Getting Students on the Path to "Hireability" with Nancy Soni of Pathmatch

Nancy Soni is the CEO/Co-Founder of PathMatch, an early career talent marketplace/platform connecting college students to modern careers, skills, and companies for internships and jobs. We're disrupting the antiquated campus recruiting processes that have left millions of students and graduates behind. 

PathMatch is an open marketplace where employers can search and connect with students at any university by their desired career path, skills, interests, location, and industry preferences, resulting in decreased time to hire, improved retention, and stronger engagement.

Previously, Nancy was the CEO/Founder of FILD, a tech-enabled recruiting firm that helped companies such as Warby Parker, Amazon, Snap, and Bonobos hire thousands of people. FILD was acquired in 2017. Nancy also served as Director of Recruiting at CyberCoders where she opened and scaled the LA, Boston, and New York offices from 0-100 recruiters over 5 years. Nancy holds a BA in Psychology from Emory University.

Recommended Resources:
The Permanent Detour: Underemployment’s Long-Term Effects on the Careers of College Grads by Burning Glass & Strada
College Scorecard by U.S. Department of Education
College Scorecard Tracker by Pathmatch

Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 0:05

Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators, and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies. Nancy Soni is the CEO and co founder of path match, an early career talent marketplace and platform connecting college students to modern careers skills and to companies for internships and jobs. Path match is planning to disrupt the antiquated campus recruiting process that has left millions of students and graduates behind. It's an open marketplace where employers can search and connect with students at any university by their desired career path skills, interests, location and industry preferences, resulting in a decreased time to hire, improved retention and stronger engagement. Previously, Nancy was the CEO and founder of ftld, a tech enabled recruiting firm that helped companies such as Warby Parker, Amazon snap and bonobos hire 1000s of people. ftld was acquired in 2017. Nancy also serves as Director of recruiting at cybercoders, where she opened and scaled the LA Boston and New York offices from zero to 100 recruiters over five years path match is one of the final 20 companies competing at the ASU GSB Cup competition this year. And Nancy also holds a BA in Psychology from Emory University. Nancy Soni, welcome to Ed Tech insiders.

Nancy Soni: 1:43

Thank you so much for having me, Alex.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:45

I'm so happy to speak to you today. Pathan. It is such an interesting company. And I'm really looking forward to diving into it with you. Let's start with your background. You come to Ed Tech from a really different and very interesting angle. You've been a superstar talent professional, a recruiter in the tech industry. For years. This much good. Let's give you like incredible insight into the relationship between education experience and work. Tell us about your background and how it brought you into the EdTech field with the founding of deathmatch.

Nancy Soni: 2:18

Well, thank you so much for having me. Yes, my route to Ed Tech is definitely been untraditional, I perhaps we'll start with a little bit about my background just because so much of it is what really got me number one trying to solve this problem for someone like me, and realizing how large of a problem it was. So a little bit about me. I am a child of immigrants from Taiwan. I grew up in Midwest, Chicago, Milwaukee in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And I also grew up pre internet days. So I because this is audio you can't tell but I am Chinese. And growing up, I legitimately thought that being Asian, I was only allowed to be a doctor, lawyer, accountant, architect, and then some flavor of engineer. And so I picked medicine went to Emory University, which is in Atlanta, I was pre med all through college. So pre med that I took the MCAT private medical school got into medical school, and then a very fluke, I think divine intervention car accident, landed me in a hospital and just sitting little laying in a hospital bed and looking around in you know, at what was going on in this hospital, really, really had me think through how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. And I think the first thing that hit me was the $200,000 plus student loan debt that I was going to be taking out and then the opportunity costs of spending the rest of my 20s in medical school internship residency and fellowship and then coming out in my 30s with, you know, basically a total combined student debt load of over$260,000. And it just that weight started to sit with me as I was looking at these doctors who didn't seem all that happy, didn't seem all that healthy, and certainly didn't seem to be providing health. So as soon as I got out of that hospital, I went to the Career Center. And very vividly. I mean, this is now 20 some odd years later, I remember them giving me almost like a dictionary or an exciting Encyclopedia of careers to look at. And I was just like, alright, seriously, I'm a senior, and I gotta figure this out, I don't have the time to go and figure it like read an encyclopedia of careers. And so my roommate suggested that I just, you know, take my resume and apply to opportunities on Monster and CareerBuilder. So I spent the next couple of months just spamming my resume to anything that said entry level. And when you know, my thought process was I'll know it when I see it. And I went on a ton of interviews. So this was 1999. Mind you so we back then only had about a million people graduating with a college degree. I was very lucky and that I got probably over 15 to 20 interviews at that time. And the opportunity that really resonated with me the most was an opportunity to be a A technology recruiter, I was pre med. So I had no clue that we were in the middle of a.com. Boom. And so I really had to have the VP of recruiting. Explain to me what I tech recruiter actually did. And I really, you know, it resonated with me. So, fast forward, I ended up spending 20 years building some legendary companies like Netflix, Amazon, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, some really amazing companies. And over 20, some odd years, I screened over 4 million resumes, and I filled over 10,000 positions. And so most of my experience has been primarily at that mid career to executive level, which gives you a lot of pattern recognition in terms of Oh, when someone does this, they become successful. When someone does this, they are less successful. And I, you know, had this kind of in 2015 2016, when I was running my last company, I got confronted with what was going on at the collegiate level, I hadn't really thought of it since leaving college. But all of a sudden, I was building our team hiring a lot of entry level people, and then building some of the companies. And so on a daily basis, we, we were received about 10,000 entry level resumes, and everything from building out some early career engineering teams to building out our own teams. All of a sudden, I just looked at these resumes, and I'm like, What the heck is going on at the collegiate level. And so it bothered me it was it got to a point where, you know, we were seeing students, or graduates who are coming out of these amazing schools, and who are unemployed for over a year. And I had spent 20 years on the demand side where I know exactly what companies are looking for, and they are desperate for the talent. And yet students are seeing a very different reality. And so I decided, I've got this really, really interesting background, I pretty much have built teams across every single department within an organization across so many different industries. Why don't we have consumer products that help people figure out probably one of the most important things that they need to figure out, which is, what do you want to be when you grow up? I'll kind of wrap it up in just a second. But I built teams for dating apps like Tinder and eHarmony. And I probably living in Los Angeles, one of the most used apps on my phone is Waze. And the first thing that you need to do when you turn on Waze is figure out, you know, putting your end destination. Well, in chatting with a lot of different students, when I was starting to come up with this idea for path match, what I realized was the average 16 to 26 year old has no clue where that end destination is post college. And what if we could actually help them do that through something similar to a dating app in terms of the tech, so that was kind of my pathway to ad tech. And there's so much, so many other things that I've uncovered and learned over the last, you know, five to six years,

Alexander Sarlin: 8:00

I wish this was around when I was an undergraduate, I was a sociology major, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do what was out there, what it took, it is so inspiring to hear that insight, I have to ask a couple of quick follow up questions about your origin before we even dive into path match. The first one is, what did your parents say when you went into recruiting rather than medicine? How did that go over? And how did that how did that work out?

Nancy Soni: 8:25

So I took a a measured approach, understanding that my parents aren't Asian and just spent, you know, the better part of three and a half, four years thinking that their daughter was going to go on to become a doctor. So told my parents, I don't have really anything major that I'm doing over the summer. So I'm gonna go take this job offer start in May, I'm going to work through the summer. And if I don't like it, I'll go to med school. If I do like it, I'll defer for a year and I've got about a year a little over, you know, a little under a year and a half to kind of make this work. And if it doesn't, my fallback is med school. So I think I cushion the blow a bit by saying, Hey, I already know I'm getting in. It's just a matter of is this the right path for me? And then about a year and four months in, I told my parents almost show them my w two, not quite, but I basically said, Look, Mom, I'm 23 years old, I make more money than most doctors and I haven't taken any additional student loan debt out. I think I'm gonna stay put because I know what my bosses are making. I know that I'm not that far away from you know, kind of getting there. So

Alexander Sarlin: 9:31

absolutely. The other question I have to ask is, you're naming this as 1999 in the middle of a tech boom, our listeners may recognize that it was a tech boom, that was about to be a tech bust. There was a bubble right after, but I imagined that didn't slow down your career as a recruiter. Tell us about what it was like riding that wave right at the beginning of your recruiting career in tech. Yeah,

Nancy Soni: 9:52

I have been through two recessions and a pandemic. Now I bank banking crisis, so I should explain why I was always on the agency side of recruiting, which means you're, you're an agency recruiter, you go find your clients, meaning you can work with as many companies as you possibly can. And then you can go and find the right types of people for those companies and your, as a agency recruiter, you're paid a percentage of the first year salary. So what you are, essentially are a salesperson selling to both companies and a salesperson selling to the candidates and then finding the best match. So it's the best, the best way that I explain it is we're an offline marketplace. And the better recruiters are really able to extract the right types of data to make sure those matches align. So having gone through the.com, boom and bust going through the bus, what you realize is you have to navigate financial markets and understand where their money is. And so just because the.com bust was, you know, what's happening did not mean that all hirings stopped, it just meant that certain type of hiring was obviously going to show a decrease, just as the 2008 through 2010 kind of quite mortgage crisis happened, you know, the massive amounts of hiring in kind of the mortgage and banking industry that obviously came to a halt. However, other industries weren't. So I think, as an agency recruiter, it is really understanding what's going on on Wall Street, as well as what's going on on Main Street, and then actually aligning how you who you work with what you're selling, who your customers are, to, you know, finding candidates and making sure that you're getting the right people.

Alexander Sarlin: 11:35

Yeah, it's so interesting to hear you. You mentioned Tinder and eHarmony, you mentioned, you know, ways and ended consumer apps where you're trying to figure out where you're going. And, and even in that answer, you know, recruiting is about matching, it's about making the right match between a company and a candidate. And that's obviously baked into the DNA of path match. It's in the name, which is a startup that really bridges, you know, higher ed, and the workforce even has the potential to bridge K 12 in the workforce by helping students understand what career pathways actually look like, and what education can do to to serve a student's potential life and happiness and earnings and fulfillment and all of these different incredibly important thing. So tell us a little bit about how path match really works? And how does it helps the college students who are handed encyclopedias, you know, right now to have a much better experience in their decision making?

Nancy Soni: 12:32

Yes. So 20 years of recruiting has taught me that each person takes their career and job search and what they look for, you know, their approach is really different, what they look for is really different. And it really comes down to what I call intent data, your intentions, your values, your motivations really drive fulfillment at work. So that is for experienced people, but it also applies to students. It's just they don't know what questions to ask themselves. And so really, the way I thought about building path match was, you know, when you when you think about a dating app, right? What's your type? What do you care about? You know, it's like, when you ask someone, What's your type will often we ended up with people that actually do not fit our type. But there are values, right, like values, alignment, how you think about the world long term, these things that really, really do matter to you. Those are the things that we need to uncover. So when I thought about building path match, it was okay, great. So if dating apps, you know, there are casual dating apps. And then there were more serious dating apps, which is why I think of like an eHarmony, where you have to fill out far more data. And it actually leverages that data to find your match. So for us, it's how do we actually help you figure out what are the right careers in this modern workforce? So having done recruiting over the last 20 years, what I've seen is careers that exist today, that the vast majority of people I've never heard of. So everything from customer success, which is not customer service, sales enablement, sales operations, which are actually not doing sales, account management versus account executive data science versus data analysis versus business intelligence versus, you know, there's just so many different careers, product management, product design, those are all pretty new careers, community management, those all exists today, purely because of technology and how it has evolved our you know, how we do marketing, how we do sales, how we do our day to day work, and yet there's not a single major for any of the things that I just talked about minus data science, right and so we need these people in our workforce and yet we there's no way there's no collegiate, you know, Class A, you know, major or college track to become one of those things at because the academic institutions, it takes a really long time to number one, decide that you're going to create a major go find the professors that would actually teach that content coming up with curriculum, all those things take time. So So I have taught myself countless skills through YouTube videos, I taught myself how to do digital marketing, which changes pretty much every single year. And I've taught myself all of this stuff through YouTube videos. And so it really got me thinking, what if we could scale this next population who are already is in, you know, either entering college or going to college? What if we could build a lightweight finishing school? By giving them content that already sits online? But getting them there for the right reasons? So is this a good time for me to kind of share what what path naturally is?

Alexander Sarlin: 15:36

Good? Yeah. What is it like for a student user? What does it feel like to be in path match?

Nancy Soni: 15:40

Yeah, so path match is a first students, it's a career navigation app. Our goal is to help you figure out your first end destination, which is that first job that you know the career path and the job that you want right out of college. So we do it through a couple different things. Number one is our career matching algorithm, we have an algorithm similar to a dating app that matches students to modern careers based on 187 variables that determines it. So students get an initial six matches, they watch YouTube and sometimes Tik Tok videos to see what they've been matched to, then our rating and selection tool helps them really get context and then also rate these careers based on things that matter to them. So they go from that initial six matches all the way down to one, once you've selected their career, the next step is actually selecting companies that they might want to work for. So we have over 1000 companies in our company discovery tool that allows for them to learn about those companies, this could be as a high school student, as a freshman, as a sophomore, as a senior. But as students actually follow those companies, then our software then shares, okay, we now know that you want to be a product manager at these companies, here's the entire you know, how to become a product manager, all the skills, the functional, the technical skills, as well as the software that those companies use. And so the way we help students understand this is we give them what's called a higher ability score. So as they learn the skills that really are relevant to the career path, and the companies, they get points for adding those skills to their profile. And then, you know, your GPA is something that most students are all, you know, they measure themselves based on their GPA. But most of us realize that your GPA doesn't matter to anyone about a year, you know, basically, basically, a year after you graduate college, assuming your employer, but your resume will follow you for the rest of your life. And so the hire ability score is essentially giving you a score, it's like a credit score for your career, it's a score on your resume. And where that is most important is how you compete against the same people interested in the same career path at the same company. And so the value of that score is really, you can manage that score, you can actually we're teaching you the things that you need to learn. But then we're also showing you where you rank in, you know, against the additional population, sometimes often outside of the same school. So you understand, okay, what are the things that I can do to make myself a better candidate? And then I can talk about the employer side as well.

Alexander Sarlin: 18:12

Yeah, it shows you you're mentioning a database of over 1000 companies that students can choose to be matched out for or sort of aim for in their resume. What does it look like for companies to companies sign up to be part of that list? Do they get to see students hire ability score? How does it work from the other side of the marketplace?

Nancy Soni: 18:30

So most of my entire career was spent in you know, kind of mid career through executive level of recruiting. So when I did research on, you know, kind of this entire early career campus university recruiting realm, what I was so surprised to realize was, gosh, well, this industry has not changed in the last 20 years. We still have companies going in and attending career fairs, and the visual of, you know, setting up a booth and students mulling around a, you know, conference hall or banquet room, having absolutely no clue what these companies actually do, and then handing out resumes. That's how people still land internships and jobs, it seems eerily not very data centric. And so on the employer side, what I didn't realize was how much of a paywall universities put in front of their students. So employers often have to spend anywhere from a couple 1000 to hundreds of 1000s of dollars for access at various schools. And so if you have a small budget or a medium sized budget, you're going to pick and choose the X number of schools that you can recruit from. Well, that seems really unfair to a lot of students who may go to a school that might not be within the location parameters of a employer search, or, you know, students who go 1000s of miles away to school but then plan on going back home to live close to home and yet because of that they don't see jobs that might make sense for them. And so there's a lot of this universities being kind of the middleman. But students and employers really, at the end of the day, we don't, you know, unless you end up working for academia, the vast majority of people 70% of the workforce actually works for some type of company, why not give companies access to those students far earlier? And so, on the employer side, what we do is give employers an ability to get in front of students through that company discovery tool, can employers can put short form YouTube and Tiktok videos right into the company discovery tool in their company profile where they can show what does it like to work here? What do we look for? When do we look for them, we have a tool for employers called talent pipeline builder, where it allows for them to show here all the career paths that we hire for here are the skills that we look for, here's the you know, minimum GPA, that you have to have to kind of get to what we you know, what we want. Here's our recruiting process, here's what we tend to look for. Here's when we start, a student follows that company, anytime that employer is looking for people is looking, you know, running informational sessions or doing you know, starting a recruiting process, that student will hear about it through push notifications, SMS, and email and chat. And so we're able to allow for employers to build their messaging at mass scale to the students who want to go and potentially work for them, and give content and training content learning content, it's, you know, this is what we look for, here's, here's what you need to do to become that. And it's just a seamless way for students to actually build their resumes for the employers, they might want to work for the future. And then what we do is show students, here's your hire ability score, on the employer side, employers now can you know, rather than staring at a bunch of resumes, and not knowing which students are really interested, the students that are most interested that have spent the time to become what those employers are looking for, employers can actually search and screen based on hire ability score as well.

Alexander Sarlin: 22:04

It's such a logical system, sort of like laughing to myself here, because you're right, that sort of career fair, maybe it's been around for probably 70 years, and not changed. And the idea, I mean, if I can vent, I'm not going to make you vent against universities. But if I can vent against them a little bit in this context, the idea that they're charging students so much money on one side, and then charging companies on the other side to get in front of the students and acting, it is insane, especially when we know that the vast majority of students are saying in surveys that the reason they're going to university is for career advancement. So it's just like, it's just, it's holding them hostage on both sides. And really being I would consider negligent, I mean, in terms of helping their student slash customers actually get the outcomes they want. That's just my personal bent, but I love

Nancy Soni: 22:57

your fans all day long. You know, I think being a parent and looking at this from a, okay, in five years, we're going to be spending this much per year, I have spent so much time in building path match looking at the curriculum, and you know, the classes that are offered to students, and how sometimes backwards, I mean, even computer science, right, where we need software engineers, still, I look at some of the school curriculum and how backwards some of it is compared to maybe other schools or what employers are looking for. And it's because many of the professors haven't worked in, you know, the private sector or worked for companies. And so they're just teaching the pedagogy that they are taught, not necessarily what is needed. And then finally, one final rant is more than 50% of college majors do not even remotely align with any of the careers that are in demand. And yet, universities aren't going to tell you know, they have tenured professors that they still have to pay, they're not going to tell these students Hey, by the way, you're gonna get no ROI on that decree. And that is something that I feel like it's a travesty. One final thing, we do not align ourselves with the university, we actually do our entire student acquisition digitally. So students find out about us through Google searches, or on tick tock, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, all of the places that they're hanging out. And so it allows for us to get to students far earlier than them deciding, oh, I think it's time like me, senior year, oh, it's time to go to the Career Center, we're able to get in front of them to help them make these big, huge life defining decisions.

Alexander Sarlin: 24:33

That one of the things I really admire about the model you're laying out is that I think it gives a lot of respect to the students. It allows them to actually sort of meet the system halfway talk about, you know, as you mentioned, their type of work, what drives them what they're interested in, and then says, Okay, I'm going to put you in front of companies beyond the companies you may have already heard of, you know, when you look at these surveys, where college students say where they want to work and it's always Google Apple Tesla, and you're like, great. Those are the big tech companies you've heard of. Those are the only ones. You know. I mean, that is ridiculous. It shows how little, you know, the rest of the world is teaching young people about the workforce, they only know that the tools they use, it's so interesting that, you know, the idea of getting 1000 companies or you know, more to be able to sell themselves to young people in a way that's more social media that, you know, savvy. That's just beyond the setting up a booth at a career fair, it seems like it would be incredibly exciting for companies to start thinking about it that way. You know, the Google internships are far more competitive than getting into Harvard or any Ivy League school. But students, especially computer science, students are like, well, that's where I'm going, I'm going to get a Google internship, that's not going to happen for 99% of them. So they don't even know where else. Yes, it's such an interesting model really inspiring. I want to ask about one angle of it that you mentioned, you mentioned that the the functional technical skills and the software that are required for some of these companies, and some of these jobs are sort of surfaced, and that often actually can't be gleaned even from job description. So I'm curious, how do you actually get the details of what these companies are looking for out of the sort of abstruse pneus of job descriptions and into something that actually students can really understand and aim towards?

Nancy Soni: 26:25

Yeah, well, without giving out too much of our secret sauce, we actually built software to scrape job descriptions, as well as we have an API that connects to a piece of software that actually tells us the entire software stack that companies use across engineering, marketing, sales, accounting, finance. And so it allows for us to say, okay, great, you know, the vast majority of companies are utilizing, you know, Twilio or Oracle or workday or, you know, NetSuite. And so it allows for us to say, okay, great, what's the training content that we can actually point to, and get it right in front of students, they do not need to be experts, nobody is expecting a junior in college to be a NetSuite expert. What we need to do is it makes it so much easier to onboard someone when you have context. And that is really having the context is part of it. Having three months worth of experience makes me more proficient. And our goal is how do we get every student coming out of college, to have some level of experience with things that will make them more appealing to employers for, you know, kind of full time hires,

Alexander Sarlin: 27:32

it's so exciting to hear that approach. I mean, it's, I've worked on boot camps, I've worked on, you know, on alternative credentials of all kinds. And some, you know, that horn that I'm always honking is that the software has to be in there, it can't just be about the theory, you have to at least introduce learners to the actual tools they're going to be using all day, every day, if they have this kind of job. And it is so exciting that you're really you know, looking under the hood, and helping students look under the hood about what is being used in their industry of choice. It's just like, really, it really excites me enormously. I want to ask you about something exciting that's happening right now for path match, which is that you were recently named as a top 20 finalists for the ASU GSB Cup competition. That's a pitch competition that happens at the ASU GSB conference. We're recording this podcast before the competition, but it will launch after the competition, you were chosen from one of 900 applicants in over 65 countries around the world to be pitching on the big stage. Tell us a little bit about that experience and what it means for your trajectory at PATH match. And for your visibility.

Nancy Soni: 28:41

It's funny, this is our actually our second year making it to the top 20. And so it's a little bit of a pinch me surreal. I think they mentioned it's 200 investors that you know, kind of look at different pitch decks and videos and vote. And so it's incredibly humbling to have been selected to that top 20 Because it just you know, gives us additional credibility as well as just gives us a realization that people get it. And I think that, you know, just through my own fundraising experiences, I think investors are starting to see because obviously investors don't do recruiting at scale AI companies, I think they're starting to see this mismatch between what's going on at the academic level and what's going on in the workforce. And our demand is not going away despite recessionary fears. You know,

Alexander Sarlin: 29:27

I'm excited for all the finalists, of course at the cup competition, but your mission is really really gets my blood pumping. And I'm really excited for the recognition because I know, I'm objective, but I love what you're doing. Let's talk a little bit you mentioned these higher ability score, this sort of number that students can look at and pump up through their use of training through their use of acquiring functional skills through classwork through any kind of thing. It's really, really interesting. I want to dig into This higher abilities score, I think that probably gets people excited. Maybe it gets some people a little nervous that they're just sort of taking people's whole, you know all their skill sets and putting it into one number. Talk to us about what higher ability means to students work with.

Nancy Soni: 30:15

I love this question. So I have been a recruiter for 20 years, and I can look at a resume really quickly, I can look at a LinkedIn profile really quickly. And I can say, good candidate, and that's okay, good candidate, here's how much they likely make. So when a recruiter is actually looking and we become speed readers of resumes, right, we're gleaning information. So when we built the hire ability score, it's based on how recruiters look at a resume and determine in six to 20 seconds, whether or not you're even going to get you know, an interview. But oh, by the way, before your resume gets in front of that recruiter, it actually has to go through another screen, which is a keyword screen. So 90% of large companies utilize applicant tracking systems, those tracking systems are built to, you know, store the 1000s of resumes that come through. But they have two key features. Number one, a parsing algorithm that pulls keywords in your resume or otherwise known as skills, and matches them to keywords in the job description. So if you are majoring in something that has no alignment, and you apply, and you have no skills that align, your resume is going to be automatically rejected. And then the second one is there's a ranking algorithm that takes all of the resumes that apply and ranks them based on fit. So our goal as the hire ability score is number one, to actually help you understand what your future jobs might look like, what skills those jobs are going to be, you know, the internships or jobs you're going to be looking for. And then actually helping you basically fill out if you look at our, we call them the path match profile, but on your path match profile or on your resume, there's eight, if it's an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, right, you've got real estate, our goal is to actually help students understand kind of a point score for the real estate on their resume. So it's not to give you know, it's really to understand that like, if you are going to Harvard, and you're comparing, you know, or if you go to a lesser ranked school, you can actually compete against the Harvard student, if you actually have the right skills, and if you actually have experience, so we give skills, whether it's functional, technical, soft skills, will give you points for all of those. We're teaching students also how to network, which is actually really who you know, is just as important as what you know, we actually give score little point boost for your path match video, it's an elevator pitch, cruder stare at Word and PDF resumes all day long. And then the next step is actually doing an interview. Well, actually having that soft skill video, right, where it's just Hi, I'm Nancy, I'm the CEO of path match, introducing yourself on video, basically, what what we've seen is actually gives a student about an eight times higher likelihood of getting an interview, wow. Because it makes you a human and not a piece of paper. And so what we're doing is basically gamifying. And putting points in places where it's teaching students, if you haven't a corporate internship, that's actually far more valuable than a 3.8 GPA. Now you need the 3.8 GPA to actually get the experience. But those companies would probably look at you if you were 3.2, not having that experience is probably the most damaging. And so what we're trying to do is teach students the level of importance of every single kind of part of their resume.

Alexander Sarlin: 33:38

I'm matching what you have been saying about how University Career Services work, and how University majors how slow they are to adapt with the incredibly quantitative approach that you're taking where it is, it has applicant tracking in it, it has social media built into it, it has, you know, literally a numeric score attached to skills. We talk on this podcast about skills based hiring as this trend coming up, but I've never heard it described quite as concretely as you just described it. It feels like you know, pulling. I mean, I think back to my undergraduate days sitting in a classroom, and it's like, there was nothing, nothing at any time in any class in my entire four years of undergrad where anybody mentioned a job, or a skill that would help me get a job, it never happened. And then you go to the Career Services, and it's still not really particularly data driven. And the idea of giving a student the data in their hands, explaining to them how keyword tracking works, explaining to them what a recruiter is looking for what skills you need. It feels like almost like a lightyears jump from what students currently get in terms of support to what they could get at. I mean, I talked to a lot of young people right out of school, and there are some that have incredible understandings of what is out there. And then most don't, and the ones who do do because parents did I'm And let's put it that way. It's not because of the university, it's because of the parents. So it's just so exciting to hear giving this much data and this much insight into students hands and into their minds when they're young enough to really truly make decisions. So that it's not about a career fair. It's not about just you know, who you happen to talk to in, in line at, at your first you know, job. I don't know, it's so interesting, desirability Scarlett, let's dig into it even more, because one of the things that comes up a lot in ad tech these days is you mentioned, you know, Harvard versus a less recognized school. But what about things like boot camps, certificates, hacker rank scores, code, signal scores, there's a lot of signal that is out there. Now, that is not the traditional education credentials. And sometimes that is not as recognized by the applicant tracking systems, which can be tuned very much to traditional education. How do you think about that with PAC match?

Nancy Soni: 35:56

Oh, there's so many things. Okay. Let me start with this. I think skills based hiring is a phrase that's being utilized quite a bit, I would probably argue that skills based hiring has been happening for the last five to 10 plus years, companies look for your skills, especially mid career, but at the early career level, I think that is something that's really important. So I believe that boot camps exist for many reasons. And for most reasons, they're great. But only doing a boot camp and not having any experience still puts you at a disadvantage. I think experience based hiring is really what's happening. So yeah, it's credentialing. You know, I think I've seen a lot of credentials on a lot of resumes, I would say, as a recruiter, I don't put as much you know, kind of work worth into the credentials, I think they're yet one more thing. But if you have credentials, a bootcamp and you still don't have any experience, you're still up against a mountain of unfortunate like, at the end of the day, companies have a lot of people to consider, where they're going to probably always default to is the person who has the most relevant experience, who actually fits well within the team. And it's going to take the least amount of time to get up and running. Those are the ones that often get the jobs. And so our goal is how do we actually how do we create more of those, if we can direct students to careers, if we can pre skill them while they're in college? If you have a freshman year, a sophomore year, a junior year internship, are you now so much more hireable, then the next person that yes, you'll probably have a decent code signals or hacker rank score, you're probably going to have a better understanding of how to land those jobs. The highest paying postgraduate jobs are actually usually given out post junior year internship as offers post internships. So those are the ones that we really want to get students into as much as we possibly can. The CERT the certificates in the boot camps, I think, often tend to be well, and this is probably a little bit generalized, but I tend to see them as people who studied the wrong things in college and now have to do the boot camps because they didn't actually do college, right. And I actually think quite highly of boot camps. But my goal is, let's get you spending those four to six years of college, which are extremely expensive, studying the right things so that maybe you don't have to do those things, or those aren't continuing education that is covered by your employer. Yeah,

Alexander Sarlin: 38:28

that makes sense. So let me then ask about the higher ability score in relationship to internships or apprenticeships or first experiences because as you say, if experiences are one of the core core core aspects of what makes someone hireable, which makes total sense. How do you get those graduates or, you know, students trained through alternative routes, who are not going to college to get that first experience? And to break through? Can the hire ability score and path match help with that?

Nancy Soni: 38:59

Absolutely. So in my research, prior to launching path match, what I realized are the biggest company in our space and campus recruiting is handshake. So I signed up for handshake as an employer and apply to recruit from many different schools. And I was rejected as a startup company, because we were just not large enough for these elite universities or institutions to allow their high ranking students to possibly deign to work for my startup. And what I realized also was, I was not alone, the number of founders of startups that have gone to, you know, amazing schools have also been declined. And then when I did the research in terms of who was declining us, I realized that it was usually a sophomore or junior work study intern who had no understanding of what they were declining. It's just that we were not large enough. So I think there's problems at that stage. Our biggest issue is there are too few opportunities to go around. Based on the way that campus recruiting is done, it's so darn expensive to actually hire a student because you have to go through this traditional route of getting your employer account set up on handshake getting schools to approve you, companies are like screw it, I'm just not gonna hire interns. Our goal is we need to actually make this easier, we need to get more companies hiring interns when they're freshmen, sophomore juniors, because we're going to have a far more built out developed talent supply chain as they hit 20 to 2324 years old. And so the easier we can make it for companies to hire this next generation, the better. So we built almost a marketplace like environment where everyone is welcome. Assuming they're able to offer a paid internship. It can be minimum wage, but it has to be paid because the unpaid internships, in my opinion, tend to favor the students who you know, can take an unpaid internship and they're not fair to people who actually do have to work through school. And so if we can actually pre skill students to get a $13 $15 an hour internship as a freshman or sophomore, that then makes them more valuable for the, you know, 20 to $25, or $30 internship as a sophomore, junior, and that's how you actually have that compounding effect of experience on your resume. Sorry, that was a very long winded answer. But

Alexander Sarlin: 41:23

to share my findings, antastic dead on I had the same experience. By the way, I tried to go on handshake to hire a college intern for a tech insiders for this and was rejected from every school and had the same, you know, curious moment of saying how odd, you know, you would think that a school would be very interested in having their students have the ability to have an internship that was paid. That was the exposure to dozens and dozens and dozens of incredible companies and startups. But now I know, behind the scenes, it was probably a student's amazing. Wow, no fantastic answer. And I think that's a really fair, I mean, one of the things I appreciate about your approach, both, you know, in this interview and with path match general is it's a very, it's about being real, it's really about, you know, let's get the information out there. Let's be really honest, like, even when you say, look, companies have lots of resumes to go through, they're gonna use applicant tracking systems, they're gonna reject people, it's just how it is you have to stand out even that is the kind of real talk you don't hear. I think a lot of students never have anybody say that to them.

Nancy Soni: 42:28

Unfortunately, especially a lot of job seekers. But having worked in this space for so long, and actually doing a lot of diligence on applicant tracking systems. Most recruiters also don't even know what systems are actually feeding them, the resumes. So it's important to understand the tech that you're up against. Absolutely.

Alexander Sarlin: 42:47

And I've seen some funny, you know, keyword hacking things. Sometimes people will hide hundreds of keywords and white text on their resume. There's, there's all this crazy stuff that goes around when you start to expose how much of this is tech based, but usually not a good idea. One of the things that is particularly interesting about your approach, to me is the salaries is that you're open about the salary ranges, and you know what it means to work in this company versus that company, what a word means to work as a product manager versus a account executive, you know, in all of these new modern careers. And this is another thing that I think college students and jobseekers in general often aren't exposed to. There are some new laws forcing employers to put salary ranges in job descriptions in some states. But generally, there's just not that much salary information that's easily accessible unless you know how to navigate you know Glassdoor levels, and things like that. So I'm curious about that choice, because some people have argued and do argue that putting salary information in front of young people who are still deciding their career choice may warp their perception may say, Oh, wow, I can make that much. If I'm a this, then I'm going to be this and I'm not even going to think about anything else. And they say, Oh, I don't want to be responsible for accidentally sending a student down a path just to chase the money. I know that that is not how you see the world at all. You mentioned the type, you know that students have all sorts of interest. But I'd love to hear you talk specifically about the role of salary information versus other types of information in giving students choices about their careers,

Nancy Soni: 44:19

students will spend four plus years you know, in higher ed, and then they're going to spend the rest of their life working. You get a paycheck, hopefully every two weeks, and that paycheck is going to allow for you to pay rent or pay mortgage pay pretty much everything else it's going to determine a lot of whether you have stress or less stress. Every single person thinks about compensation thinks about money very differently. So putting it there is more of a data point allowing an individual to actually do research on what they're going to spend the rest of their life doing. And compensation is a piece of that. So I'm a big believer in it's probably the most important decision To make a second time who you end up spending your life with, is what do you want to do? There's research that shows that Gen Z will switch jobs 18 times over six careers in their lifetime. So our job is not necessarily to put you in the, okay, you know, speak now or forever hold your peace, you cannot switch careers, it's really helping you get to the first destination. And then, you know, we call it a career navigation app. We've had many students, we've helped get their first, second and third internship and their first job. And then they come back to us and say, Hey, how do I go and get promoted? How do I like navigate either internally or externally? And so career navigation is every single job search is going to actually take on compensation in slightly different ways. And so it's just one data point that allows for the individual to map out is this in line with my values? And my motivations?

Alexander Sarlin: 45:53

Yep. It makes a lot of sense to me. I'm going to push you on this and throw you something controversial, but I'm sure that you've heard it before. I may be controversial. Do you think there's a role for this type of high mobility score in high school or even lower age students? How do you think about that as it gets even more a little skin crawly for some people to think about, you know, a seventh grader? You know, how hireable they are. But I'm curious how you respond to questions like that.

Nancy Soni: 46:22

So what we are not trying to do is put higher ability school, I have a seventh grader and that terrifies me. No, I don't think that we should be putting her ability scores in front of students, although colleges already do that. If you know anything about what it takes to get a student into certain schools these days, that's already happening, whether or not we want to admit it. But that is not necessarily what we're focused on. It's really we're trying to help students understand the higher ability scores really only if you have a PAP match profile, and that is primarily for students that are in college looking for internships and jobs. But for high school students, we have a lot of high school students who take our assessment because they want to understand what careers make sense for them. And so for them, our product is really giving them kind of the guidance in what career paths what major and what schools,

Alexander Sarlin: 47:08

that makes a lot of sense. Interesting to hear you that Yeah, I knew you would have thought about that. Because it's, it could be a slippery slope, or it could be a very clear, you know, concrete idea. And, you know, it makes me think of some of the countries that have the British Commonwealth system with the eight levels and Oh, levels. And, you know, there are some countries that are much more explicit at to students at younger ages, that you know, that the choices they make now, or how they decide to live and work, even at a younger age will have an effect on the rest of their life in terms of what kind of university they may or may not go to whether they're doing vocational work. And, you know, we really try to avoid that in America. And in my experience, a lot of nervousness about trying to be very explicit about different life trajectories, because we're in an incredibly unequal society, because we're in a very individualistic society where we don't want to, you know, have people feel limited, but I'm on the side of transparency. And I really love the path match approach of just trying to give people the information, they need to make choices that are very important for their life. As you have said, It's so exciting to see what you're doing. So we could talk about this for days. And this is one of my favorite topics. And I think it's so, so interesting. But we are running low on time, and I know you have a company to run, I always end the interview with two questions. The first is about what is a trend you see rising in the Ed Tech landscape right now, what do you think people are going to be talking about at ASU? Or what do you think is right around the corner that's about to be, you know, in everybody's mind.

Nancy Soni: 48:38

I think AI is one trend that every investor and a lot of students and professors are talking about in terms of how it's being leveraged by students to either write resumes, write essays, you know, doing a lot of things. So I think there's going to be a lot of conversations about AI and really how it evolves what we do for work. And I think now more than ever, something like patch is really necessary because work is changing. It's already changing. I have 14 uses chat GBT for certain things. And so it's silly not to be, you know, kind of thinking those things.

Alexander Sarlin: 49:10

One of the first things people started putting into Chet GBT was cover letters, because it's incredibly good at making very generic but acceptable cover letters. So it just makes me think of that job process. And what is one resource that you would recommend one or more resources that you would recommend for people who want to learn more about the topics we just talked about today? There's just a wide variety?

Nancy Soni: 49:32

It's great question. So one of the resources that actually I looked at which basically made me decide to sell my last company and Bill pack mash was burning glass and straw do a lot of these research reports on you know, kind of the differences between academia and the workforce. NACE does some great research as well. And so those are ones that I think are really, really helpful. The US Government Department of Education puts out a college scorecard, which is not the easiest to read, so half matches that actually publishing our own college scorecard that will give students in theory easy way to understand and, and make decisions regarding what majors makes sense for them.

Alexander Sarlin: 50:09

That's really exciting. I remember when the college scorecard policy came out and was trying to do exactly what you're saying make the outcomes of higher education more transparent to students in terms of where people go, what majors lead to what types of jobs and salaries and what schools and it came out and ended up on a government website that nobody knows how to find, and even fewer people know how to navigate and it's really exciting to hear that you're leveraging that data that is being collected and made transparent but making it user friendly. For the you know, the social media generation, the internet generation, are expecting consumer friendly interfaces and not you know how to navigate a complicated government website. I love what you're doing. It is so exciting. And Nancy Sony, CEO of path match, good luck in the competition at the ASU GSB in a couple of weeks. And thank you so much for being here on edtech insiders. This has been really interesting.

Nancy Soni: 51:01

Thank you so much for having me. It was fun for me as well.

Alexander Sarlin: 51:06

Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.