With $1.5M From Adecco, Path.To Wants To Be The EHarmony For Jobs In Silicon Valley And Beyond
The job-hunting market today is getting a little more social: Path.to, a kind of About.me-meets-LinkedIn service that lets people create image-filled, sleek professional profiles for themselves online, is today relaunching itself as a network to connect those professionals with job openings.
And taking a pro-tip from the matchmaking site eHarmony, Path.to has developed an algorithm to create “compatibility” scores between job seekers and job vacancies using data from social media sites as part of the mix. It says it is the first online job service to offer this feature. It is also today announcing a $1.5 million round of strategic funding from HR giant Adecco to help it along the way.
Started in August 2011 by Cliqset founder Darren Bounds, Path.to went dark in March in preparation for this newest version of itself. It is kicking off its service targeting Silicon Valley and a hiring quandary specific to the tech industry: a high demand for interactive designers, software engineers and others skilled in IT, and plans to extend that to Chicago and New York later this year.
The first wave of jobs features openings from more than 100 companies, including Eventbrite, Evernote, Lytro and Uber. And Bounds notes that Adecco will soon also be posting jobs on the site, too. The service is free to use for job-seekers. For employers, it is free for the first 90 days. After that it will be a pay-per-post model with discounts for volume. Each job is live for 30 days.
To find compatibility, Path.to will offer users a “Path.to score”, a ranking system for both the applicants and the companies in question.
The Path.to score is not based just on a person’s previous employment background, but a number of other factors where the social element really kicks in.
They include a user’s social graph — based on Twitter and Facebook activity; and a person’s contributions to and general reputation on sites like Behance, Dribbble, Forrst and Github. The site is also trying to add more human elements into the mix: Path.to says it will incorporate “information about what is important to the user in their next position such as dress code, benefits and culture to better pair applicants with companies that closely match their ideal place to work.” And on the subject of past employment history, Path.to is putting emphasis on endorsements from others on top of the basic fact of having worked somewhere.
There is an obvious opportunity to extend Path.to to other markets outside of the Bay Area, but if you think about it, even focusing on the single vertical of tech could open Path.to to be used elsewhere: London startups, for example, also lament about the difficulty of finding talent to fill out their teams.
Check out the interview below that my colleague Leena did with Darren, covering things like the working of the site itself; what makes Path.to different from would-be competitors like LinkedIn or BranchOut; how “marquee” startups like Evernote deal with the huge wave of applications that they get for job openings; and how a company like Path.to can help with that issue.
Leave a Reply