Given the dearth of qualified engineers in New York (and Facebook’s propensity for hoarding them), an online job tool geared solely towards programmers and designers was more or less inevitable. Enter Path.to, a Florida-based online job company that announced today that it is expanding to New York, along with Chicago and Boston.
Path.to describes itself as an “eHarmony for jobs,” but if you can forgive them for that PR fumble, the company’s approach to hiring is actually quite novel. “We try to get a deeper understanding of job seekers, life situation, personality, their experience and education, as well as their passions and interests,” Path.to’s CEO Darren Bounds told Betabeat by phone last week. “We pair that with a better understanding of a business and their culture and what it takes to be successful in a particular role. We combine those two things and sprinkle algorithmic sugar on top, and we come up with a Path.to score. It’s a 0-99 measure of how compatible we feel a person is with a specific role at a specific company.”
Prior to their New York launch, Path.to was located primarily in the Bay Area, where it accumulated over 10,000 users and 200 startups, including Vimeo, Gilt and The Onion. And the price to post a job ad is pretty affordable: Businesses can begin hosting their jobs for free for 90 days. After that, each position costs $500, but there’s a discount for renewal and volume. “We could probably charge a lot more, but we don’t want to right now,” added Mr. Bounds. “We’re just trying to provide a lot of value.”
Along with the expansion to these three new cities, Path.to has announced three new features, including a visual social portfolio which aggregates contributions and actions on networks like Forrst and Github. The second is immediate candidate recommendations, derived from Path.to’s algorithm, that serves a company with the most compatible candidates available for a position. The third new feature is the ability for companies to create public business profile pages advertising their open positions and showcasing aspects of company culture.
Mr. Bounds is excited about the company’s launch in New York, which he says Path.to identified as the “second most high-demand market in terms of business.” Path.to is currently hiring, but since the company is based in Jacksonville, it can’t use Path.to to fill those roles.
“We can’t post our own jobs in our system, which is kind of ironic,” Mr. Bounds admitted with a laugh.
