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Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
Hi HN,
I'm Kevin, co-founder of Pathrise (https://www.pathrise.com https://www.pathrise.com). Pathrise is an online replacement for career services that helps students get better jobs and make more money. If and only if they get hired during our program, students pay us back a tuition fee of 7% of their income for 1 year.
For more context, you can read about us here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/09/pathrise-wants-to-be-the-y-combinator-for-tech-students/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/09/pathrise-wants-to-be-the-....
The problem: universities aren't directly incentivized to get students good jobs since they make all their money in upfront tuition. As a result, college career services centers aren't results-driven and can't properly support their students. Most students are essentially left to figure things out on their own, and they think to themselves, career services are useless. The easiest way to verify this is to ask your average student how many times they've visited their career services center in the last year.
In reality, career services (that actually work) are probably one of the highest value things a student can receive. You can take any step of the job search (e.g. online applications), train students on one technique (e.g. lead gen and cold emailing), and produce significant and measurable returns (e.g. we've measured that this technique in particular can 4X response rate from under 5% to over 20%). Pathrise does this with every step of the job-hunting process, from training students from a 2/6 to a 5/6 in technical interviewing scores based on real company rubrics to helping students get a 10%+ higher salary through negotiation.
In this sense, we're kind of like YC for students instead of startups. Founders give 7% equity to YC because they know YC will increase their company's prospects by more than 7%. Students give us 7% of their first year's income, and our program is designed to increase their job prospects by more than 7%. They know we'll do everything in our power to provide them that value because we have aligned incentives - we only make money if they do.
What this ends up looking like is an online accelerator for students that takes place in 12 monthly batches a year, followed by an average of 3-4 months of support until a student is placed. Instead of focusing on a technical education (like our friends at Lambda School), Pathrise is entirely about optimizing your job search. This involves services like resume review, prospecting, referrals, interview preparation, and negotiation advice. Again, unlike career services today, we track every data point so we can hold ourselves accountable to actually produce significant and measurable value for our students.
Thanks for reading! I'd be happy to answer any of your questions and would greatly appreciate your feedback.
- geofftrojans 9y agoLove the idea and I definitely see the problem and need. If you are able to answer, I have a few questions: 1) You say that you will track every data point to hold yourselves accountable. What metrics do you intend on tracking to prove the value of your service to potential customers? 2) Do you screen the customers prior to accepting them into your program? If so, what kind of characteristics are you looking for in an applicant? 3) What experience/skills/connections, etc does the company bring to the table for the customers?
- kevintxwu 9y ago1) Some of the metrics we are currently already tracking: Response and follow up rates from cold emails Response and follow up rates from referrals to hiring partners Technical interview score over time (measured by internal rubrics we design to be very close to what is actually used at companies) Success rate per interview over time (hard to see trends for an individual, but kind of starting to see trends for a batch) The classic feedback form, 1 to 5 in how much did you learn after every session Average gain from negotiation compared to the base offer and to industry standards Pretty basic stuff for now, but still able to prove value. For example, like I mentioned we're seeing a response rate from under 5% to over 20% after applying cold emailing techniques. This is theoretically already a 4x difference in the number of opportunities you receive. Another example is average raise as a result of negotiation through the program can be thought of as literally money we get you. 2) Yes. We mainly look for a fundamental conceptual understanding of your field (since we don't do technical training besides interview prep) and a high level of motivation. Surprisingly, we haven't found the need to look for anything else. This lets us ignore something that might increase implicit bias like trying to evaluate culture fit. We can focus on finding each individual candidate the company that's the right culture fit for them instead of the other way around. 3) We have about 10 hiring partners right now as well as an advisor and alumni network we use to make referrals on behalf of students to top companies like Facebook, Google, etc. In terms of experience: my co-founder and I are unique in that while we have past founding experience and have worked at top companies like Facebook, Salesforce, and Yelp, but we are also young enough that we are not decades separated from the problem of figuring out your early career. There aren't many people working on career services that understand both sides of the table when it comes to what it feels like to be a university student looking for a job and what it feels like to be a hiring manager evaluating a university student. This would describe us though. We like to think we understand what a student is going through and how to help them better than anyone else because of this.