CEO, Steve Jobs. As Mr. Gates and then Mr. Stringer answered questions on Day One of the three-day digital schmooze-fest, it was clear that Sony and Microsoft both could be diagnosed as suffering from iPod envy.

* * *

And here's another good blog post on Martha - Howard from Gary Arlen.