Evisors.com – Land Your Dream Job
What do you want to do in life and how will you get there?
This is a question every person asks him- or herself at some point in their life. Unfortunately, it is far from easy to answer. The reasons for that are many, from not knowing what opportunities even exist for your skillset to not knowing people who can guide you in the right direction.
A company that is trying to tackle this ever-present problem is Evisors, a career-coaching platform that connects individuals looking for jobs with professionals who have worked at companies that the individual is interested in.
Value Proposition to Customers
Ease of access to relevant people and information
Learn directly from a professional who has worked in a position that you are pursing. In other words, you don’t need to use any networking skills in order be able to reach a person who works (or has worked) at the company of your dreams.
Saving time spent on researching
Researching careers on the internet is a difficult and time consuming. There is too much information out there and it’s hard to know who to trust. On the other hand, having a career conversation with a relevant professional gets your questions answered much more quickly.
Opens doors for high-quality underdogs[1]
Highly competitive jobs such as investment banking or consulting typically recruit only from top academic institutions. If you don’t go to a top school, the recruiting processes for these jobs can be very frustrating. Often times it seems that nobody wants to talk to you or that nobody takes you seriously.
The Evisors’ platform lets you can bypass recruiter’s biased selection process by proving yourself directly to the working professional you paid to have a conversation with.
Value Proposition to Advisors
Get compensated for talking about your own experience
Many people love to talk about themselves and their careers, and this knowledge, although often taken for granted, can be extremely valuable to anybody who’s trying to follow the advisor’s career path.
Sense of Purpose / Giving Back
In general, people love to feel important and helpful to others, and Evisors makes helping others very easy and profitable.
Operating Plan
From a customer’s stand point, Evisors works in three easy steps:
- Browse the advisors
- Find a perfect career coach
- Connect over the phone
In order to provide the value to its customers and advisors, Evisors needs to balance its efforts among five critical operational components:
- Web Platform
- Advisors
- Customers
- Sales & Marketing
- Administrative Services
Web Platform
Evisors website is the face of the company where customers and advisors come together. It is easy to navigate, offers relevant information, and makes search process for the right professional advisor undemanding.
Advisors
The platform is only as good as its advisors. Evisors has done a great job of getting advisors from many top companies such as McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Google, Microsoft, etc.
Customers
If advisors are a key to the quality of the platform, customers are its lifeblood.
Sales & Marketing
Since the company is fairly young (started in 2010), there is still an enormous potential for growth and market share capture. Although there isn’t a lot of information on what the company is doing on this front, the assumption is that they are trying to heavily spread awareness through various efforts such as calling universities (cite), word-of-mouth, and more.
Administrative & Legal Services
In order for the company to operate successfully, they needed to put in place a reliable payment system and legal framework to avoid lawsuits.
Value Capturing Mechanisms
The company makes money in two different ways, (i) charging for calls and (ii) charging for webinars.
Charging for calls
Customer can pay an advisor for three different types of services:
- Career conversation
- Resume / cover letter review
- Mock interviews
Prices are set on an individual basis and vary from advisor to advisor, as well as from service to service.
Charging for webinars
Webinars are online lessons in form of presentations on variety of topics. Each webinar has a free intro portion (approximately 5-8 minutes), but if a customer wants to continue watching the entire presentation, he or she needs to pay $3.
Alignment Analysis
Overall, business and operating model work hand in hand. The more advisors sign up, the more value is created for the customers as they’re offered better and more relevant choices of people to talk to about their dream job search.
The competitive advantage comes from the quality of advisors and the quality of the platform. Given that the company has been able to secure advisors from some of the most prestigious companies in the world, it is in a great position to sustain the advantage against the competitors and new entrants. Furthermore, as the company grows and has to support more advisors and customers, it will need to make sure to keep the quality of the platform at the highest levels (ease-of-use, no crashing, branding, appeal, etc.).
Finally, it is important to note some potentially negative implications of the current business / operating model. The more advisors sign up, the harder it will be to satisfy their expectations of how many people will reach out to them. Some advisors will have a lot of work, but some might end up with none if they don’t brand themselves correctly. On the other hand, from the customer’s stand point, it is going to be hard to differentiate who is good and who is not. For example, if there are 50 advisors from McKinsey, it can be difficult for a customer to know which one of those 50 is the best person to call.
All in all, Evisors tackles a very important and serious problem regarding careers. In the ideal world, we would all know exactly what we want to do and what all the little steps we need to take to get there are. In reality, finding the right people, asking the right questions, and coming up with the right answers is extremely difficult, and unfortunately, for some people even impossible. Evisors platform does a great job of taking us from status quo closer to that ideal world by democratizing access to relevant people and best information.
Sources:
http://www.hbsalumniangels.com/article.html?aid=127
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK4UQInEq3s
[1] High-quality underdogs are smart and driven individuals who do not have credentials from top academic institutions
Nice job Dino! I like it, though I wonder what the right incentive is for the advisors – if they view it as transactional, then it may change their attitude in a negative way and/or college students might simply not have the money to pay what these advisors are worth. If the advisors just want to do it as a way to give back, then you have to manage it in a way that’s not overly burdensome for the advisors.
Dino! Great post – this is a really interesting concept. What stuck out to me was the idea that the advisors could be current or former employees of the companies the customers wanted to reach out to.
If an advisor is a current employee, do you think there’s danger in customers viewing the platform as a way to pay for an interview? If that happened, I think that could erode a lot of the value on both sides of the equation. The customers wouldn’t be able to get an honest view of the company because they were too busy trying to present themselves in the best light (we’ve all be guilty of this). The advisors might also lose the feeling of “giving back” if they sense that someone is simply paying them for a networking opportunity. Do you think there’s a way for the company to address this potential concern?