Sorry you took umbrage over some of the things in my post about Path101. It’s a nice enough site, but after your 18 months of work (see your Sept. 2007 blog posts) and a provocative presentation at the March ERE conference, I was expecting a little more there, there.

After getting your launch announcement the other day, I went through the site. I know a few things about law careers, so that was one I checked out. Path101 says that the average number of years of education required for a career in corporate law is low. On the other hand, the educational requirement for a job in food service is listed as average. Something’s not right there. While you’re on the food service page, take a look at the longevity metrics. The “Stickiness” for the category is reported as average, but after they’ve worked a job in the field, the “% of people who stay” metric is reported as low.

Knowing you are in pre-beta, I didn’t walk through all of this in the post. More traffic and more participation will inevitably improve the site over time and add to its value. For now, though, it’s career planning lite.

Meanwhile, for a jobseeker considering a career change, Monster and Vault are both better choices. That Monster hasn’t generated a lot of blog buzz is a silly reason to ding it. Monster’s career planning tools, imperfect they may be, provide a good deal of specifics. They certainly do not advise me that the educational requirements to be a lawyer are low.

On the other hand, I was tickled to see that Path101 lists teamwork and agreeableness as two of the lowest scoring lawyer personalty traits. For a site in alpha, however, I do wonder just where the data came from.

Hope this helps clarify things.

Thanks for the coverage. We definitely appreciate the feedback. I’d just like to clarify a few things.

I’m not sure where you get that we’ve been developing the site for 18 months. That would put us back in September ‘07. The company was incorporated back in October of ‘07 and we finished our fundraising round back in Febuary of ‘08. We began our crawl around that time, but application development didn’t really begin in earnest until we hired our first two developers back in April and May of last year. So, in terms of people hours, what we’ve done is a little less than a year old.

As for Monster, I had to re-read that paragraph twice. I wasn’t sure if you thought we should be disappointed or Monster should. Monster’s offering had been “in development” even longer than ours had (I met with the team working on it up in Maynard personally) and they have nearly unlimited resources to work on it (vs. our team of 4 working on angel capital). Yet, besides being “more graphical” I was pretty underwhelmed. None of what they presented is anything that we can’t do, and I’m not even 100% convinced they’ve presented it in a more usable way. Have you seen any industry or jobseeker buzz about their product? Most of the industry people I’ve talked to have been pretty unimpressed, and no jobseeker that I’ve talked to has brought up this new section of their site. In fact, their $3 million Super Bowl add didn’t even really mention it, and their traffic last month is just about what it was back in September, meaning the launch had a pretty negotiable effect above normal seasonality.

“…personality traits common among individuals in the profession. Where this latter insight comes from isn’t clear, though there is a personality test available.”

You answered your own question. Our personality data comes from our own personality tests.

One thing you also forgot to mention. Unlike Vault.com, our tools are completely free.

I would have been more than happy to chat with you about our product before you wrote the story. Please do feel free to reach out next time at charlie@path101.com.