Job Quest

Problem Background  

The job search process is overwhelming, especially for entry-level job seekers who lack experience and confidence in what steps to take. Many job seekers struggle with staying organized, prioritizing job applications, and maintaining motivation throughout their job search journey. With so many tools offering disparate solutions, there’s a need for a single, structured system that helps users focus on the right actions and stay motivated without feeling lost or overwhelmed.

Our problem statement:

‍How might we help entry-level job seekers prioritize their time so they take more consistent and effective actions to land more interviews?

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Why Now?

There are 40 million job seekers each week on LinkedIn (market size). We estimate the total addressable market focused on entry-level job seekers to be 4.4 million who regularly use LinkedIn. This is based on an estimate from Standout Resume Australia of 26 applicants per entry-level job (in line with other estimates), and LinkedIn stating there are 169,000 entry level roles advertised at any one time.

From our survey research findings of 75% of entry-level job seekers experiencing overwhelm during job search, this means our total obtainable market is 3.3 million job seekers weekly.

With this level of competition among job seekers, there is a significant need for a tool that helps job seekers take consistent action and engage meaningfully in networking. By addressing these pain points, Job Quest aims to help job seekers build habits, reduce overwhelm, and take strategic actions that increase their chances of landing interviews.

User Pain Points & Research Insights

1. Lack of interviews from actively searching: 42% of job seekers we surveyed have been actively searching for a job for 3-12 months, yet 67% hadn’t landed a single interview.

2. Lack of Clear Direction: 67% of job seekers we surveyed don’t set daily or weekly goals, resulting in scattered efforts. Many only apply for jobs when they see an opportunity, with no strategic networking or follow-ups.

3. Job search process overwhelm: Job seekers feel overwhelmed by the job search process and are unsure where to focus their efforts. 76% of those surveyed said they often feel overwhelmed by the job search process, with this being one of their biggest demotivators.

Feedback

Our user interviews shed more light on the statistics found from our survey around job search overwhelm and its effect on motivation, with one interviewee sharing:

“The lack of motivation is coming from the lack of direction and being overwhelmed by the vastness of the task of finding a job”.

Other users suggested there was no way of prioritising efforts for jobs you are most interested in on platforms like LinkedIn and job tracking tools like Huntr, so this feature was requested.

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Solution Explanation

Based on our users' pain points, and assessing technical feasibility given our current team skills and resources, we proposed to build Job Quest, a web application that simplifies the job search process by providing structured guidance through Quests, Missions, and a Job Follow-Up Board. 

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The key features include:

1. Quests & Missions:

Job seekers can follow specific Quests to tackle major job search goals step-by-step. Each Quest, such as “Optimize My LinkedIn Profile” or “Tailor My Resume,” is broken down into Missions that guide users with actionable instructions and tips.

2. Job Follow-Up Board:

A streamlined board where users can track their applications, view their highest priority jobs with options to rank how motivated users are for each job, and monitor follow-up dates, including receiving email reminders for when to follow up applications and with who. This feature helps users maintain focus and stay organized without relying on complex tools.

3. Do This Next Button:

Users are prompted to take the most impactful next step in their job search journey, whether it’s following up with a recruiter or sending a connection request on LinkedIn. This helps alleviate decision fatigue and keeps users progressing with small, consistent actions.

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Low Fidelity Sketches

High Fidelity Wireframes

Login/Sign-Up Flow

Quest Flows

Iterative Design Learnings

After we let users test our app in front of us, they shared important feedback in live calls:

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Quests feature

There should be more instructions in one Quest card. Two users stressed it would be more useful to take more significant actions before clicking to the next set of instructions, as they both found the amount of clicking needed was annoying. 

• Spacing so each instruction card wasn’t such a block of text was also highlighted.
• It would be good to make the Mission instructions clickable, so when asking user to open LinkedIn, Indeed, provide clickable hyperlinks to job search pages. 
• This was prioritised and the Quest feature was totally redesigned by the team, both by our designer and the developers.

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Job Follow Up Board & Add Jobs Feature

• Create a Notes field in the Add/Edit jobs section for users to add notes (multiple users said this)some text
  • This feature was agreed by the team to be low effort and medium impact for the user, so we built this for the MVP after this feedback.

After building our MVP, feature requests from user testing indicated having an Advanced Networking Quest, as well as a Mock Interviews and Interview Questions Quest, so these are features we would consider to build which help achieve the goal of landing interviews and also jobs for users.

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Technical implementation

Our tech stack:

• We’re using Flask as our backend framework, React.js as frontend framework, tailwind for css frameworks, and our database choice was MySQL.
• Our app is hosted in GCP(Google Cloud Platform)

High level journey of a request:

• We chose these frameworks because of the high level of familiarity we have working with them, as well as being robust tools that are industry standard.
• Our app saves different elements in the database such as user information for login, quests information that helps us display them in the page and jobs that users can save, update and delete in the page and we display it for them in a table. Here’s a gif of how we’re doing all of this functionalities using HTTPi:

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Technical challenges

Hardest part of development has been figuring out logic for features like keeping track of user progress and buttons not working the way it's intended. Fortunately, our app doesn’t have any major issues as of now.

The key takeaways for us have been how much we can still improve our skills and how valuable working with your teammates is, especially when you’ve hit a roadblock.

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Future Steps

We will not be continuing the project, however have reflected on what we would do if we were to continue. We would plan to iterate the development of features already built from further user testing and feedback. 

Due to time and technical feasibility constraints, we originally proposed to make this app into a Chrome extension and build a scraping tool to collect job information automatically into our Job Follow Up board. We would have liked to incorporate this into our core product with more time to learn how to do this technically, as it would have made a big difference to usability.

Other feature requests from users in the backlog included:

• Advanced Networking Quest or ChatBot (we built a Custom GPT here called ‘Job Quest: Networking Coach’ and planned to test this with users)
• Mock Interview Quest or Chat Bot.
• Motivating Mascot or Peer Accountability with other job seekers using the app.

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