In his early twenties, Aaron Michel thought he had life figured out. He was going to do corporate law for the money and practice his true passion — environmental law — on the side. He had already been accepted into law school when a brief stint at a corporate law firm irrevocably changed the course of his future.
“It took a week — maybe two weeks — before I realized I would be terrible at this career,” he says.
The decision would have cost him $150,000 and three years of his life — only to leave him in interminable dissatisfaction.
Michel says that he figured if it could happen to him, it had undoubtedly happened to others. He says that’s what inspired him and co-founder Alex Li to launch PathSource back in 2009.
But their goal wasn’t just to launch a mobile job board or simplistic career app, which have since inundated the app market. Rather, it was to provide an intuitive, mobile career exploration and management service.
And it all begins with their lifestyle assessment — a sequence of questions designed to determine users’ future salary needs.
Personalized salary report (Photo courtesy of PathSource)
“We’re asking them everything from, ‘What kind of car do you want to drive?’ to ‘Do you want to rent a home?’ to ‘Where do you want to live? How often do you go shopping?’” Michel says. “Then … we’re calculating the cost of living for them on our backend, so we can tell [users], ‘OK. Based on all of this information that you just gave us, here is the minimum annual, gross salary that you need in order to support the lifestyle that you want to have — localized to where you want to live.’ So, we’re able to really give you a clear picture of what sort of salary that you need, so it’s not just coming out of the blue. And then we’re also going to give you what that budget looks like, so you can see, ‘What does my monthly budget look like? What’s going into it?’”
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Michel says that the salary information is an aggregation of data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as individual state departments of labor. PathSource updates as soon as those departments update, which — depending on the state — occurs on a quarterly or annual basis.
Michel explains that this particular function is helpful for students because it elucidates their true salary needs and allows them to consider a broader range of opportunities that they might have otherwise overlooked due to financial reservations.
Following the lifestyle assessment, users are then walked through an interest inventory and career assessment, the results of which offer more context than traditional questionnaires.
“What we found when we looked at career assessments is that — across the board — they almost universally will all give you one or both of two types of outputs,” Michel explains. “They’ll give you insight into your personality and how that relates to careers and/or it’ll give you 10 career recommendations and a paragraph or two about each of those careers. You know, ‘You can be a Google executive or a zookeeper. Go make your life-changing decision.’ And that’s just crazy. It’s insufficient. So, we think we do a much better job of that. We’ll give you those insights in your personality and we’ll give you those career recommendations but on top of each of those recommendations, we’re then able to layer whether each of these careers are going to support your lifestyle and salary needs.”
PathSource then links each of those career recommendations to “an ecosystem of key data” — including a written description, projected job growth and related majors and careers — as well as informational interviews with professionals in those industries.
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According to Michel, PathSource hosts the world’s largest database of informational interviews, with more than 3,000 videos in queue.
Michel says that PathSource staff conducted a series of focus groups to determine the parameters of the videos and what questions they should ask of industry professionals. Questions range from “What do you do on a day-to-day basis? What’s your job?” to “What is your career and educational path?” to “What do you wish you knew when you started your career that you know now?”
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“This is an opportunity for the interviewee to kind of package their aggregated wisdom from working that job and say, ‘Here’s what you’re really getting yourself into if you go down this career path,’” Michel says.
Michel adds that the company deliberately avoided going through corporations and reached out to interviewees on an individual basis in order to facilitate complete transparency.
“Usually when you go through a corporation to get to their employees and say, ‘Hey, can you give us some of your most articulate employees to put on camera?’ ultimately what you have is these whitewashed stories because the employees know that their boss is going to be looking over their shoulder,” he says. “The employer usually wants editorial control and, you know, students smell the B.S. from a mile away. … We want them to give us the gritty, honest truth.”
In addition to the lifestyle and career assessments, the previously released iOS app also debuted an update for Apple Watch on July 15. The update alerts users about upcoming job fairs in their area and provides navigation to those fairs.
While the app is listed as free in the App Store, a few in-app features are hidden behind a pay wall.
But, according to Michel: “You’re going to get access to 95% of our content without paying a cent.”
And there are more features to come.
“What we’re about to roll out is a mobile resume builder and we’ve already got sort of the first-generation of our job board,” he says.
Users can currently build their resume within the app, extract data from their LinkedIn or upload their resume online in order to apply for jobs posted on PathSource.
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“[Our listings] are about as broad as it gets,” Michel adds. “We have white-collar jobs, we have blue-collar jobs. We have everything from a Facebook co-founder to a movie star to an HVAC technician and electrician. We’ve got everything under the sun. That is very much by design.”
According to Michel, there are approximately 250,000 active job postings on the app and about 75,000 users. The company hopes to grow their scale with the release of their Android app on July 29.
“We are really, for our users, changing the entire course of where they’re going to go.”
Jaleesa Jones is a summer 2015 USA TODAY College intern and a recent alumna of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Filed under: CAREER PATH, TECH Tagged: Aaron Michel, Alex Li, Apple Watch, career choice, Jaleesa Jones, job apps, Mobile Apps, PathSource, tech, USA TODAY College