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 to present to potential employers, often in a Word document on their personal computer.  This professional journal allows undergraduates to generate different resumes as needed. If a student is applying to an internship, he often will often develop a resume based on experiences in this journal, keeping the potential employer in mind when deciding what points to add to the resume.  The resume is often built the night that an application is due, or the day before a career fair, but students who landed job offers tended to add items to their journals as they happen (e.g. at the end of a summer internship).  Some students update their GPA every semester, while others update this when they make a new resume.  Often the major updates to the journal happen when applying for jobs, fellowships and scholarships.  These activities generally occur once each semester.  Students have decided to keep a journal often because a friend, parent, or other mentor has told them to do so, generally after starting college.  

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.  Some undergraduates have the issue of not wanting to look bad because they do not have a strong resume, which sometimes leads to exaggeration, such as saying that the student is "fluent in Hindi" when he only has a basic understanding of the language.

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.  Most 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 at 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 is the first impression and a good opportunity for a candidate to show that she is a professional.  Two of the three recruiters we spoke with 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.

GR2: Designs

Design 3

Isamu has decided to use IvyPlusResumes to help him get ready for the career fair tomorrow. He opens his computer and goes to the IvyPlusResume's home page. He sees some text about how IvyPlusResumes will get him ready for networking. He sees a place to login, and a place to sign up for an account, so he decides to sign up.

He is taken to a sign in page, where he enters his email address and a password, which he will use to log in from now on

When he hits create, he is taken to his home page. He has the ability to view past resumes by clicking on their names. Although there are currently no resume names as he has not yet made and saved any resumes. There is also a resume viewer on the page, where he will see a resume when it is clicked on. Lastly, there is a "create new resume" button, which he clicks on to create his first resume.

He is now taken to a page which resembles a resume, except where there is usually text, there are textboxes with hints.

He fills in these textboxes and has a form that now looks like this:

After filling in all of the boxes, he clicks the "preview" button at the bottom and gets a professional looking resume as follows.

He notices the 4 buttons at the bottom and tries each of them. The "edit" button takes him back to the previous page which he can edit. The save button opens up a dialog box as follows.
He can type in a name and save his resumes. He can then view this resume from his home page under the "View past resumes" tab.

Next he tries the print button, which allows him to print his resume, by opening up his computer's print dialog box. He prints his resume and is ready to go.

Lastly, he clicks the fourth button, the "share" button. The share button allows him to open and share his resume with any email address he wants, by typing the email address he wants to share with in the dialog box and by clicking the share button.
He shares with his mom, because he is pleased with his resume, prints a few more copies, and heads off to sleep, confident now with his new career ready resume.

He then logs out from the top left corner, where he can always go to his home page or log out (if the current resume is saved).