Employers and universities aren’t getting the whole picture of their applicants, contends Heather Hiles, the out founder of Pathbrite.
“We are not the sum total of our bubble-test data, and I intend to prove it,” she said.
Her new startup aims to change the way employees and students present their life, learning and projects. Pathbrite is a digital portfolio that helps collect, organize and beautifully publish a lifetime of learning and success.
Employers and universities aren’t getting the whole picture of their applicants, contends Heather Hiles, the out founder of Pathbrite.
“We are not the sum total of our bubble-test data, and I intend to prove it,” she said.
Her new startup aims to change the way employees and students present their life, learning and projects. Pathbrite is a digital portfolio that helps collect, organize and beautifully publish a lifetime of learning and success.
Students can build academic portfolios, for example, that show all the evidence of their learning, including research projects, collaboration and any other completed product. This type of presentation is appreciated by faculty because it enables assessments that go beyond the standard “bubble” test to get more “qualitative assessments of cognition, understanding and knowledge,” said Hiles, who is also CEO of Pathbrite.
Hiles argues that anyone trying to advance a career uses portfolios that go well beyond the “flat” resume and instead present a more “holistic” view of their individual capabilities and accomplishments. Referred to as “artifacts,” items in a Pathbrite portfolio can include a traditional resume, as well as videos, photos, and documents of any kinds, including scans of transcripts or diplomas.
“Recruiters love portfolios because they get a better sense of a candidate’s ‘fit and finish’ for any given opportunity, which results in lower rates of expensive bad hires,” said Hiles. Employers can also use portfolios to help employees track their work product during an evaluation period. Then at the end of the period, there is proof of an employee’s accomplishments.
Hiles, who earlier in her career was the CEO of SF Works, a welfare-to-work program under the Clinton administration that successfully trained and moved women into jobs, also served on the San Francisco Unified School District board where she saw first-hand the impacts of stubborn achievement gaps among the city’s most vulnerable students.
“I’m so passionate about what Pathbrite portfolios can do to help people address the critical gaps in their lives that might prevent them from getting the education or job of their dreams, or promotion they deserve,” said Hiles.
But Pathbrite faced a series of obstacles before launching, mostly financial. Without her family and circle of friends and angel investors, Hiles admits the company would not have emerged. “There were moments that were really tough, where I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off,” she said. Pathbrite has most recently received its Series A financing. Hiles, who describes herself as “stubborn,” said that she truly believed in the idea and just kept pushing.
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