Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
I'm Kevin, co-founder of Pathrise (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-....
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.
76 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread1) 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?
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.
You said you are measuring gain from negotiation as one of your metrics. Will you be teaching the customers about negotiation techniques or actually negotiating on their behalf?
Is this only open to currently enrolled students?
Would be very interested in applying as a self-teaching job seeker.
Edit: Sorry I totally misunderstood the question. Yes, it is available to self-teaching job seekers!
We say students for simplicity because the program is designed for your early career and university/new grad recruiting.
Also 7% of first year salary seems steep, considering co-op costs are around 8k at my university (don't know about others off the top of my head). Which are covered pretty easily with mandatory 16 months of work experience.
considering co-op costs are around 8k at my university (don't know about others off the top of my head). Which are covered pretty easily with mandatory 16 months of work experience.
Do you mean a co-op costs you 8k or that you are paid 8k, and is the 16 months of work experience referring to the co-ops or to the full-time job search afterward?
Apologies for the unclear sentence, the engineering degree is 5 years, during which there is 16 months of mandatory work experience. The $2,592 is paid in increments across the 5 year degree. Which is in $324 payments each semester of work until the total of $2,592 is paid.
The way we see it, no matter your experience level, especially if you still haven't actually been at a real full-time position yet, it's probably true that you can make your job prospects at least 7%+ better.
I would definitely say plenty of students we work with are fine and plenty capable on their own, but job seeking is rarely a binary of you're either fine or you're not. It's a spectrum from underemployed to dream job.
We try to get students the job that's the best possible fit for them, which is at least 7%+ better of a fit than they would've found alone.
TL;DR - It's not steep in the case that you believe we can provide you more in return in value.
The real long term benefit is if using the service results in a better entry level position. A person starting a career developing on Win32 will have a significantly different career than someone starting a career in React Native. If Pathrise leads to an increase in job offers (quantity of offers) and an increase in the type of job offers (diversity of projects types) than they can be worth the 7% even if the initial pay is equal because it will give the recent grad more options in choosing their path.
There is a lack of job hunting skills among recent CS and CE students, and there is a potential customer base. If I were looking to invest in Pathrise I would specifically be interested in how they plan on targeting students that have tried and failed in the job market and filtering which students failed because of a lack of job hunting skills and which failed because of a lack of technical skills. Graduates they have tried and failed in the job market are the ones that should see the most benefit from this service.
Recruiters solve the problem of hiring whereas we solve the problem of job seeking.
Some questions:
1. How do you know the student's income?
2. How do you know if they're hired or not?
3. What if a student is hired and then is laid off?
4. What if a student is hired and promoted within the first year? Do they give you 7% of the income per their original job or 7% of total income received?
2. Same answer as question 1. Also, just to add to this, most students are pretty honest since we're likely to be friends at the end of the program anyways.
3. They normally pay through a share of their monthly income. If they are laid off, and therefore don't make any income that month, they don't pay us anything. However, the payment is then deferred until they can pay again, for a maximum of 2 years, after which everything left is absolved. The goal is to never have anyone have to pay money they don't have.
4. 7% of the total income received. They still pay through a share of their monthly income.
2. Same answer as question 1. Also, just to add to this, most students are pretty honest since we're likely to be friends at the end of the program anyways.
3. They normally pay through a share of their monthly income. If they are laid off, and therefore don't make any income that month, they don't pay us anything. However, the payment is then deferred until they can pay again, for a maximum of 2 years, after which everything left is absolved. The goal is to never have anyone have to pay money they don't have.
4. 7% of the total income received. They still pay through a share of their monthly income.
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Thanks for the prompt reply! I didn't know such an agreement per (1) existed. In the unlikely event a student refused to pay you, how would you collect? Sue them?
We're actually transferring the management of the income share agreements to a third party company that's built a software platform for this that directly uses ACH.
So with that combination, hopefully we never have to sue anybody ever about anything! Seems like a terrible experience.
Care to share the third party?
If you sign up all students and do nothing further, you still get your 7%. That is not aligned.
To align incentives you would have to align the students payments with how much you improved their outcomes - much harder to do of course.
I think your model has the same risks as real estate commissions where the selling agent is highly motivated to sell quickly and they have little motivation to get a higher price.
The progressive^2 pricing model is interesting though. It's a little legally complex unfortunately so we have to look into it, but I also like the aspect of the idea where the less you make as a student, the more a lower percentage could help you live more comfortably.
Thanks to a focus on software and automation where we can afford it without hurting the experience, it's been good enough so far where we haven't noticed this affecting our decision making yet.
Another point: the cost per student does not increase linearly with time. Instead, advising becomes significantly more efficient after we've already taught the student our core insights. This means we're much more willing to spend additional time on students the more time we've already spent.
In contrast, houses can't "learn" how to sell themselves like a student can, so real estate agent costs are linear with time spent.
As for the risk of trying to sell quickly rather than looking for quality, I think the most effective way we can tackle it is by also measuring the student's satisfaction with their final offer.
One of the most important things to protect a student here as well is they don't have to accept any offer they're not happy with. They can reject an offer to look for more and we don't have any say to stop them.
Whenever we do run into a situation like this where our advice may be affected by a conflict of interest, we also do our best to inform the student first. Something like, "Pathrise will make money if you accept this offer, so please take what I say with a grain of salt, but..." and then we'll just have an honest conversation about what they're looking for and if the offer is a fit.
There is a chance here for both the student and Pathrise to benefit from working together, but the social interaction (and understanding that students sometimes make life-choices that they later regret) must be navigated with a deft touch.
An up-front payment for Pathrise's services, assuming that they work, would appear to avoid any future sadness; the student could finance the interaction with an outside financier. Coupling the financing directly to the service may cast an unwarranted shadow upon an effective job-placement service.
One of the ways we handle this now is we actually ask the students to consult their family before signing anything. We also allow the students to still drop out of the program at no liability within the first two weeks.
The problem with upfront payment is that we are no longer held accountable by aligned incentives. The most predatory thing about student loans is that you still owe the same amount of money regardless of your outcome. I think our income share agreement is designed to be much safer since in almost every case where you pay anything you are also capable of paying it.
For students in exceptional situations, we'll even waive their dues or retro-actively offer financial aid since we didn't design the program to be a future burden. The way we see it, helping out a student in need in any way pays back tenfold in terms of reputation later.
As in, if it was a loan for only $1000, it's certainly more ok to do less qualification. Versus if you were saddling a student with a loan of $40,000, you should probably be very careful.
You guys doing very little gets you 7k.
You guys putting forth significant effort gets you 7.7k.
That's not much difference and it makes a lot more sense for you to put that extra effort into finding another customer to get another 7k.
With this logic, I think you can look at the income share agreement more as us taking on the risk rather than aligned incentives.
The problem with some potentially good career coaching services out there is that charging students thousands of dollars upfront without actually having placed them yet just feels unfair.
On the other hand, with income sharing, students know we have a similar risk of getting nothing out of the experience as they do, which motivates us to make their experience as impactful as possible.
Even if we continue at an extremely high rate of placements, let's say 95%+, for the other 5% of students where the worst case happens, the income share agreement model is much better than upfront payment because the cost of these invested advising hours and resources is on us rather than on the student.
Outside of that, I think from a purely revenue perspective you're basically right that the incentive to invest a lot of time for a little salary is not incentivized.
Part of the reason why we are still incentivized to put effort into our students (especially if we can track measurable results) is that those results will ultimately lead to much better user acquisition anyways, especially since we expect natural referrals for Pathrise to be one of our main sources of growth moving forward.
I do have to admit though, that though this is a very real incentive core to our business, it isn't an incentive that's actually integrated into the revenue model itself.
I'd love to see a concept like this work but it is very difficult to truly align the incentives between recruiters and candidates or companies. Like you said it's just like real estate, a turnover game where the broker doesn't really care about optimal outcomes for the transacting parties.
That said this could still add a lot of value for students - I certainly had no clue about career paths when I was in school. So I hope they figure out a way to make it work for everyone.
For most people (that tech companies/professional companies want to hire), they already have the skills needed to market themselves.
Outcomes from job seeking fall on a spectrum from underemployed to dream job and our goal is to help get you an outcome that's at least 7% better than what you would've got on your own.
Even going to a state college, the schools are still quite driven to have very high job placement statistics, and the career services offered were quite helpful if you took the effort to go.
Something like https://lambdaschool.com? (YC S17)
Any business has a good reason to treat their customers well because that results in future business, but you wouldn't necessarily call something like a restaurant an aligned incentives business.
We've seen from our perspective that the lack of aligned incentives in the business model itself leads to ineffective solutions. A good portion of our students come to us after already having gone to their career services centers and realizing they want more help.
To be clear, I still think career services centers and the counselors that help run them are doing good work. However, one counselor using intuition and anecdotal evidence to advise hundreds of students just doesn't work very well.
[1] Obvious not everybody or there wouldn't be a business.
Although...I do want to clarify we actually offer advice on project development, the interview prep goes to a reasonable technical depth, and you are connected with other engineers at top companies. So in many ways, it is still a fellowship.
We struggle a little with how to describe ourselves because we're not quite just career coaching but calling ourselves an accelerator is too nebulous.
We try our best not to be intrusive - if you don't mind, could you actually email me on the things you disliked the most about our cold email? We definitely want to make the changes we can to be more well-mannered here. I'm at kevin@pathrise.com.
If anybody else has any questions as well, feel free to use the contact information above.
I have a friend with a BA in Photography and a MA in Collaborative Design. She is very talented and intelligent, but has trouble explaining exactly what it is that she excels at. (I've known her for years and I still only get the gist of it. Think creative work mixed with formalized systems thinking.)
Is this a possible customer down the line?
Ideally the further we expand the more we're capable of supporting interdisciplinary job seekers like your friend. There's potentially something here where the more industries we cover, the more we know about everything in between those industries, and the more effective guidance we can provide to candidates who are stuck in between.
I'm excited for private companies like this to help students who want to put in the work.
Austen Allred had a tweet recently about how dangerous it is to get career advice purely from your parents. My parents are fantastically supportive, but I've ended up in a tech/software industry that they would've been oblivious to during their lives/careers. I could've definitely received far better and stronger advice during pivotal years. I made a misguided university choice, quit after six months, then stuffed around for a few years before starting the business that I still run 20 years later.
For the students that look for internships with us, the service is a reduction in short-term capital gain for career trajectory.
Let's say the industry average is 120k (in California). If you deliver 12k extra, and take 7% of the total, you're actually taking more than 9k out of this extra 12k.
Starting off with an additional 12k in your salary means you'll get an additional 12k next year and every year thereafter, if not more.
Also, though we really need to do more work to figure out how to measure this effectively, the quality of the position goes beyond the salary itself.