Major Changes to WSO Mentors Service

Dearest Primates,

For over a decade, we have offered a way for WSO members and visitors to find a specific mentor that can guide them on mock interviews, career consultations and even resume reviews through our WSO Mentors service.  The reviews are almost unanimously AMAZING...

Unfortunately, in order to help us cover the matching costs and support, in the past we had a relatively high take rate and it was still our least profitable (+ largest headache) service by far. 

As a result, we had two paths...1.  just to remove the service and 2. to try and make it more into a platform, build out a more robust/automatic matching algo + reduce our take rate + allow for variable pricing, etc etc...  

Given the raving reviews, we wanted to try and keep it alive, so here is what we did...

1.  Cut prices and our take rate dramatically -- we now run it at breakeven (or slight loss) but the goal is to help drive higher quality content in the forums

2.  The automated system and backup mentor matching algo is working really well and taking care of ~70% of the matching with no intervention from our team which allowed us to do #1 above...even though it was expensive to build!  

So, what this means for the service, how you can use it and what it means for our mentors is the following:

Lower Priced Options Now Available

• For those students/clients that are more price sensitive, we now allow mentors that want more mentees to offer much lower prices... now you can book time with mentors (working pros) for as low as $37 for a 30min session
• Previously, the price was $79 for a 30min session...
• This also means that some of our most popular (and busy) mentors that have built up a ton of glowing reviews have increased their prices (in some cases as high as $267 for a 30min session) 
• You can filter the mentor profiles by highest or lowest price above the table on the right side

New Mentor CTAs

• In order to encourage our team of 1,000 mentors to help give great advice in the forums, we now place a green "Mentor" button to any user that also has signed up as an official WSO mentor on the platform
• This helps reward the mentors that give the most free advice out and serves as a nice incentive to promote quality content since each comment is almost like a mini ad for how good of a mentor they would be/are

Mentors have More Control

• It's super easy to submit an application to be a mentor here.    
• When setting up your application, you set your required pay rates for a 30min, 1hr, 3hrs of sessions + resume review service (which some mentors choose to price much higher than what we have traditionally charged)
• Mentors can change their pay rate at any time to increase or slow down the number of mentees they want so that they can be more responsive (one of our main headaches in the past)....

SIGN UP TO BE A MENTOR HERE 

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Browse mentor bios and FIND YOUR MENTOR HERE

We hope that these changes will have a positive impact on the quality of content in the forums, get more professionals active and also allow more mentees to access these incredibly talented pool of professionals!

Onward and upward we go!

Patrick

ps - of course, these new changes have only been live for a few weeks so I'm sure we may still tweak things here and there to make things better for both sides