Apply For Me

• ApplyFor.Me

• Fall 2018

ApplyFor.Me was meant to be a service where people would pay a fixed fee for a business to apply for many internship and/or job opportunities in their name. The value hypothesis was that people would pay to expedite the process of applying for jobs. This is a shift from the traditional job site that shifts the cost to recruiters and companies, since the value add here also lies in the fact that I could apply to any job posting - not just the ones of companies that I convinced to post on some new job site.

I conducted 9 in-person interviews with Cornell undergrads. The research indicated that there was an implicit problem; people were spending up to 15 hours per week applying to jobs and answering the same questions on all their forms. However, they also mentioned that they like to hand-pick the specific jobs they apply for, not just blindly apply to a bunch in one industry. Once I had a landing page up, I would ask students to scroll the site and speak their thoughts aloud. This allowed me to pinpoint confusing copy.

Since the user research was positive, I decided to launch a concierge MVP: instead of spending months building out a bot to automatically apply for jobs for people, I would manually fill in their information for jobs they were interested in. As per the user research, I had them send links of jobs that interest them instead of blindly applying. I got early adopters through a channel with the biggest need: a Startup Career fair in the Spring for students who were desperate for internships and even willing to work unpaid.

I had just a few users who ended up converting and using my service. After following up with them months later, I found that they did not hear back from many companies at all. They got only one or two interviews, but no internship offers. While I can apply to companies for them, I cannot compensate if they do not have a strong resume. However, I only applied to 25 internships for each of them. I think that if I did a better job tailoring the jobs I chose, then this could work. I will continue pursuing this one.

The inherent nature of my product leads to a question as to whether I provide value if I see that they are a freshman and don't have a strong resume at all, since they likely won't get offers. I could address this by offering a resume service or only providing service for people with a good resume. It's important to consider both the immediate and long term value you can provide to consumers. My site gave users short-term satisfaction but didn't help them much in the long term of actually getting an offer. If users aren't happy in the long term then the product isn't sustainable. The MVP method of manually applying for them was extremely time consuming, so I decided to put this on the back-burner for when I have more time.