Right Your Resume

‍Problem Background  

A career change is exciting, thrilling, an adventure…but also a challenge, especially during the resume tailoring process.

Career pivoters often have transferable skills that are not obvious to them. Tailoring resumes in this context can be nerve-wrecking. Nevertheless, we all know that a customized resume will help employers understand how and why the candidate is the right person for the role. 

How then do we help career pivoters identify and articulate their transferable skills?
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Research Insights & User Pain Points

Our team’s internet research and 10 user interviews reveal that career pivoters generally know that they should include transferable skills in their resumes. However, due to insufficient knowledge in their new industry or career path, career pivoters generally don’t know which of their skills should be emphasized and how to phrase them (e.g. which keywords to use to match the job description).

Our research also noted that due to the extremely high volume of applications for each job posting, recruiters want to:

• Easily spot job-relevant skills on candidates’ resumes either manually or through their employer’s applicant tracking system (ATS), which is typically programmed to scan for the exact same keywords from the job posting.
• Easily evaluate that the candidate’s skill and experience level matches the job role (i.e. not under or over qualified).

User Persona

Meet Butter, an aspiring software developer who has learned coding through bootcamps. 

Career pivoters, such as Butter, comb through job postings for opportunities that they are excited for but eventually get stressed out because of (1) the sheer number of job requirements to read through and (2) the difficulty to determine which of his transferable skills matter for the roles. They also get discouraged from drawing a blank in how best to showcase transferable skills in their resumes.
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Landing on the Solution

Problem Statement: How Might We streamline the resume creation process for career pivoters so that job-relevant keywords and phrasing of transferable skills can be optimized?

Based on our user research and persona, we noted two emotional goals to solve for: 

1. Lower career pivoters’s stress levels by helping them quickly identify keywords in job descriptions that point to their relevant transferable skills.
2. Improve career pivoters’ confidence by providing examples on how to articulate transferable skills in their resumes.

We designed our web tool to have two interconnected features and a feedback survey to address these goals. 

• The first feature enables users to find keywords in a job description that may reveal their transferable skills. 
• The second feature enables users to find examples on how these transferable skills have been phrased in resumes that landed interviews.
• The feedback survey enables users to rate the effectiveness of the tool and provide ideas on how to improve it.

Finally, in the near future, we will also include a feature that provides a prioritized list of keywords for desired job levels (Junior, Senior, Manager) and the following roles: Product Manager, Product Designer, and Software Developers.

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‍Low Fidelity vs. Hi Fidelity Prototypes

We wanted to create a simple, intuitive, and innovative app to improve the confidence of career pivoters during the resume tailoring process. We wanted users to easily navigate to the core features so that they can quickly identify important/repeated keywords from job descriptions and be provided with good examples on how to phrase them in resumes.

Landing Page LoFi vs HiFi

Job Description Input LoFi vs HiFi

Keywords Output LoFi vs HiFi

Transferable Skills Examples LoFi vs. HiFi

Find Prioritized Keywords LoFi vs HiFi

Prioritized Keywords LoFi vs HiFi

Feedback LoFi vs HiFi

Prototype Feedback and Iterative Design Learnings

Users were enthusiastic about our product and provided actionable feedback, which we were able to implement prior to the next usability test. In the early stages of testing, users were unable to understand the objective and navigation on our landing page. We iterated on that before our next round, which made the beginning of the flow easier for users. A majority of the feedback was about word use and meaning. Changing our language tied into modifying placement of a few screens to create a cohesive flow. Going forward, we may need to consider shortening the wording of our CTA buttons and revisit directions as we iterate.

Implementation Details 

Technical implementation

• Where is it hosted? Netlify
• What is your tech stack? React.js / node.js+express / axios

Technical challenges

• What was the hardest part of development? The hardest part about development was delivering estimates for each user story. When you're less experienced, there are usually unknowns as you get into your work that you do not take into consideration due to lack of experience.

Does your app have any scaling issues?

• At the moment we do have some restrictions with the API, so if there were to be a large amount of users using the product, there's a good chance that the API will get blocked at one point.

What are some key takeaways?

• ‍‍Communication, communication communication is very important to keep the team up to date around you so that everyone is aligned and knows where things are heading.

Future Steps

The Butter Up Your Resume team plans to finish building out the planned features and iterating on the product with two-week sprints and additional user feedback. 

• Our alpha release is targeted for late summer 2022 with the focus of obtaining qualitative user feedback and quantitative app metrics to improve how the app functions and user experience.
• Our beta release is strategically targeted for early 2023 and will be positioned to help career pivoters during the peak hiring season.
• In between the two releases and going forward, we will discuss, implement, and iterate on our go-to-market strategy.
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We will explore different tech stacks that were determined to be impractical with the Co.Lab time constraints, but ultimately gives us better user data and/or allows us to scale better.

Our future steps could include: 

1. Bringing in additional team members or mentors to fill the gap in skills (e.g. different coding backgrounds, go-to-market strategy)
2. Enhancing the job description scan feature, such as by changing the API or by adding additional processing steps to refine the keywords output
3. Adding our North Star metics and web analytics so we can track effectiveness, user growth, and engagement
4. Modify job description scan feature to enable retention of pasted job descriptions and/or keyword outputs for our team’s data analysis 
5. Allow users to track/save helpful resume bullet points (e.g. save them for later use)
6. Allow users to rate helpful resume bullet points (e.g. allow them to add stars)
7. Adding a credits page (on the web app) to show all the contributors to each feature and maybe a story or two of how they evolved over time
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We will keep exploring this as a passion project as a way of giving back to all the career pivoters who have helped us (e.g. attending user testing, giving us their resumes, giving us valuable feedback) and paying it forward to those who eventually will be positioned to help others.

If you are interested in our product and want to contribute to building out a feature or two, please reach out to one of us on Linkedin!

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