Author Archives: fordjake

The results from an additional 2 student interviews conducted this week helped us narrow in on some of the hypotheses we were testing this week.  Both students confirmed that the big difficulty when resume writing is extracting the relevant skills and qualifications from a job description and demonstrating them with their experiences.  We found that students attempt to achieve something similar with cover letters, finding a similar level of difficulty to do so.  An applicant’s online presence is secondary to rather than reliant upon a job application.

BUT WILL THEY PAY?

Both students identified reasons why they or someone like them would not use a career to achieve what we hope to with our web app.  It is very difficult when going to a career centre for help, to see positive results.  Until you actually get hired, there is no real feedback to communicate the value of going to the career centre.  MySkillBase’s advantage could be that we are available ALL times of day, unlike a career centre.

Full interviews are available here and here.

Summary:

RC, a second year business student, has confidence in her resume writing skills. She thinks that her resume is pretty good and has effectively targeted  a specific employer. In the past she has visited a career centre, but has found her new knowledge surpasses that which she gained from visiting an adviser. She is working on a resume for a job application and has based it on advice she has received from a contact already working for the company and example resumes.

She half-proved Hypotheses 1: she already knew about making accomplishment statements, but really wanted examples of effective ones to model her statements after.  Hypotheses 2 and 5 seemed mostly wrong from this student’s perspective.  Hypotheses 3 and 4 seems somewhat true, though she already does these things (gets her resume looked over and targets employer language in her resume) and doesn’t seem to be looking for extra help here.

She seems very well prepared, pulling out skills that employers want to see from job descriptions and brings them into her resume.  Business students with more advanced training in resume writing do not seem to be in our target market, though the opportunities for help here are in providing valuable examples and allowing resume customization.

See here for the full script and notes

We had an early start to the day, meeting with Elizabeth Newton, our mentor for the Lean Launchpad.  We had a great discussion around who our customers might be and substantiating ourselves to professionals in the field.  Hopefully, we will have some interviews with HR personnel and with another entrepreneur in the student career space.  Thanks to Elizabeth for meeting with us this morning and sharing her insights.

The top three takeaways we received from the meeting are below:

1. Talk to Employers

2. Deciding our approach: Scientific approach or a ‘softer’ general approach to job applications

3. Interview style: Open ended questions- not leading- allow the interviewee to make their own conclusions

That is all for now.

The hypothesis we are testing with students through interviews in the upcoming week is that : Students find making resumes difficult and stressful.  We also realize, however, that this is a broad hypothesis and we want to find out what parts of making a resume are the source of this difficulty, and where we can make the most inroads in solving this pain.  So, we have identified Sub-hypotheses: Continue reading →