Job Readiness in Evolving Markets (3rd place winner, hackathon)
Venkata Naga Aditya Datta Chivukula ( Graduate - Computer Science ), Shibi Ayyanar ( Undergraduate - Computer Science ), Nilay Patel ( Undergraduate - Computer Science ), Praise Ifetogun ( Graduate - MBA )
What's the problem?
Despite having access to resources like school websites, tailored professional roadmaps can be tricky for students to effectively use. On top of that, each student has their own unique goals, experiences, and priorities. Students in need of tools to accelerate their professional growth -- especially tools that are personalized -- are in need of those that can identify their specific strengths and weaknesses.
But First...
Our team was cautious about assuming what other students wanted, so we conducted a survey to understand their needs. Through the survey, our team realized how critical of a role education plays in preparing students for the demands of a constantly evolving job market. Once we chose to frame our idea around the resume stage, the need for tailored resources became clear to us.
The Qualtrics survey our team conducted showed that over 58% of [participating] students recognized the importance of education in preparing them for securing desired jobs with updated skills.
Combined with the empathy map, our team saw that the first touchpoint for many job searches is the resume. This cemented our goal to optimize resumes, create actionable plans using school resources (like classes, clubs, or projects), and help students identify potential gaps when comparing to the job description and other students who have gotten similar jobs.
Defining the problem for a better solution
We briefly considered an idea centered around aiding students in summarizing class content. But ultimately, we felt that a resume tool would be more empowering for students' career goals than a study tool, so we settled on leveraging AI to provide students with insights into their resume. Our solution would help compare their resume with job descriptions and successful resumes from their peers. With their consent, our resume tool would incorporate resumes from both current students and alumni. That way, we hope to empower students to craft action plans and bring them that much closer to their dream position.
The Prototype
The prototype is a trained AI model that reads in the user’s resume and target job description, where our program will parse through both and compare the uploaded resume against similar resumes in our database and show the results to the user, helping them identify different strengths and weaknesses. Users can take advantage of their findings in terms of their weaknesses in order to better plan future education paths in order to help strengthen these weaknesses.