Pathmotion wants to apply science to choosing the right career path

“What do I want to do when I grow up?” is a question a lot of people never stop asking themselves even when like me, they reach the age where you should be singing “My Way” rather than “New York, New York”. Given the mixture of ignorance, prejudice, laziness and happenstance that has guided my career choices; it’s perhaps not surprising if I occasionally wonder where else I might have ended up. But even the most clearsighted and successful must harbour occasional doubts that there might have been something else out there for them that was even better. But how could have they have known all the possibilities?

A new company, Pathmotion, is attempting to fill this gap with a website that will allow jobseekers to match their profile with people like them, and gain a deeper understanding of what’s possible.

“It’s a big inefficiency in the market, an information problem,” says founder and CEO David Rivel, who created the site based on his own experience and the encounter of a lot of clever people who appeared to be making not-so-clever decisions about their careers.

It’s a simple concept, but requires complex algorithms to make it work. Candidates enter details about their experiences, their strengths and aspirations and complete a short psychological profile. Then the system matches them with similar people so that they can see the potential career paths.

“You can compare all the different jobs and then the suggested jobs and once you’ve go those job suggestions you can see where those jobs lead eventually,” says Rivel.

Data is very important to the success of the site, and as well as using people who register, Pathmotion has built a webcrawler to extract thousands of CVs from the web.

The site is focused on knowledge economy jobs such as consultancy, an area where Rivel feels there is a lot of scope for this type of support.

“MBA schools are the biggest exporters of people who don’t know what they want to do,” he says. “Then they go into consultancy to defer the decision again.”

Rivel sees one of the biggest values of the site as offering support to people who are a year or so into a job, “sick and tired” but unclear about their next step.

“Sometimes it’s about reassuring people—don’t worry if you can’t stand it after a few months, look at what other people did and look what doors it opens, avoid jumping too fast,” he says.

The area where the site closes the loop is allowing people to contact—wit their permission—others on the site to find out more about their career path. This is now being supplemented with “industry icons”—people who, in a personal capacity, will host informal lunches with young professionals and students who want to learn more. Strategy consultant Adam Swersky is looking forward to his first lunch as an “icon”.

He points out that one of the biggest obstacles for interviewees is that the person they are trying to get information from is also evaluating them for a job.

“I love doing undergraduate recruitment events and I do find it much more interesting to talk to people who admit they know nothing about consultancy but have just come along for the free drink,” he says. “On the other side, you get all these people from universities who talk a lot about consultancy and get all these wrong ideas about it. For example I knew nothing about consultancy when I started, even though I’d done an internship.”

Swersky can see how Pathmotion could open up not just consultancy recruitment but career planning.

“One of the things that is interesting is looking at the trajectories into consulting and what people do before and after,” he says. “You put your career path down and it comes up with a lot of things you could do next, but what is really interesting is what could happen in five years time. People individually have very diverse career paths, but when you start aggregating you get some very interesting trends.”

Choosing a career path is one of the most important decisions to make in life, yet there’s very little science about it. The waste of people’s time and chafing of square pegs in round holes must contribute a lot to the talent deficit, not just in consultancy but in the UK generally.

So in the future will sites like Pathmotion slot us all effortlessly into our perfect job?

“People misunderstand, it’s not about finding the perfect job,” says Rivel. “I don’t think there is such a thing as the perfect job. This is more about understanding who you are and what you do well—and finding a job where you do much more of that.”

All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com.

Contact Mick with your views or suggestions at: mick.james@top-consultant.com.