How I do it with Sarah Drew, TheLadders.co.uk

Name: Sarah Drew
Job Title: General Manager
Company: TheLadders.co.uk

Please tell us more about yourself, for example your role in your present company
I joined TheLadders in June last year at which point I went over to the New York office to spend six months with their 200 strong team. I took this opportunity to get to know each department and work with them to build TheLadders.co.uk. Now back in the UK, I am building a UK team and oversee everything from the hiring of staff to leading our PR and marketing efforts. My day is really varied and goes crazy from about 2pm onwards when our New York office get in. Thatís where our technology and product teams sit so I really work a two time-zone day!

How long you have worked for your present company?
Just 7 months

How many employees work in your company?
Well overall there are over 200 but working for TheLadders.co.uk we have a team of 15 people and 5 in the London office here at Tower42 in the city.

Outline your company's business and how it works
TheLadders is an online career service that provides senior and executive level job seekers access to a number of services, tools and features to enable them to move up in their careers. The site is free to recruiters to search our CV database and post their open positions that have compensation of 50,000 and over. Every recruiter is pre-screened and every CV is also reviewed to ensure that we maintain a quality memberbase.

What are the benefits of your recruitment software to your customers?
We have over 60,000 pre-screened candidates using our services which include a CV review by our CV Services team and a personalised salary report. Our software enables members to used advanced search including keyword search and our top keyword typed in by both recruiter and jobseeker is ìDirectorî. You can also see whoís viewed your profile and thatís a great tool because you can see whoís showing interest in you.

What do you do to attract candidates in your sector and what will you be doing to maintain this in the future?

Our acquisition of jobseekers has mostly been driven online via Google, MSN, Yahoo! Search as well as email adverstising and targeted banner campaigns. However, a lot of this is viral and a lot comes from PR. A recent example is an article on the FT.com and how ComScore had discovered that the ladders was the most popular career site for users of the FT.com.

Well we consider our customers to be both the jobseeker and the recruiter and provide exceptional customer care.

Our acquisition from a recruiter perspective has been from exhibiting at some recruiter conferences like OnRec, ERE and AESC. But a large part is that many of the Fortune 500s already use our services in the US and love the quality of the candidates they get from our site and have spread the word over to this side of the pond.

How do you envisage your company developing in the future (especially regarding recruitment), and what will you be doing to ensure this happens?
The company is going to grow considerably over the next couple of years with expansion into France and Germany this year ñ TheLadders london office will become the International headquarters. Itís hard to say how big this will be but with a 200 strong team for just our North America business ñ Iím sure weíll scale quickly. I would also like to add an additional business line this year with a Premium Service for recruiters and grow the CV services we offer.

How has online recruitment changed in the last twelve months or so from your company's perspective?
I think itís beginning to turn and big corporations like SAB Miller and Barclays have reaped the benefits (cost, time and quality candidates) they can get from using online recruitment as a major weapon in their armoury. I think agencies too are relying more and more on sourcing their candidates from companies like TheLadders.co.uk and LinkedIn.