I said this a little earlier in the thread, but I would definitely say plenty of students we work with already have some of the skills needed to market themselves and they'll do fine on their own, but job seeking is rarely a binary of you're either fine or you're not.
Outcomes from job seeking fall on a spectrum from underemployed to dream job and our goal is to help get you an outcome that's at least 7% better than what you would've got on your own.
You would need to consider more than just the first year. In reality, the difference it makes in terms of your career as a whole is significantly higher than that initial 12k because it compounds.
Starting off with an additional 12k in your salary means you'll get an additional 12k next year and every year thereafter, if not more.
Also, though we really need to do more work to figure out how to measure this effectively, the quality of the position goes beyond the salary itself.
Yup! Although we're not there yet, we believe the program is generalizable to every young professional who wants to work in the US, since the core insights themselves are not industry-specific.
Ideally the further we expand the more we're capable of supporting interdisciplinary job seekers like your friend. There's potentially something here where the more industries we cover, the more we know about everything in between those industries, and the more effective guidance we can provide to candidates who are stuck in between.
By aligned incentives, we mean aligned incentives that are integrated into the business model.
Any business has a good reason to treat their customers well because that results in future business, but you wouldn't necessarily call something like a restaurant an aligned incentives business.
We've seen from our perspective that the lack of aligned incentives in the business model itself leads to ineffective solutions. A good portion of our students come to us after already having gone to their career services centers and realizing they want more help.
To be clear, I still think career services centers and the counselors that help run them are doing good work. However, one counselor using intuition and anecdotal evidence to advise hundreds of students just doesn't work very well.
Percentages in and of themselves are progressive pricing! If we believe we can get the student a 100k+ job, we'll definitely be incentivized to help them get there instead of telling them to settle for a 50k job.
The progressive^2 pricing model is interesting though. It's a little legally complex unfortunately so we have to look into it, but I also like the aspect of the idea where the less you make as a student, the more a lower percentage could help you live more comfortably.
Right, but your revenues are also dependent on the cost or time it takes you to do. Let’s say it costs you $1000 of time to get someone a $100K job and $1500 of time to get them a $120K job. You are going to encourage them to take the $100K job to maximize your company’s revenues.
This is potentially a real effect, but in this case, the exact unit economics will determine exactly how much it matters.
Thanks to a focus on software and automation where we can afford it without hurting the experience, it's been good enough so far where we haven't noticed this affecting our decision making yet.
"Potentially a real effect" meaning almost the definition of a principal-agent problem and a well-known problem in real estate. If you want to prevent it from happening (and I'm not saying that you do) you will have to try very hard, not just assume that it will happen.
You're right - my language was too dismissive. The general idea of what I said above is still valid though.
Another point: the cost per student does not increase linearly with time. Instead, advising becomes significantly more efficient after we've already taught the student our core insights. This means we're much more willing to spend additional time on students the more time we've already spent.
In contrast, houses can't "learn" how to sell themselves like a student can, so real estate agent costs are linear with time spent.
