Glassdoor for MBAs and Startups

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One of the big issues with employment review websites, such as Glassdoor, is that feedback is usually submitted only by those who had a really great, or really bad, experience at a company.

And feedback is so general, it doesn’t offer an accurate snapshot for people with diverse backgrounds: A business school student fresh out of undergrad sees the same salary range as someone with an MBA, for example. Smaller companies and startups without many employees, aren’t as well represented as major corporations.

University of Chicago Booth startup TransparenC is hoping to change that with curated career sites. They’re starting with a website tailored to MBA students, called TransparentMBA, but they anticipate expanding their platform to law, engineering, and tech among other niche job seekers not served by general career sites like Glassdoor and Linkedin.

The idea first came to Mitch Kirby, a UChicago Booth student, last fall when attempting to look for jobs post-graduation. Glassdoor felt like “information overload” he said, and most of the aggregate information didn’t give him an idea of how his qualification–an MBA from a top-ranked business school–would translate to a position or compensation. So he decided to create a platform that gave more granular information on companies and careers for MBA students (he coded it himself), and see if his classmates were interested. They were: about 50 percent of Booth students quickly signed up, he said.

Profiles for companies, jobs, and industries are built through feedback that users provide, which they’re required to submit when signing up for the platform. Users can see feedback such as expected compensation, satisfaction rates, and culture fit for an MBA at a given company and position. They can also compare the experiences at the industry level.

Kirby said about 15 percent of the top MBA students are using the site right now, in addition to prospective students and alumni, and they have about 1,700 companies listed on the site. By including a broad range of experience levels, he hopes to help people not just land one job, but understand where that job could lead.

“[It’s] not just data points for an individual jobs, but if I got to this job where do people go after this job–understanding entire careers,” he said.

In addition, the TransparenC team noticed that a larger number of MBA students are interested in working at startups. But startups’ varying compensation packages (often a combination of equity and salary) make it tough to create an aggregate of what an MBA should expect when negotiating. So in coming weeks they’re launching a startup dashboard that can walk a student through the negotiation process with a startup based on its traction to ensure fair compensation.

TransparentMBA is free for users (aside from having to input data), and so the four-person startup is looking to make revenue through partnerships with companies looking to recruit and university career services that want to work with more data and tech. They already have several pilots in the works. Next up they’re competing in UChicago’s New Venture Challenge.