The Muse Case Study Personal Use Ebook

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Why it Works

The company offers services in an a-la-carte style of fees. A career seeker can sign up and request the services of a mentor, a coach, and a master coach. The amount the company charges is based on the level of coaching job seekers wish to obtain. Also, it appears that coaches can set their prices.

Job seekers can take courses on the platform, although there aren’t many as of the time of this writing. In fact, there is only one course that is offered that is native to the platform. The others are housed on Skillshare.com and Udemy.com. Still, they are decent offerings for people looking to improve their skills. It’s likely the company will add more as time goes by.

The company started by catering to young professional women. However, they got a flood of requests from people of all ages and career levels. They have since expanded their service to include anyone wishing to get a better job-searching experience.

Job seekers can find useful articles on how to navigate their careers or tips on job-related activities. These are written by in-house staff as well as contributors. Several of the contributors are coaches, which makes sense for them to write about tips for job seekers. According to an article featured in PCMag.com, when asked what an unusual way that people are using the site is, Minshew said that managers of companies were encouraging employees to use the site for career development.

[Source: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2499715,00.asp]

When people are looking for jobs or careers, they should have access to information that helps them learn more about the companies they are considering. That is something TheMuse.com tries to provide. The company also has many articles from internal staff and contributing editors that help the job seekers navigate the job search landscape.

Promotion:

Cofounders Cavoulacos and Minshew cowrote a book together published on Amazon, “The New Rules of Work: The Modern Playbook for Navigating Your Career.” The book may not be directly used to promote the business. However, it does contain the website on the cover of the book. That will lead readers to be curious about the website and likely visit it. The book has several reviews with high ratings. The majority of ratings are 5-star, and there aren’t any 1-star ratings at the time of this writing. The book was released April of 2017. You can find more information about the book on the company’s website:

https://www.themuse.com/thenewrulesofwork

The company has a refer-a-friend link. However, there aren’t any monetary incentives associated with it. For instance, many companies offer a referral commission. The company does not provide an affiliate program at the current time, or it does not publish it directly on the website if there is one.

The company has the potential to use its data from customers and coaches to improve the service and gather appropriate career information. There isn’t a direct indication that the company is doing this currently. But, it is available to them and would be a tremendous advantage for growth of the company.

The company is active on social media. It updates its Facebook page frequently and has over 300,000 likes and followers. Most of the postings on the Facebook page lead back to the company’s website.

On LinkedIn.com, the company has over 37,000 followers, which for LinkedIn is quite good. It also posts frequently on this platform and seems to overlap the postings from Facebook.

Features:

On Glassdoor.com, the overall score by employees is 3.7 stars out of 5. The rating for recommending the company to a friend is 63%. The approval rating for CEO Kathryn Minshew is 64%. One reviewer liked the concept of the company but did not like the leadership. Another believes that the company hires well. Another employee also stated that the leadership was inadequate. One reviewer felt that management needs more training. This person felt that the lack of training is the primary cause of the company’s high turnover rate.

Lessons Learned By The Business

• Minshew believes in face-to-face meetings. It is the best way to connect with people and to understand who they are and what they are looking for. She frequently travels to learn about others and herself.

• While Minshew believes in networking, it’s not right for everyone. In an interview published in Forbes Magazine, Minshew stated that people expect networking as a means of getting something and that it is seen as transactional. It’s better to have a few people that you build relationships with than it is to have hundreds who you hardly ever contact.

[Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2017/04/18/kat hryn-minshew-how-to-navigate-the-new-world-ofwork/# 50d8fc1724d7]

• The company knows that no job will ever be an exact match for people. However, the company tries to find ways to make the best match possible and to give job seekers as many tools as they need to find that best match.

How Other Businesses Can Learn From This

Companies should not try to expand rapidly without a plan or a reason to do so. If you put all your effort and money into expansion, what if that isn’t what customers wanted? Sometimes, you have to learn about the business, and the needs of the customers, to make adjustments based on that what you have learned. Then, your expansion plans will make sense.