Mrshafrir.com

A nice little pick-me-up on a Thursday afternoon. I'm excluding the job seeker's name, because while he did authorize TheLadders.com to use his name, I'm not speaking in an official capacity here.

Oh, and OpsLadder is just one of 8 different functional titles we offer $100k+ job seekers. Remember, job seekers pay for access to TheLadders.com. The top 10% of all earners are willing to pay because we offer a cleaner, more streamlined service than anything else out there.

OpsLadder Team,

I felt compelled to send a "thank you" and an "landed" update for your files. I left my career with GE after 12 years in January 2007. I had enjoyed great success in GE, but felt compelled to leave large corporate life and try something different. I enjoyed the first month reconnecting with the family. In February I started my active job search - utilizing a few of the public search boards, including 6Figurejobs, Execunet and OpsLadder.com. It became clear, very quickly that the quality of OpsLadder FAR surpassed anything else out there. While I monitored the other search sites - I relied heavily on OpsLadder as my primary search tool.

Out of the gate I found numerous potential job fits, but focused on raising the bar in my career - a larger scale job, better pay and a smaller private company with room to grow. I had a number of interviews and flew to many face-to-face meetings. Perseverance paid off in April as I was contacted by a recruiter after posting for a COO role through OpsLadder with a Specialty Finance company. After three rounds of interviews with the Executive Team and the Board of Directors an offer was presented to me last week. I start a great COO job in a two weeks!!!

I can’t thank the OpsLadder team enough for your product. OpsLadder played a significant role in accomplishing a major milestone in my career. Without question, OpsLadder as a job search tool is the best organized, most user-friendly and is filled with the "richest" content. You’ve earned a customer for life - through In my new capacity as COO you can bet my company will be using OpsLadder as it’s primary external recruiting tool.

Please send my thanks to the entire OpsLadder team for a job well done!

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yawn...

The best part is in the FAQs.

The answer to "Why did The New York Times decide to work with Monster.com?" is, apparently, "A strategic alliance will create an unsurpassed combination of scale, technology and marketing power for The New York Times."

Not, "A strategic alliance will create an unsurpassed combination of scale, technology and marketing power for the New York's top employers." But then again, when your stock chart looks like this, what's a little brand dilution among friends?

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in 2002, fresh-faced out of college, I applied to a bunch of jobs on sites like Monster. A lot of them began with headlines like "Want a Job in Sports?" Turns out that these were usually jobs where you hang out in the bowels of Yankee Stadium and get people to fill out credit card applications in exchange for a free t-shirt.

Want a job in sports, indeed.

Except that's what the New Orleans Hornets seem to be saying. And it's not the credit-card-application type job either.

It's a Finance Controller. And a Director of IT. And an Inside Sales Manager. And they're having a job fair to bring in applicants. I've never been a hiring manager at an NBA team, but I'm guessing most openings aren't filled this way.

The Hornets face two unique challenges -- the first, obviously, is that New Orleans, post-Katrina, isn't exactly a boom town. The second is that the Hornets have actually played their last two seasons in Oklahoma City. So instead of re-relocating, a lot of their employees stayed in OKC.

In any case, if I lived in New Orleans, I might just drop my application in for this job.

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fred Wilson opines that JetBlue has grown "too big for it's britches" at the JFK JetBlue terminal. I would've titled the post "I Still Love JetBlue, but air travel in general really sucks," but that's just me.

The last time I flew JetBlue out of JFK they drove us to an auxiliary terminal for the flight. It wasn't a big deal, but it certainly seemed like temporary overflow housing.

It's not so much JetBlue though that has outgrown its housing at JFK. It's the idea of using JFK as an airport for short-haul flights. I'm no transportation expert, but it seems logical that the tri-state area should be using LaGuardia, White Plains, and Islip as the short-haul domestic airports, and JFK and Newark as the airports for cross-country and international flights. That's basically how they were used in the past (especially JFK) but it seems like the frequency of flights at JFK is causing problems for JetBlue. And given the overcrowded, increasingly expensive state of domestic air travel, that's a really bad thing for an NYC-based traveler like myself.

I have a decent amount of travel through this summer and I'm not looking forward to any of it (the travel part, not the actual destination).

And while we're on the subject of travel, let me confess my love of Kayak.com. It's a comparison site/engine for travel that includes, unlike Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity, fares on JetBlue. Their user interface is really intuitive, well-thought-out, and constantly evolving as well (a huge bonus).

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Living in New York's East Village is a pretty sweet deal as far as food options go.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'll be eating one of these realllll soon.

I dig on "a sandwich with three layers of white bread, and we stuff it with original ingredients: caramelized onion with balsamic vinegar, tuna, shrimp, ham, artichokes, Fontina cheese."

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh, Internet. A blessing and a curse.

For one thing, without you, I wouldn't have my job.

On the other hand, without you, there would be no Myspace. And with no Myspace I'd have no idea that Ben Kweller is playing 3 nights this summer at the Southpaw in Brooklyn. And with no information about these concerts (where he's playing each of his albums, one each night) I never would've just dropped $120 on 2 tickets to each night.

Considering that each of his albums is about 40 minutes long, I'm guessing I'll spend more time getting out to and back from Brooklyn each night then I will at the concerts.

Whatever, it should be a good warmup for the Virgin Music Festival the following weekend!

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ahhh, I remember it like it was yesterday.

School ends in June, you pack up the trunk, say goodbye to your parents, and hop in the private jet to take you up to summer camp.

Seriously?

Un-ironically, Robin O'Hara of Great Neck, explains:

"The bus takes 31/2 hours. It is crowded, and it's always a very dramatic scene," said O'Hara, of Great Neck, L.I.

"This year, she is not going with her [older] sisters, so we want to make it a special, unique experience for her.

"It's a trend. A lot of my friends do it," O'Hara said. "They play videos, they serve kids' food, sometimes, we'll have a manicurist on board."

What will they think of next?

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We also hired a new Chief Marketing Officer, Robert Turtledove.

Rumor has it our next hire is a partridge in a pear tree. OK, ok, I promise, last joke ever about that...

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Technology reporter Bob Tedeschi tackles the story of this humble little company known as TheLadders.com.

FOTLC, Heather Hamilton, gets the money quote:

Heather Hamilton, a staffing manager at Microsoft who uses the site to fill marketing positions, disagreed. “If you’re not serious, you’re not going to pay the money,†she said. “That’s a big part of why we’ve found TheLadders to be more fruitful than other job boards.â€

It's really neat to see us in the New York Times, that's for sure.

Posted by Michael Shafrir at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)