The Ladders

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Asi Erenberg

How narrowing the field of operation can widen the rewards

The Single Focus philosophy emphasizes a niche-style “boutique” approach online, as opposed to replicating the Walmarts or K-Marts of this world.

One telling example is the success story of a job-finding site, TheLadders.com that chose to specialize. In the online job-market world, the big-box, WalMart role was traditionally played by Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Yahoo’s Hot Jobs, all vast online emporiums for jobs in every walk of professional life.
TheLadders, under founder Marc Cenedella in New York, decided to concentrate on a strictly limited range of jobs – just those paying $100,000 a year and above. And it narrowed down the job fields to just twelve professional areas, from Technology, Finance, Human Resources, the Law and eight others.The thinking was to create a “walled garden” where the two essential forms of customer, six-figure job-seekers and their recruiters, could connect with each other.

A big attraction would be that there would be none of the extraneous advertising that you get at Monster and the other big job-boards (where tacky offers of get-rich-quick schemes can be as annoying as the screaming “Special Offer!” come-ons can be in the aisles of Walmart.)

To ensure the exclusive-club feel of the site, the trick was - remarkably - to charge job-seekers a subscription fee ($30 per month). Now, that’s a measure that wouldn’t of course work for many a niche-serving boutique.

It was considered risky in the online employment market, too, since traditionally job-finding sites would charge a fee to recruiters but not the seeker. Conventional wisdom was overturned, though, and TheLadders has ended up attracting 40,000 new recruiting posts every month. And on the seeker side 51% of its subscribers have turned out to be at director-level and above, and more than 82% have at least 15 years of experience in their fields.

Bottom-line evidence that the company’s approach works is that it’s now generating astonishing annual revenue. I don’t in a million years want to suggest that of charging an fee is the online route to success for any online service, but using some well-chosen method to narrow your customer focus certainly is.

For instance, the TheLadders experience in full-time employment search is now being emulated by a firm concentrating in an even more specialized way – targeting highly-paid contract workers. Based in Minnesota, HotGigs has grown in just 3 years to be a service for 100,000 individuals who pay a modest $100 a year for access to job listings from about 20,000 companies and recruiters. HotGigs is pulling in revenue of $5 million a year.

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