Path 101 – Coming Out Party
Sans the party.
My wife (@sparkle201) and I (@dherman76) were asked by our friend Charlie O’Donnell about a year ago to invest in his new startup, Path 101, at a very early stage in it’s life cycle. Initially Charlie approached me for the investment but I have no real domain knowledge of the HR world, so I flipped this one over to my wife who had been involved in HR for 15 years at a large global bank.
The deal was a no brainer when Charlie sold us his vision – even though he wasn’t quite there yet in terms of actual execution; his vision was grand and we feel that this sort of vision is needed in the marketplace. Additionally, Path 101 helps filter millions of data sources (resumes) and turn them into actual information – an area that I’m interested in as a side note.
I’m proud to say, that Charlie, Alex, Hilary, Jennifer, and the rest of the team have publicly launched and the site is open for all to use. This could not come at a better time as the US Unemployment is about 8.1% and this tool would be helpful for not only those entire 8.1%, but an even higher percentage of people who are looking to change their jobs.
I’m going to paste a bit of what they wrote on their site so that all can learn exactly what Path 101 is:
Path 101 has always been about opening up career opportunities to people using data. We believe that it’s not that people don’t know what they want to do with their careers–they just don’t know what’s out there to do. By crawling the web for resumes and analyzing that data in our Resume Genome Project, we’re learning more and more about what real career paths actually look like and figuring out how best to expose that data.
See our screencast demo and FAQ here: http://mapping.path101.com/faq
Our resume analyzer tool, powered by these public resumes, is the first of its kind. Nowhere else can you automatically upload your resume or your public LinkedIn profile and get a customized view of how you compare to others,what other people with your background are doing, the schooling you might need, and what other career options are available to you. This is complimented by industry and function landing pages–views of the data we’ve gathered that help provide detail on career options and opportunities.
Our career advice section, also part of this new release, is the only place on the web where you can anonymously ask or answer career advice and directed it towards professionals in a specific industry. We know that many career questions are sensitive, especially when you’re currently employed, and we value your privacy. You might not want to ask career questions in front of your whole network. On the other hand, sometimes you want as much help as you can get. That’s why we built integration into Twitter and Facebook so that you can share your questions and advice with everyone across your network to get more people providing their accumulated wisdom. You can even sign up just to be an advice giver, and request to get sent a limited number of e-mails per week targeted towards people in your field.
Finally, we continue to get excellent and supportive feedback on our personality test. Over 80% of people who start the test complete it. It has provided thousands of people with useful feedback on what industries people have professionals with similar mindsets. We’re looking forward to our upcoming job satisfaction survey–part of a future release–that will give us a lot more flexibility on what we ask questions about and how they directly relate to specific aspects of your resume.
So congratulations to the Path 101 for the launch and I look forward to all of the feedback that you receive to iterate the product to the next level.