Where’s your Easter egg?

I was at the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan when it hit me.

I was with my Ladybug at Rise Bar — that gorgeous 14th floor hideaway in the Battery Park Ritz overlooking the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and New York Harbor. The centerpiece at the hotel for Easter weekend was an enormous six-foot-high tower of chocolates. The tower was like one of those gushing fountains, with candies, chocolate rabbits, and Easter eggs overflowing the brim. And as I got closer it turned out that the tower itself was pure chocolate!

Now six feet of chocolate is a wondrous thing. The cascading circles of chocolate coins, that heavy fulsome aroma of cocoa, and the beautiful deep dark brown of the chocolate tower itself, made for a sight that your $100K+ job-loving correspondent won’t soon forget.

And that’s when it struck me, looking at all those chocolate eggs?

The $100K+ job search is an Easter Egg hunt. We all believe that our special surprise is out there, somewhere, tucked away in the bushes. And we spend our time, too much time really, running around in circles trying to find it.

And you might think that the typical 47-year-old executive would be a whole heck of a lot better at finding his or her next great role in life than a 5-year-old running around the backyard.

But somehow, the job hunt has become much more difficult than retrieving a hard-boiled egg from under Fido’s dog dish.

And, gosh, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

There are perhaps 100,000 recruiters at companies and executive search firms who hire or place a $100K+ professional in the course of each year. And by our count, there are 4 million hires, transfers, and promotions at this level in the U.S. every 12 months. So why is it so difficult for us to find our next great role in life?

Your next job is out there. It’s on the computer desktop or in the file folders of a recruiter right now. But like the Easter eggs, it’s hidden.

And the saddest part of it all is that the recruiters want to hire you, that’s how they get their bonuses, and kudos, and recognition at their firm. They didn’t really intend to create a system where jobs were hidden away from the job-seekers they wanted to reach, but the internet (and the way it’s given the whole world easy access to information) has forced our recruiter friends to hide their great $100K+ jobs away.

You see, when you post a $100K+ job on my old employer, HotJobs.com, or on one of the new-fangled phenomena like Craigslist.org, everybody on the internet, all over the world, can see it.

And what do you think happens when you post a really great job where everybody can see it?

That’s right, that job posting gets more interest than Leonardo DiCaprio at an all girl’s academy (I’ve never really understood that fella’s attraction, by the way, but I’m off to see The Aviator tonight so perhaps the clouds will part and I’ll be enlightened).

So recruiters, in order to keep their lives reasonable, their schedules sane, and their inboxes free of muck, have had to hide their best job postings from the great unwashed masses on the internet.

And that’s where your buddies at Ladders.com come in. Each week, we search through thousands of company career sites, we email thousands of recruiters, and we call hundreds of them directly on the phone to say: “Got any $100K+ jobs for our 307,674 subscribers this week? It’s really targeted — we only accept subscribers who’ve made more than $75K recently; on average our readers send only 18 highly qualified resumes per job; and because we’re a member-supported organization, we can’t and won’t accept your money.”

Well, you can imagine their glee at this proposition, to the tune of 18,893 new $100K+ jobs in the past 30 days alone.

And by collecting all these Easter eggs, er? $100K+ jobs, in one place, we’re making your job search so much easier than looking under every couch, checking the cookie jar, and climbing the old apple tree in the backyard.

Happy hunting, Readers!

NEW FEATURES ON THE WAY

Now a lot of you have written in with great suggestions about how we can make the hunt even easier: keyword search, sorting jobs by distance from your zipcode, letting you know which jobs you’ve clicked on recently, etc.

Well I’m pleased to let you know that “Sapphire”, our next generation product, will be coming out in early May. It has all of these great features and more. We’re putting the finishing touches on the code and then we’ll be testing, testing, testing it for the month of April, so please stay tuned.

Ladders.COM IN THE PRESS

And Readers, let me tell you, word about our vision for a faster, simpler $100K+ job hunt is spreading!

Click here to see my interview with Lester Holt on MSNBC on age discrimination.

JOBS ACCEPTED BY SALESLADDER SUBSCRIBERS THIS WEEK Just as reported, typos and all…

Title Compensation
Account Director $100,000
Account Executive Advertising Sales Salary plus commission
Associate Publisher $140,000
B2B Sales all comish, $150K+ potential
Branch General Manager $112,000
Business Development Manager 140000.00
Channel Manager $140K OTE
Client Team Leader 120000
Consultant 160K
Custom Network Solutions Sales Manager
Dir. Business Development 200K
Director, Business Development 120,000.00
director 130,000
Director $120,000
director 200k +
Director 160000
Director of Advertising 137,500
Director of Membership Sales and Marketing
Director of Sales 250
Director of Sales over $100K
Director of Sales
Enterprise Account Manager $150K OTE
Executive Director $115,000.
General Manager 100,000
Global Sales and Marketing Manager 125k
Group Publisher $140,000
Midwest Sales Manager 100,000.00 +
National Account Manager $118,700
National Account Manager 100,000
Partner Development Manager Total Comp. =$160K
President confidential
Regional Sales Manager $115 Base, $250 Total package
Regional Sales Manager 185k
Regional Sales Manager 100,000.00 plus
Regional Sales Manager $100,000
Regional Sales Manager 225,000
Sales $100,000.00 plus commissions
Sales Manager 125,000
Sales Manager 140,000
Sales Rep 100K+
Sales Representative 100K
Senior Director 170K
Senior Director 250,000
Sr. Account Executive $162K
Storage Sales Specialist 165K
Vice President 165000.00
Vice President 120,000
Vice President Sales $125,000
Vice President, Installation Services 100+
VP of Sales 120K
VP Sales $300K
VP Sales 300k
VP Sales & Marketing 120K + Bonus