With $1.5M From Adecco, Path.To Wants To Be The EHarmony For Jobs In Silicon Valley And Beyond
Summary
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. 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.