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.

Students at Ivy Plus schools such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford make up the first class of users.  These students have significant computer skills, a deep drive to land a great internship or job opportunity, and hectic schedules.  Underclassmen at these schools typically have an array of experiences and skills from high school, but have not had to organize these items in a traditional one-page resume.  In contrast, Ivy Plus upperclassmen have generally found a method to make an effective resume, but have difficulty maintaining different versions for a range of job and educational opportunities.  Moreover, they are uncertain that they are presenting their experiences most effectively 

Recruiters are the other user group for IvyPlusResumes.  Recruiters would like to connect with all students at Ivy Plus schools, but need an effective way to screen these candidates.  One recruiter mentioned that she was "worried" she might not interview the best people for the job.  These users generally have less computer experience, unless they are at a technology-focused company, and have had bad experiences with enterprise human resources software.  They dedicate a large portion of their time strategizing about the best way to get in touch with students and struggle to insure that employees' limited recruiting time is used to interview the best candidates.

Task Analysis

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

As students develop professionally, they maintain a log of their experience and activities for themselves, and to present to potential employers.  This professional journal allows undergraduates to generate different resumes as needed.  The log will be online, so a user can access and edit it from anywhere the user has internet access. 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.  Also, since the user can add and edit an entry at anytime, the user can simply put something small in his or her journal, and then return at a later date and expand on and update it. For example, if at an event, a my project is praised, I can make a note of it in my online journal and then later elaborate on it. 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 interview 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 has become a nightmare for some students, especially those that try to track changes over time.  Mosts students clutter their desktop or other folder with different versions of resumes with confusing filenames such as "Resume_Sophomore_Fall_v2.doc".  Whenever new experiences need to be added to the resume, a student might remove or modify some of the prior experiences and save down a new version.  Students were frustrated keeping track of so many resume files.  One upperclassmen noted that this process became worse when applying to graduate school and post-graduation jobs simultaneously; he was often uncertain that a specific file had the most up-to-date information.  This was especially difficult to the student's stretched schedule while attending class and dealing with applications and interviews.

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

Recruiters, especially of large companies, have to filter through many candidates by quickly scanning their 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 get promising candidates into their internal recruiting pipelines.  They told us that, when confronted with a resume book, all they want is a way to filter through resumes by school and GPA in order to focus on the most relevant candidates.  Speed is essential, given the number of resumes.  The most common errors at this stage of recruiting are 1) letting a solid candidate accidentally "slip through the cracks" because of resume overload and 2) eliminating strong candidates with weak resumes. 

Note on LinkedIn

We are aware  that LinkedIn has similar capabilities to IvyPlusResumes, and we were concerned that we may be trying to do something that others like LinkedIn have already done.  Multiple recruiters said that they do not use LinkedIn much for undergraduate recruiting  because LinkedIn tends to be more effective for networking with people more advanced in their careers.  Students who are applying to entry-level jobs right out of college not only take up the most time for recruiters, but also have the most limited experience.  The recruiters noted that undergraduate profiles on LinkedIn are often sparse.  Furthermore, the recruiters said that at this stage in the process, they are only looking for the ability to sort and view resumes.  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.   One freshman noted that he was not “experienced enough to look good on LinkedIn” and did not bother including detailed descriptions on his profile.