Tag Archives: hypotheses

Week 2 Plan – Our Refined ‘sub-hypotheses’

Posted on November 3, 2013 by | Leave a comment

We have refined our value propositions based on our interviews from last week. We’re also ready to add some new value propositions (posted on Friday).

Students:

We want to ask very similar questions this week about cover letters and LinkedIn profiles as we did last week with resumes. We find that the open ended, ‘let them talk’, approach works very well. Our questions will be based on these hypotheses and will be posted tomorrow. Here are the sub hypotheses (reminder: our main hypotheses is that students find creating job applications stressful):

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

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

LinkedIn:

1. Students know that they should have a LinkedIn profile

2. Students either do not feel confident making or know how to make a LinkedIn profile

3. Students don’t use any other platform besides LinkedIn for their professional online presence

Employers: 

We’re continuing with the same questions as week 1 because we have only interviewed 2 employers and don’t have enough data yet to revisit our hypotheses.

 

Leave a comment

Posted in General

Tagged , , , , ,

What we learned in Week 1

Posted on November 3, 2013 by | 1 comment

Even with only 1 week finished, we have already learned a lot! We completed a total of 7 student interviews and 2 employer interviews. So far we’ve learned that:

Students:

Hypotheses 1 – CORRECT- Students have difficulty taking value from jobs (skills) and putting it into bullet points – Our 9 skills and Accomplishment statement tutorial will be useful tools here.

Hypotheses 2 – HALF CORRECT – Students need a faster way to tailor resumes (they want to do it for every application) – Students want to customize resumes but don’t really care about the speed though. Customization is a feature we need but not a unique selling point or value proposition.

Hypotheses 3 – INCORRECT?? (Not 100% solved yet) – Students want a resume review process / tool to prevent being “tossed aside” – From the interviews students tend to think that their review process is good enough. We will see what employers think, however, which could change the result of this hypotheses.

Hypotheses 4 –  HALF CORRECT – Students struggle to identify the important qualifications they need to highlight for the job – Unlike hypotheses 1 where everyone said it was a pain, only half identified it as a pain. The other half identified ass something they do already but weren’t 100% sure if they get it right. 

Hypotheses 5 – CORRECT?? – Students want more guidance creating a resume than the generic resources available today – We are still not 100% on this one, and will look to confirm it this week. But students do find it difficult to start resumes and to write out a new experience from scratch.

Employers:

Not enough info to make insights yet – only 2 employers interviewed – hoping to have 5+ by Friday and more meetings booked for week 3.

In General:

We have learned that Cover Letters go hand in hand with resumes.We received a lot of feedback about how we should be asking about that process as well.

We also got some questions about how to create a LinkedIn account. We would like to pursue that as well as a possible pain point in the market that we can solve.

Check out the game plan for week 2.

1 Comment

Posted in General

Tagged , , ,