For many young professionals, crucial career decisions like what school to attend and what kind of position to look for after graduation are often based on little more than intuition and anecdotes. TransparentCareer, a Chicago startup, wants those decisions to be based on data instead.
“We have a ton of information about so many aspects of our lives but not this,” said founder and CEO Mitch Kirby. “So we’re trying to provide better data that’s personalized to the individual, in order to understand their fair pay, and visualized so that they can understand how entire career trajectories pan out.”
His company crowdsources detailed information about compensation, weekly hours, travel, progression and career satisfaction from its users. Upon entering that information, along with details about education and work experience, users can also track how their compensation levels stack up against their peers, or what to expect upon entering their first salary negotiations after graduation.
In addition to understanding where they stand on the compensation ladder, TransparentCareer’s dashboards let users visualize and compare satisfaction, pay and work-life balance data by industry and role, helping them make educated decisions based on their own priorities. Each of these categories also gives users the option to dive into company-by-company statistics.
Originally founded as TransparentMBA with a laser focus on MBA candidates, the company was born out of Kirby’s own frustrations around choosing a career path. Since launching this March, the company has partnered with 19 top universities including University of Chicago, Northwestern and MIT to bring their students onto the platform.
To date, Kirby said, about 25 percent of current students in those MBA programs use the service. Upon seeing this initial traction, the founders decided to expand its scope to include other fields like law and engineering, with a long-term ambition to create a service for all aspiring young professionals.
“Undergraduates, in particular, are most starved for the kind of data that we want to provide,” said co-founder Kevin Marvinac. “There’s no product that’s catered specifically toward undergraduate users that offers … deep compensation metrics, work-life balance metrics and satisfaction scores.”
That ambition will be aided by $850,000 in funding from investors including Hyde Park Angels, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Origin Ventures, OCA Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners and Rough Draft Ventures.
The co-founders attribute much of their early traction to the guidance they received as part of the New Venture Challenge, whose pitch contest they won this summer, as well as to the mentorship they have received from other members of the Chicago tech community. This support, in their view, is what makes the Chicago tech ecosystem so special.
“At different points we talked around ideas about the Bay Area, and what are the pros and cons there,” said Marvinac. “But we were both really attracted to the idea of founding in Chicago. We have really strong mentors here, we have amazing investors here, we love the community and we like the camaraderie of the tech community here.”
Image via TransparentCareer.
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