Fast Track to the Top

By Lisa Gschwandtner

2003 Marc Cenedella founds TheLadders.com

2008 TheLadders.com is now the #1 worldwide source for $100k+ jobs.

What TheLadders.com does Hosts 80,000 jobs a week through eight specially targeted sites geared to experienced industry professionals and the recruiters and employers looking to hire them. 10,000 new positions are added each week.

Cenedella’s past success Head of corporate development at Hotjobs.

The Concept After Monster and Yahoo started a buyout bidding war which Yahoo won, Cenedella decided to build a system that would reverse the model and charge job seekers $30 a month or $180 a year for a highsalary search that would serve as a screening mechanism to make sure there were only really good candidates calling on companies.

The Catch According to Cenedella: “Back then, people said, ‘High- end people don’t use the Internet, and high-end people definitely don’t use the Internet for job hunting.’” After being on the inside at Hotjobs and hearing customers say finding high-level candidates was a problem, Cenedella knew he was on to something.

The Challenge Web developers told Cenedella it would take three months and $30,000 to build a prototype. “I really did not want to wait three months for a prototype – I wanted something that freakin’ worked – and I didn’t want to pay $30,000. So I went out and bought $359 worth of Web programming books, taught myself computer programming, and built the site in three weeks.” He admits it wasn’t a great site, but it worked. “What I learned from that is to just go; do it.”

The Result More than 1.7 million subscribers. 361,888 on SalesLadder. 200 employees. Presence in the UK.

Mission Statement “Mission statements are all boring and awful and wretched, and nobody can remember theirs. We’ve only got two rules. Rule #1: Love the customer. Rule #2: Our team wins. It’s our goal and our good fortune to help people through a tough time in life. It also means we’re going to win personally and professionally. ‘A’ players want to get better each year, so we spend far more of a percentage of our payroll on training and development than any other Internet company.”

Happiest Career Moment “All through high school I worked as a cook at Perkins. When I got a raise from $4.25 an hour to $4.50 an hour – out of all the raises in my life, that is the one I was most happy about.”

“We keep a giant gong in the center of our office, and whenever anyone reaches a new milestone, like signing a big recruiter, for example, we celebrate it with authority!” – Marc Cenedella