Would you pay a company US$400 to land your dream job?

30 Aug 2018

Raising The Bar is a company run by ex-publisher and professional career mentor, Sandy Golinkin. Its core business is in helping young professionals manage and develop their careers through good decision-making, sustainable skills and habits.

According to its website, Golinkin spreads her expertise through consulting sessions and online classes to help young people land their dream jobs.

“I managed them and coached them and brought them on to some really great careers,” she said to New York Times.

“I helped them realise their full potential.”

According to her LinkedIn profile, Golinkin’s CV is an impressive one. Her experience for the last 25 years includes being a publisher of magazines Travel & Leisure, Departures and Conde Nast.

The website states its mission as:

“Raising The Bar is a consulting company founded by Sandy Golinkin to help people achieve the highest standards of professional excellence. The company’s primary area of focus is to work with recent college grads and young adults who are finding their first jobs, or are early on in their career path.”

Raising The Bar is said to be different from job sites and hiring agents as it sets out to help clients “distinguish themselves from the competition”. This is done thrpugh one-on-one consultations, in person, phone or via Skype, where she helps clients “identify their best career path, develop a range of skills to gain jobs, and in turn, often boosts clients’ confidence”.

While sites like Glassdoor and Linkedin can help connect you with recruiters, it’s an impersonal service through computer screens, which are hardly able to assist in fresh graduates’ search for values like social impact, workplace diversity, meaning or work-life balance.

This was an interesting read. Valuable lessons in how to prepare for your career after college.#education #thenewyorktimes #college #career https://t.co/TbwhQPgpyR

— Dr. Frank Tiano (@DrFrankTiano) July 9, 2018

The irony is that this search for a the perfect job through a paid personalised service is an impressively expensive one.

In a time where more than 40 million Americans have student debt and 14 percent owe at least US$50,000, being able to afford US$8,000 for 20-hours of sessions, or US$400 an-hour means – unless one has a generous endowment – working one or more regular jobs to earn such money.

Golinkin is aware of this and has created a low-cost option in response, including a free, 45-minute video giving an overview of what she teaches and five online classes for US$89 each.

For those who can afford it, there’s the issue of whether these services are effective. Certainly, good mentors have been known to launch successful careers, like Larry Summers, who was Facebook COO and Sheryl Sandberg’s Professor at Harvard, is credited for helping her land pivotal positions at the World Bank and the US Treasury Department.

A vast amount of research has shown the power of mentorship to benefit future careers as well, developing the future workplace talent pipeline, also using personal contacts to help fresh graduates find internships, network with industry insiders and find employment opportunities.

Literature appears to shows that millennial workers have been known to splurge US$18 on avocado toast, so the prospect of them investing in a service like Raising The Bar may not be too far-fetched. And with this age group’s reputation for shopping around for jobs that best align with their needs and life goals, maybe paying someone big bucks to do it for them will become the next big investment trend among this group.