Category Archives: General

The My.Skill.Base team has been having a lot of debates over how to proceed after the LLP is over. It’s hard to know when you’re “finished” the customer development phase, because I don’t think you ever are.

Continue reading →

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.

We’ve updated our canvas and added a 3rd segment.

Right now we are contacting HR reps at large companies and Student Development professionals at post-secondary institutions. We want to:

• establish a customer archetype for each segment
• capture their decision ecosystem
• find out which segment is more likely to pay

We know that our product adds value to those segments, now we want to know how much they value it so we can make some cash flow.

Value Prop: Less tiring / tedious / stressful / fatiguing hiring solutions

Hypotheses:

1. Employers are want to change their current hiring practices because….

   1. They want less stress (Walk through/hand holding process)

      1. emotional fatigue

      2. wasted time

   2. They want more time (streamlined approach)

   3. They want to do a better job (missing qualified applicants/ accepting unqualified)

2. HR departments in large organizations are open to changes in their hiring processes

3. The initial stage (quick) of the filtering process for applications takes approx. 5-15 seconds and looks for:

   1. Qualifications (Hard skills)

   2. Formatting and professionalism

   3. Keywords and skills for the position

4. The secondary stage (detailed) of the filtering process for applications takes approx. 30-60 seconds and looks for:

   1. Translating (how they convert their experiences into the job)

   2. Fit (language, passion, why work there)

5. Employers do not spend enough time or effort making job descriptions because…

   1. it’s too difficult

      1. not trained properly

   2. it’s not valued enough

**Employers could be – HR professionals, direct hirers (not HR specialists), large companies, small companies, start ups

Week 3 Hypotheses:

1. What are the specific pain points throughout the job application experience?

   1. Main hypotheses: Students want a step by step tutorial to create job applications

      1. Resume Pain Points:

         1. Accomplishment Statements- Proven

         2. Identifying the key qualifications and skills need- Proven

      2. Cover Letter:

         1. Students don’t know the correct elements to include in a cover letter

         2. Students see cover letters as more important than resumes (positioning, priority, value, etc)

         3. Students change the tone of their cover letter depending on the job they are applying for

      3. Online Presence:

         1. Students update their resume and cover letter around the same frequency and time as their online tools. Why?

2. Why don’t Students use the solutions provided?

   1. Students don’t utilize the assistance that is provided to them because…

      1. Self-esteem / nervous – not comfortable going to talk to an advisor

      2. Inconvenient/unfamiliar – not (like their regular habits) a part of their daily routine/pattern

      3. Time- too long, job application ends too soon

      4. Accessibility

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

Interviewed someone that works for UBC and hires a lot of students for work learn positions.

Interview key points:

• Highlighted the importance of the candidates “fit” into the office culture/space

• The resume is more quantitative- talk about your experience in the least amount of words possible- similar to a list.

• The cover letter is qualitative- Story telling about how they got to where they are now.

Hypotheses

1- Yes- This Hypotheses always goes really quick- it is a standard that everyone uses

2- Half- Domestic students over inflate their experiences (in general) compared to international students who are too modest

3- Yes- Same as students- both side ID as very important

4- No- Not until the interview- during interview for sure

Here is the link to the script