Group Members

Wesam Manassra
Arun Saigal
Gordon Wintrob

Problem Statement

IvyPlusResumes lets students manage their range of educational, professional, and personal experiences and generate polished resumes.  Beyond the formatting of a quality resume, college undergraduates dislike the hassle of maintaining a set of different versions for specific companies.  Moreover, they are often uncertain about how to best describe and organize their experience during the job search.  IvyPlusResumes serves as a tool for students to build resumes and present themselves more effectively to future employers.

GR1 Analysis

User Analysis

IvyPlusResumes has two user classes: students who are building their resumes and recruiters who are looking to connect with the students.
\[Describe student user class\]
Recruiters are the other user group we envision for IvyPlusResumes.  Recruiters would like to see everyone at a school and determine whether or not they would like them for the job.  Until that happens, recruiters cannot be completely sure that they have, in fact, got the best people for the job possible.  We would like to make a database whereby recruiters would be able to easily access and filter through resumes of students and decide which resumes they are interested in.

Task Analysis

1) Students maintain a list of experiences and skills that would potentially be included in a resume.

Till date, we have not found an easy to use professional diary, where a user can log, in an easy to use manner, his or her professional activities.  Hence, we plan to allow users to input and update their professional journal.  This is something for them to view and keep track of what all they have done.  There have been many times where we have all wanted to remember what we did at some point, either for curiosity, but often to put it on a resume or talk about it in an application.  This professional journal would allow the user to track him or herself through out time, and refer back to this log whenever.  The log will be online, so a user can access it from anywhere the user has Internet access.  The nice thing is that the user can input and update entries whenever the user feels like it.  The application asks the user to take his or her knowledge and store it for him or her to see.  The user can update this journal as frequently as the user would like, whether it be once a week, once a month, or once a year.  The UI will be designed so that the user can understand how to use the web application simply by interacting with it.  We will have a manual and FAQs as well.  With regards to safety, a user may input the wrong information.  All entered information will be editable and removable, so that should not be a major concern.  A user could however delete something that the user did not mean to delete.  This can cause problems.  Anytime a user is deleting a full item with other sub-items such as “Summer Internship at Google” and all the bullet points it contains, there will be a confirmation screen asking “Are you sure you want to delete this?” If they still accidentally delete this bullet point they may have to reenter the information.

2) Students customize a specific version of their resume.

Before a career fair, resume drop, company info session, or career fair students need to prepare the latest version of their resume.  In order to write this document, they must have a list of their experiences and skills, along with well-written text describing each item.  Students then use a word-editing program like Microsoft Word to format some of the text into a one-page resume.  One freshman used a Microsoft Word template from an upperclassman in his fraternity; another underclassman duplicated a resume style in a pamphlet provided by the Careers Office; a senior used a LaTeX document that he noted was difficult to change.  Many students commented that they rushed this process and hated having to stay up late the night before a career fair to tweak their resume.  The MIT students we spoke with seem to typically attend one career fair, four info sessions, and three interviews per semester.  They typically update their resume once per semester, but the task becomes increasingly rare in later grades.  The most common errors are small typos, formatting inconsistencies, and even occasional mistakes.  One student recalls incorrectly listing a summer internship from “June 2008 - August 2009” and another misstated the grade she participated in a club.

3) Students maintain different versions of their resume and share them with employers.  

Maintaining different resumes can become a nightmare for students, and tracking changes that were done some time ago can become very hard to find.  Usually, the student will have their desktop cluttered with different versions of resumes he has changed over a period of a time.  Whenever new experiences need to be added to the resume, the student may see the need to remove some of the prior, less-important experiences.  However, since these removed experiences might be needed at some point in the future, the students creates a new files for this new version of his/her resume.  Many inconveniences arise since there will be many resume files, and it is hard to know instantly which one was was a prior version, and the changes added from one file to another.  
While this process may not occur as frequently on average (probably a couple of times a month), students usually tend to have a strict time schedule.  For example, they usually would start editing their resume one night before a recruiting event, or a career fair and so it is crucial for for them to minimize the time spent on keeping track of their experiences.
Therefore, IvyPlusResume resolves this issue by creating a revision once a new resume is rendered for a resume profile.  This way, the user can inspect previous revisions on the resume, and track changes easily.  

4) Recruiters sort through a set of resumes to find the best job candidates.

Recruiters, especially of large companies, have to filter through large numbers of resumes.  One recruiter from a large multinational corporation said that if a resume does not look professional, she will not bother reading it, even if the candidate looks somewhat promising from a glance.  She said that while she knows she turns aways some technically skilled candidates, one must look professional, and the resume it the first impression and a good opportunity for candidate to show that he or she is a professional.
Two of the three recruiters we spoke to find recruiting online a pain, because they do not think that there is an easy way to do it.  They told us that all they want is a way to filter through resumes by school and GPA.  If they could easily find candidates from top schools with high GPA's, they would definitely use it.  Hence, we feel that this is a task that should be allowed for.
To perform this task, users simply need to open a browser on their computer, log in as a recruiter, and filter through resumes using clearly defined buttons, textboxes, and dropdown menus.  They should be able to access this system from where ever they are, as long as they have a computer, but they will likely be using this product when at a career fair at a specific school or in their office.  They will want to go through resumes quickly, so it should take a few seconds to get the resumes and the transition from one resume to the next should be quick.

The few errors that can be made are related to the filtering criteria which the recruiter inputs, and reentering the criteria (which should take a few seconds) will be the time lost when correcting the mistake.

Note on Major Competition:

We are aware  that LinkedIn does things similar to what we do, and we were concerned that we may be trying to do something that others like LinkedIn have already done.  We were pleased to hear that multiple recruiters said that they do not use LinkedIn much, because LinkedIn is a professional network for those who are often a bit advanced in their careers.  People who are applying to entry level jobs right out of college (where recruiters spend most of their time recruiting), people often do not have that much experience, so they are not on LinkedIn, or if they are, their profiles are not that attractive, due to their lack of experience.  Also, there is a lot of other things on LinkedIn, and all these recruiters are looking for is the ability to view resumes.  Hence, recruiters said that a system that lets them look at resumes and easily filter through these resumes would be something of great value to them, and they would be happy to pay to use the website.
Similarly, a few freshmen and sophomores said that they wanted a resume builder and that they did not like the UI of most resume builders, and did not want to use LinkedIn because they were not “experienced enough to look good on LinkedIn,” as one freshman said.