By Susan Adams, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips
Hemant Mohapatra set his sights on getting a job at one of three prestigious American companies—McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group or Google. As a student at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School in the U.K., he knew a few people who worked inside the companies but didn’t feel comfortable asking them to coach him extensively on his applications. Though each firm offers career advice, on its website, he had specific questions, like how to customize his résumé for each potential job. He also wanted to run through a series of mock interviews.
Fortunately for Mohapatra, 31, his school had an arrangement with a startup career website called Evisors. Evisors offers job seekers the chance to get individually tailored résumé advice and interview preparation help directly from some 2,000 people who either work at target companies or have worked there in the past. “Mentors” charge an average of $125 for an hour of one-on-one coaching. About half of Evisors’ business is directly with job seekers. The other half is with some 50 business schools like Judge, Rutgers Business School and the Belk College of Business at University of North Carolina, which buy packages of mentoring hours and offer them free to students.
Mohapatra spent ten hours with Evisors mentors, and he credits them with helping him land a job two months ago as a business development manager at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Google is known to favor candidates who display what it calls “googliness,” but Mohapatra didn’t know what that meant. “I was asking myself, do you have to be really smart, a great athlete, or really good looking,” he recalls. An Evisors mentor who works at Google explained that, among other things, the company likes to see a passionate commitment to an interest outside of work. For Mohapatra, that meant fleshing out the part of his résumé that described his experiences as a mountain climber, musician and poet.
In the crowded world of online career advice, much of it repetitive, obvious or too general to be useful, Evisors has come up with a formula that seems to be working. Another client, Andrea Asztalos, was a longtime student of statistical physics, earning a master’s degree in her native Romania and then another master’s and Ph.D. in the U.S. and finally working in a post-doctoral position at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. At 32, she had never been on the non-academic job market when she started looking for a software development job. After a half dozen phone interviews and one face-to-face meeting that went nowhere, she set up a $240 mock interview with an Evisors mentor who works at Microsoft. The mentor told her that she was getting too technical in her answers too quickly. “He showed me how to explain my plan first and then worry about the details,” she says. Her next interview turned into a job she will be starting in May.
Evisors began in 2009 as a project at Harvard Business School, where Fredrik Maroe, son of a Norwegian oil company executive, teamed up with three other students to start the site as a class project. Maroe, 30, says the idea grew out of his experience as an outsider applying to college in the U.S. from Norway. After an arduous process he landed at Penn. Things were much easier when he applied to his first internship, at Lazard. A frat brother had worked there and helped him prep. “For me that was an ‘aha’ moment,” he says. After college he applied to work at McKinsey and again got invaluable help from a friend who had been through the multi-phase interview process. Maroe got the offer, cementing his belief that inside connections and one-on-one help are the way into great jobs.
To recruit their first mentors, Maroe and his team reached out to their business school classmates. They were surprised by how many signed up. To put together the website, they invested $25,000 of their own money and hired a developer in India. Judge Business School was Evisors’ first client, though its initial $5,000 contract was hardly enough to keep the doors open. Soon they started signing up more schools and more mentors, and Maroe bought out his partners. So far he has raised $1.3 million in venture funding, and he says his revenues doubled in 2012 over 2011 (he won’t reveal a figure).
To date Maroe says between 2,000 and 3,000 job seekers have done Evisors mentoring sessions. The company takes a cut of each session, typically 33%. When it sells business school packages it asks mentors to discount their listed price by around 30% and Evisors takes a portion of that.
Though it’s easy to see how appealing the service is for clients and for school placement offices, the service raises questions about potential conflicts of interest for mentors. The site has a rating system, where users give their mentors up to five stars for performance. The higher the rating, the more popular the mentor and the more he can charge for his services. Doesn’t that make the mentor want to walk across the hall and recommend a candidate to a boss or call up a former colleague and push an applicant? I talked to three Evisors mentors who all said they would never do such a thing.
Another question: How ethical is it for mentors to take money from Evisors’ clients for the job their company is already paying them to do? Most employers want their workers to scout for new hires and help promising candidates through the application process.
Some firms have drawn a line, telling their employees they can’t work for Evisors on the side. In fact at McKinsey there is a policy that prohibits employees from doing any paid work outside the firm. Though McKinsey’s global recruiting head, Brian Rolfes, says he’s agnostic about Evisors as a business, he thinks there is no need for would-be employees to pay for help, because McKinsey offers so much support to promising applicants, including a buddy system where candidates are paired with consultants who help them prepare for interviews. “We don’t believe it’s necessary for folks applying to us to use these third party vendors,” he says.
Not true says Nick Oak, a former McKinsey consultant based in Exeter, N.H., who makes his living as a coach for Evisors (he charges $400 an hour) and for PrepLounge, a Cologne, Germany-based company that pairs interview coaches with applicants for management consulting jobs, mostly in Europe. The help McKinsey offers candidates, he says, “falls way short of what candidates really need.” McKinsey generally gives promising candidates one interview coaching session and some online examples of case studies, he says. But to be successful at the McKinsey interview process, candidates must do more than simply answer questions and talk about things like potential customer segmentation and indirect competitors. To prepare properly takes many hours, says Oak, who adds that he’s worked as a coach for candidates even after they start working at McKinsey.
Christina Wallace, an Evisors coach who knows Maroe from business school and who used to work at Boston Consulting Group, sees a conflict of interest for Evisors coaches who are already recruiting and doing mock interviews as part of their job for a consulting firm. “To do the thing that they [BCG] had trained me for, to then get paid by someone else for that, feels very conflicting to me,” she says. She did two or three Evisors sessions while at BCG, she says, but has done most of her coaching since she left to form her own company. (She charges $65 an hour for résumé critiques and $125 for mock interviews.) She says she is most valuable to students who come from schools that are not on top consulting firms’ target lists and thus don’t have access to the extra help the firms offer to candidates from top-tier schools.
Jai Jung Kim is such a candidate. A Korean immigrant and an undergraduate at George Washington University, where McKinsey does not recruit on campus, Kim says he cold-emailed a hard-to-fathom 1,000 people through LinkedIn and other sources before he finally landed an interview with McKinsey. To prepare he did more than eight hours of coaching with Evisors. He got a job and will be starting in August. After going through the exhausting process of getting the first interview, he decided to start a non-profit, legupcareer.org, which will run workshops for students at schools where top consulting firms do not recruit, like University of North Carolina and Penn State. Kim also plans to suggest students use Evisors for coaching.
Evisors is aiming to stretch far beyond the world of management consulting and technology. It already has advisors who represent banks like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and a handful of retailers and consumer goods companies like L’Oreal, Procter & Gamble and General Mills. Many of its mentors work at small companies or startups. Some clients come to Evisors for business school admissions advice and get students or recent grads as mentors.
Maroe expresses some lofty ideas about democratizing the hiring process, comparing Evisors to massive open online courses where students can take free classes from top-flight professors at schools like MIT and Princeton. But of course Evisors is not free. On the other hand, as Maroe points out, spending a couple of thousand dollars on coaching to land a six-figure job may be well worth the investment. “We’re trying to democratize the process of pursuing a career,” he says. Democracy may not be the right word. Access to insider advice might be more like it.
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