Frequently Asked Questions
Welcome to our help center, where you'll find answers to common questions.
There are many unique advantages to becoming a Pathrise fellow. Here are a few:
We give you unlimited 1-on-1 time with an expert at a top tech company and insider knowledge. Most of our strategies are proprietary and developed based on our internal data.
The community is extremely strong. Fellows are supporting each other by practicing for interviews together, trading referrals, and answering each other’s questions daily.
After you fail an interview, the same opportunity may not present itself again or it may take you another year to try again. With Pathrise, you 2-4x your interview scores.
Pathrise pays for itself. Historically, Pathrise fellows have achieved a higher lift in salary than their income share, either through the initial offer they receive or negotiation afterward.
No. Pathrise focuses on helping you with your job search. You're expected to have some education or experience coming into Pathrise and we'll be helping you with everything from your resume, to networking, to interview preparation to negotiation. We're able to help you significantly improve your job search process and get a better job with a higher salary.
Yes! You are free to withdraw from the program within the first two weeks of it starting, no commitment necessary. Worst case scenario, you get two weeks of free advice from top recruiters and experts in your field.
Pathrise currently helps people find jobs in six key areas: software engineering, strategy/ops (including product), data, product design (including UI/UX), marketing and sales. For each fellow, we further personalize the track they've chosen to suit their specific needs and interests.
Individuals seeking internships that they plan to start within the next summer are welcome to join Pathrise by paying an upfront fee. Our ISA model is reserved for full-time job seekers.
Job seekers must be 18 or older and be authorized to work in the United States or Canada to join Pathrise. Beyond that, we look for a commitment to improvement and a baseline level of knowledge or skills to be productive in your field. While there is no secret formula, we do our best to work with those we feel like we are in a position to help. At the end of the day, motivation and commitment to the program matter more to us than your existing resume.
We advise a wide range of fellows with varying levels of experience! Some are PhDs with multiple past positions and a specific target industry, or engineers with several years to a decade of experience under their belt looking for a new opportunity. Others are graduating seniors looking for their first job or self-taught bootcamp grads. For each candidate, we evaluate both their potential and how much of a difference our program can make before inviting them to be a fellow.
We believe that everyone deserves an opportunity to become a fellow regardless of race, ethnicity, age, gender, religious beliefs or sexual orientation. Our internal application selection process is based solely on the merit, value and growth potential of the individual. One of the goals of Pathrise as a program is to help even out the playing field for underrepresented minorities in the field of technology and demystify the part of your career that is not taught in the classroom.
The application process generally takes 1-2 weeks from beginning to end, but if you are available and would like to be accelerated, we can often get you through the process in a few days or even faster. We accept fellows on a rolling basis throughout the year, with each new cohort starting every two weeks.
Our fellows typically spend an average of 10 hours a week on their job search up until they get hired. This includes up to four hours of sessions each week working with Pathrise mentors or other fellows, with the remaining time spent on all of the activities you would already be doing for you job search. Pathrise as a program is designed to run in parallel to your job search, guiding you throughout your job search instead of giving you extra work. We expect our fellows to be committed to the program, but we are very flexible in working around class/work schedules, especially during hectic times, like before a big exam or deadline for a big project at work.
Yes, but you can have as many in-person sessions through our office as you’d like as well. All workshops and mentorship sessions happen online via video calls for maximum convenience and flexible scheduling. When you join Pathrise, you also gain access to our gated platform where you can access company guides, a job board, the Pathrise forum, and exclusive perks. Most of our mentors are located in the Bay area and we do organize meetups frequently, in case you are interested in in-person events.
On average, our fellows apply for positions, interview, hear back and sign a final offer within 4 months, but we are willing to work with you for as long as you need to get hired, even if it takes longer we will support you with weekly 1-on-1's and more until you succeed.
While we make an active effort to execute on every single requested referral from our fellows, we’ve found fellows who come into the program with the assumption that a referral is a direct way to an offer are typically unsuccessful. Referrals are a powerful tool, but are far from the only thing required to succeed in a job search. We do have an extensive network of both Pathrise alumni and professional contacts through which we can provide connections, but these referrals are typically only effective when combined with various other tactics that require significant effort on the fellow’s part. Pathrise is oftentimes most effective for fellows willing to dedicate invested time (5-10 hours a week) to their job search based on our assignments and program rather than a passive program where you just join and wait for referrals. Typically, you can expect about half a dozen referrals throughout Pathrise.
Any! Pathrise fellows have gone on to work in major cities like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, as well as smaller cities around the country. Some Pathrise fellows have even gone on to get positions in international locations, like London or Tokyo. However, a prerequisite of joining Pathrise is being authorized to work in the US. Another note is that our income share agreement also applies to jobs outside of the US.
We help our fellows get jobs across a wide range of companies, both inside and outside of tech. We can help you land a job regardless of your interests, whether you’re looking for an early stage startup, a top tech firm, or something else. Fellows have gone on to work at many companies, including but not limited to, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Uber, Amazon, Zynga, Ipsy, Affirm, Yext, Magic Leap, Cryptomove, Lumahealth, TrueAccord, Abridge.AI, Codeacademy, Bitfusion, VMWare, Smarkets, Loop, Kaiser Permanente, Clover Networks, Doordash, Crate.io, Arc Block, Cerner, Yelp, Postmates, LogMeIn, UPS, E&Y, Northrop Grumman, and more. Pathrise is built around highly personalized mentorship and generalizable best practices so we can support you no matter what your goals are. We also have an internal network of over 200+ companies that we will introduce you to if it's a good fit.
Each of our fellows is matched with a career mentor and can select to meet with our network of experienced industry mentors. Our industry mentors have professional experience in the job field you are looking to enter and will help you develop your skills and domain knowledge to make you as competitive a candidate as possible. Our career mentors are experts on best practices for each step of the job search and will help you translate these insights according to your individual goals, strengths, and weaknesses. They’ll serve as a sounding board and support system for any questions or challenges you encounter in your job search. You meet with your mentors 1-on-1 every week until you sign your final offer.
Yes! We'll help you figure out if your offer is fair, if you could make more money, and if applicable, negotiate equity, stock options and other benefits as well. On average we can often get our fellows a 10-20% lift by guiding them through the negotiation process, which in many cases covers the standard income share in and of itself! While negotiation results are certainly not guaranteed, our historical performance has been strong thanks to the additional information we have about the current job market.
Of course! The Pathrise program is completely personalized to your unique situation. We heavily modify the program to suit individual circumstances and never give you busywork. Instead, we invest that saved time into helping you with whichever part of the job seeking process you could use more help with.
Outside of paying us back a small percentage of your income through monthly payments, Pathrise is a lifetime community. You'll always be a part of our family and be able to leverage the growing network of fellows, both professionally and personally.
The program is completely free until you’re hired, with no upfront payment for anything. You only pay Pathrise if the program actually works for you, meaning you accept an offer. Once you do start working, then you would pay us back a small percentage of your income for a limited time.. Any time we make an offer to a potential fellow, we strongly recommend that they seek outside counsel (e.g. friends and family) before they sign anything. Outside of that, we do our best to hold the utmost transparency for any potential issue. The income share agreement itself is based on a standardized contract common as a financing option in higher education and online educational institutions. To get a better sense of what a typical income share agreement looks like, you can review one publicly released by Purdue University (https://purdue.edu/backaboiler). Our income share agreement is similar in nature.
Fellows have an opportunity to withdraw from the program at no cost after 12 months if they didn’t receive a job offer during that time. In exceptional circumstances, we may approve withdrawals before the 12 month mark. In these cases, the fellow will be required to pay a withdrawal fee. The fee is $250 for every week the fellow was in the program. This is at Pathrise’s sole discretion because we invest significant time and resources in every fellow. We need to be consistent with our income share agreement policy in order to make the program free upfront.
Depending on the exact nature of the situation, we will either entirely exclude or heavily discount existing offers or current work you have coming into Pathrise from the income share, so as to make sure you only pay us if the program actually works to help you get other offers. We are not able to offer a discount on the income share for any companies you aren’t in the final round interview stages with though, since we can provide significant assistance in helping you through those earlier stages all the way up until you accept an offer.
That's totally fine! If you're still interviewing or will continue interviewing for other companies, Pathrise will accelerate you in the program to help you get more offers. Depending on the exact nature of the situation, we will either entirely exclude or heavily discount existing offers or current work you have coming into Pathrise from the income share, so as to make sure you only pay us if the program actually works to help you get other offers. We'll still help you negotiate your original offer and help you choose between the ones you end up with. Either way, we make sure to add addendums to our contract to ensure you’ll never end up paying a full income share for anything we didn’t actually fully help with. If you can provide documentation of any existing offers, we can include a written addendum to the contract stating that if you end up working with any of these companies, we will reduce your income share agreement significantly depending on the situation.
Depending on the exact nature of the situation, we will either entirely exclude or heavily discount existing offers or current work you have coming into Pathrise from the income share, so as to make sure you only pay us if the program actually works to help you get other offers.
For other companies that you interview with once you begin the program, we cannot offer a discount or waive the income share. This is because we provide significant assistance in helping you through those earlier stages all the way up until you accept an offer. Your mentor is coaching you through the entire process of all your interviews, not just the person who introduces you.
You are never obligated to accept any offer as part of Pathrise and we don't even make introductions or referrals for you unless you explicitly confirm your interest first. That being said, we do evaluate how motivated and committed potential fellows are to finding a job and furthering their career before we extend an invitation to the accelerator.
For individuals who would prefer to pay a fixed cost upfront instead of an income share after getting hired, we offer an upfront fee option. The fee is due prior to joining Pathrise. If you withdraw from the program during the two week trial or after 12 months without receiving a job offer, your payment will be refunded.
Every fellow who participates in Pathrise improves their job seeking prospects by astronomically more than their income share amount. Beyond getting you better opportunities with higher salaries, our negotiation advice alone usually accounts for a salary increase of 10-20%. Every single part of our program, from teaching you how to do outreach that will 2-4x your response rate to interview preparation that improves your interview performance scores by 1.5-3x, is designed and closely measured to statistically improve your job prospects way more than what you commit in return.
