Let’s hook up: Path.to expands to find you the job of your dreams

The company calls itself the “eHarmony of jobs.” Hot startups like Quora and Evernote, Eventbrite, and Lytro post their positions there. And now that Path.to is expanding beyond San Francisco, maybe, just maybe, your dream job will meet you with a kiss and a box of chocolates.

Above: CEO Darren Bounds

Path.to has been matching up love-lorn job seekers in San Francisco since April, and in that time it’s started working with 200 of the hottest companies in technology. Today, CEO Darren Bounds announced that the company is expanding into New York, Chicago, and Boston.

“Path.to makes the connection between company and job seeker,” Bounds told VentureBeat. The company helps speed the hiring process, he said, because “the quality of applicants is very high, enabling many of our clients to go right to the final stages of hiring within the first week.”

The service works by gathering rich data from job seekers, including their career history and their social activity on key networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Then it adds detailed information about their participation in online work-oriented sites such as Behance, which hosts elegant online portfolios, and Github, the social software development community. It also imports data from LinkedIn, bringing in an applicant’s personal summary, skills, and jobs.

“We want to know their passions and interests, and pair that with a deeper understanding of a company and corporate culture,” Bounds said. Path.to then uses all the data to built a rich visual resume — the company calls it a social resume — almost a personal infographic:

In order to accurately match candidates and companies, Path.to needs to also get rich profile data from hiring companies. So the company ensures that recruiters who join the service fill in extensive profiles, to help job applicants get a good sense of what it would be like to work at their firms.

“We help them showcase their corporate culture,” Bounds said. “We help them build out a really beautiful profile page,” which can include video, blog posts, the company’s Twitter stream, and a photo gallery.

Path.to then creates a compatibility score between zero and 99, and connects companies and people it thinks will match:

The company is currently hyper-focused on the designer and engineering communities, and there’s a good reason for that, according to Bounds. “The tech industry is what we’re focusing on. We’re technologists and designers, and we want to do what we know.”

It’s a different type of job search experience, more social, more detailed, more human. Bounds believes that there has been little innovation in the recruiting and job search industries for the past decade, pointing to job-finding services like Monster and Dice as impersonal, “just searchable directories.” Competitors that are trying a similar approach include White Truffle, which also focuses heavily on technology jobs.

Bounds has a seemingly perfect career background for Path.to, having previously worked at Taleo, which provides human resources software for managing the job-filling process, and his own startup, CliqSet, which aggregated and organized social communications. Put the two together, and Path.to is the obvious result.

Path.to is based in Jackonsville, Florida, and is backed by $1.5 in financing from Adecco, an HR solutions provider.

Photo credit: ShutterStock