TheLadders.com in the Wall Street Journal

I've been at TheLadders.com for almost 26 months now. We've done a lot of great things, some of which get noticed by the outside world, some of which don't. It's always refreshing to meet people that are subscribed to TheLadders.com -- both jobseekers and recruiters -- because you sometimes forget that people are actually using the site you've put hours and hours and hours into creating (and yes, I know that with 825,000 jobseekers and 18,000 recruiters signed up that may seem a little weird, but trust me).

Well lookie here: The Wall Street Journal says "Move Over, Monster" and leads the story with TheLadders! (The link will work for the next 7 days).

Here's the lead:

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.

My other favorite quote is from an executive at Monster who explains why they shut down ChiefMonster (a competitive site for jobs at the executive level):

Monster.com, the biggest of the big boards, says it tried a more niche-oriented approach some years back with segmented sites such as My.Chief.Monster.com, for executives. But given that "people can only bookmark so many sites," Monster found it more effective to return to one central site, says Doug Klinger, president of Monster Worldwide Inc.'s Monster North America division in Maynard, Mass.

Ummm, yeah...

And if there are any recruiters or hiring managers out there who want to learn more about TheLadders.com, please email me!