A tool that reduces career pivoters’ time on reading job descriptions and give them good examples on how to tell their stories in resumes
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?
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:
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.
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:
We designed our web tool to have two interconnected features and a feedback survey to address these goals.
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.
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
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.
Technical implementation
Technical challenges
Does your app have any scaling issues?
What are some key takeaways?
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.
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:
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!
Developers Build, Designers Design, and Product Managers communicate. While all of us have something unique to give, we all have creative ideas and solutions. Through consistent communication, together-alone brainstorming sessions, and all hands-on deck collaboration, we came up with our impactful problem statement that we all want to solve. Who knows? Maybe you’ll see it on Product Hunt or Techcrunch one of these days.