As a product guy, I usually try to explore options to make things simple and easy. During my Internship I realized the recruiting process has a lot of disconnect and there is no way prospective employers could be reached easily. Also the whole process of submitting resume, personal information and creating new usernames and passwords for some companies is too redundant. (For eg: Amazon, Ford). It is a cumbersome process to apply to companies on some portal and then try to reach the recruiters on LinkedIn.
Personal Experience: I interviewed with Amazon, for a tech role and I faced some challenges with the shared editor not displaying the code to the interviewer. Finally I had to open a google doc to paste my code to share with the interviewer. The whole experience of interviewing was a mess.
Problem Statement: Build an easy to use social platform for job-seekers and recruiters to be effective.
Methodologies and Action Taken
Once I started working at Monster.com as a product manager, I took it as an opportunity to talk to industry executives about the problem. When I discussed this problem with industry people, they all thought it was a good problem to solve but Monster is more focused on showcasing jobs to the job-seekers hence they were not ready to explore it further.
During my curriculum at graduate school at CMU in a web application development course we got an opportunity to develop an application of our choice as a month long project. Two of us decided to a build a social job board with features that will solve the above problem. Since most of us were techies, we focused on solving the problem for demography of people who are techies,who will probably be our early adopters.
I verified and collected requirements by talking to students from different schools at Carnegie Mellon University. I asked them questions about how they find the existing job application process, what would help them, what problems are they facing and what might help them.
Finally narrowing down on few critical problems, we added below mentioned features to solve them.
Job application status update: Color code and abbreviation indicating the status of application in the hiring process.
Apply with default Resume: To apply to a job we need not fill or upload resume every time. It has a default resume stored if you dont want to use a new resume.
A private discussion board: Job seekers and recruiters can discuss and schedule interviews for every job posted by recruiters.
A shared editor: Where a recruiter can type a question for the JobSeeker to answer. Editor was capable enough to syntax highlighting to support Coding Interviews.
Google Hangout PopUp: To avoid using multiple devices we wanted to use a single platform. Most Interviews involve having a phone call, we decided to use google hangout instead. To enable Video or not is upto the Job seeker and Recruiter.
Other small features to make life easier.
Give a try at www.careerlaunch.work
