Discovery Interviews: Job Specific Resumes

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Background

Resumes provide a glimpse into a freelancer’s professional journey, highlighting their expertise and achievements. By analyzing them closely, hiring managers can identify candidates with the skills, industry knowledge, and proven track records needed for successful projects. One of the key values of this company is that they do a lot of this work before ever sending a potential talent to a client to ensure clients only receive highly qualified matches.

What we noticed however, is that clients still spent a considerable amount of time reviewing a talent’s resume before deciding to schedule an interview with them and the rate at which clients decided to schedule an interview with a talent (talent sent to interview scheduled conversion rate) was below our expectations.

The Decision Statement

I applied the decision first framework to this problem and started by defining the decision the team wanted to make.

What should we change about the resume in order to increase the talent sent to interview scheduled conversion rate.

The Approach

The design and product team wanted to test a new design for the resume as a simple usability test. However, after conducting stakeholder interviews, I determined that the new design was not based on evidence from clients but instead assumptions about client needs.

In order to make the decision about what changes needed to be made, I suggested we needed to gather the following evidence from clients.

  • How do clients review resumes?

  • What is the first piece of information clients look at?

  • What is the most important thing they look at?

  • What are the elements of the resume they don’t need?

  • How do they make a decision to schedule an interview with a talent?

To gather this evidence, I decided to start with discovery interviews with clients. During these interviews clients were shown the existing resume design for a talent who matched a job similar to one the client had recently hired for. I asked them to walk me through their thought process, talk about what pieces of information they were looking at, and ultimately how they would make a decision to interview the talent or not.

Results

I uncovered four key insights about how clients review talent which helped us completely we work the resume.

1: Logistics fit

The first, and most important, thing clients wanted to understand was whether or not it would even be practical to work with this talent. Primarily, this meant clients wanted to understand the timezone overlap between them and the talent. If this didn’t work out well, it was an easy decision for the client and didn’t require any additional review of the resume. The way we were presenting the timezone overlap was confusing and buried on the resume.

2: evidence that we understood the requirements

Clients wanted to see how the conversation they had with us about their role translated into the particular talent that was sent. When this was clear, trust was increased not only in the talent but in us overall.

“…you can tell they were really listening and understood what I was looking for”

3: Less is more

Intuitively, we tend to think having more options is a good thing. The paradox of choice however tells us that more options leads to decision fatigue and increased cognitive load. The current resume design was crammed with as much as possible in as many formats as possible. This resulted in lots of sections and lots of repeated information.

“…there is no flow or clear outline for how I should review this thing…it’s hard to figure out where I should even start”

4: The Personal Statement Mattered

At this stage clients are trying to assess softer things like culture fit and get a sense of personality. The personal statement is the first time the client could actually do this. I was surprised to learn that most clients I talked to actually read that statement and made some judgements based on it.

Study Impact

We set out to decide what improvements we should make to the resume in order to increase the talent sent to interview scheduled conversion rate. Based on the evidence I gathered we made the following decisions:

  • Improve and highlight the time zone overlap between the client and the talent

  • Add a section at the top of the resume highlighting specific details and skills matches based on the job requirements to show for how and why we chose that specific talent.

  • Remove as much duplication as possible

  • Keep the personal statement and encourage talent to write high quality personal statements.

In the end, we launched the newly designed job specific resume as an A/B test which resulted in a 12% improvement to the talent sent to interview scheduled conversion rate.

Skills Used

  • Cognitive walk throughs

  • Usability testing

  • A/B Testing

  • Project Management