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One day, I want to go work for a cool company in Silicon Valley and then be told I get to open a new office. Hopefully, if I'm lucky, that office will be in Omaha, Nebraska.
Oh wait. LinkedIn beat me to the punch.
If you'd like to work for a great Internet company in New York freakin' City, click here. Or just email your resume to michael (at) theladders (dot) com.
And hopefully that means in Foxboro and for the Patriots, because the Pats just traded for Randy Moss.
For the optimists out there, let's look at Randy Moss' 2003 stats: 111 catches, 1632 yards, 17 touches.
"I don't think you all understand how excited I am to be a part of this organization," Moss told the media. "I think [New England's] record and what they're about speaks massive volumes. I'm just very, very happy to find some happiness and getting back to what I love to do -- that's play football and going out there and [competing]."
We have a pretty intense interview process at TheLadders.com. Here's a clip.
(Thanks to Scrozie for the link)
At least that's what Deadspin is calling this guy.
I played in a Beirut (or Beer Pong) tournament this weekend. This guy would've won for sure.
One of the better blogs aimed at younger workers and their career options is Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist.
From BC:
Penelope Trunk writes career advice for a new generation of workers. She explains why old advice - like pay your dues, climb the ladder, and don't have gaps in your resume - is outdated and irrelevant in today's workplace. She has a reputation for giving advice that is counterintuitive but effective, like take long lunches, ignore people who steal your ideas, and stop vying for a promotion.
Anyway, the news came today that LinkedIn has signed on to sponsor her blog. Penelope's blog gets, on average, about 4,500 visitors a day (according to her Sitemeter). As far as independent blogs go, I suppose that's pretty good.
But this isn't really about Penelope's traffic. It's more about what LinkedIn's sponsorship says about their marketing and corporate strategy. After all, if there's one site out there that for a while has said it's about one thing ("networking") while making money off another (jobs, recruiters, and job postings), it's LinkedIn.
For example, on the LinkedIn "About Us" page, here's what LinkedIn says about creating a profile:
When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.
There's nothing in there specifically mentioning "jobs." However on the same page it says that "through your network you can:" (following emphasis mine)
* Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended
* Be found for business opportunities
* Search for great jobs
* Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
* Post and distribute job listings
* Find high-quality passive candidates
* Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know
So LinkedIn is about networking. But it's also about jobs. And networking too.
Like they say, smoke 'em if you got 'em. Or you gotta dance with who brung ya. Or a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. OK, maybe not that last one, but you get the point. This might be (to my knowledge) the first career-oriented blog that LinkedIn sponsors, but it definitely won't be the last. This sponsorship (and potential others), in my book, is a strong move by LinkedIn.
Bairam points to this neat Google Maps Easter Egg.
1. go to Google Maps
2. click on "get directions"
3. type "New York" in the first box (the "from" box)
4. type "London" in the second box (the "to" box)
5. click on "get directions"
6. scroll down to step #23
As an added bonus (for me), the North American portion of the journey ends at the New England Aquarium in Boston.
Who cares if it will probably be 40 degrees...
Nick Douglas first appeared on my radar screen about a year ago as the first editor at Valleywag. He seemed intelligent enough but never really brought much to the table to turn Valleywag into a must read.
When I first saw him at the Web 2.0 conference last year in San Francisco, it all made sense. He really fit the definition of a smarmy internet blogger...he was small, nerdy looking, and clearly seemed to be relishing in his pseudo-notoriety.
But from time to time (and really since getting fired from Valleywag) he puts out some decent copy. Like this piece, entitled "Dear bubble veterans. We get it. Now shut up, you're harshing out buzz." Well said!
When I first started at TheLadders, I had no idea about the effect of pricing on sales. We experimented with all sorts of prices for our Premium Job Search product -- $15 a month, $25 a month, $30 a month, $50 a month. We found that $15 increased upgrades but sacrificed long term revenues. $50 was nice in that we didn't have to keep subscribers as long to hit the same LTV (lifetime subscriber value), but we had trouble getting enough in the door to fuel rapid growth. $25 seemed to be a good number, but when we went up to $30 we didn't see a major drop-off in upgrades. So we've been at $30 for a while now.
Job postings, on the other hand, have always been free on TheLadders. We figured that this would bring more people to the table because there was really no decision to make. And it's certainly worked -- we're about to crack 30,000 recruiters on TheLadders and we're publishing about 9,000 jobs a week. But even with free postings, we have a sizable team that is devoted solely to Recruiter Relations and maximizing the number of jobs that recruiters post on TheLadders. That includes everything from customer service, to direct marketing, to phone-based outreach to our existing clients to get them to post as many jobs as possible. That's the team I manage, and this week we discovered that recruiters that have direct contact with a member of my team are 2 to 3 times more engaged than recruiters who don't work with a member of the team. That's a huge lift. But why is there a disparity? You would think that free would be the incentive for action.
Recruiters remind us constantly that time is money (especially on the contingency side of the business which is essentially a commission based sales job). If we deliver value, recruiters will use the product. If we don't, they won't -- at any cost.
Does free send the wrong message (this is true not only at TheLadders but with other companies that offer free products)? After all, the conventional wisdom goes, if it were good enough to charge for, we would. Joel Spolsky, Co-founder of Fog Creek Software, explains the pricing decisions his company made early on:
We had to raise the price a couple of times. We didn't have to, but raising the price actually increased the number of units that we sold. I guess because it looked more legitimate with the more realistic price...There was a five-user license that was like $199, and that just feels like shareware, practically. But today, when you say that a ten-user license is $999, it starts to feel like a more substantial product. In that market, it still is actually a good deal. But you really have to have a price point that conveys what you think the product positioning should be. Many people will judge where your product fits in the market based on its price.So we increased the price a couple of times, and both times it increased the number of units we sold. We launched new versions, kept adding more and more features.
(Source)
I don't really have a conclusion for this post. What I've learned so far though is two-fold: 1) Pricing is an inexact science at best. Sometimes you just have to shoot first and aim later. And 2) Your first pricing decision won't be your last.