A Foot in the Door: Entry-Level Hiring Process Concept
“I’m convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.” – Lawrence Bossidy
Finding a first time job is hard, but...
Everyone knows how tough it is to land that first real job. You’ve worked part-time as a barista or fast food worker through high school or college, and now you’re trying to launch a career—with little or no relevant experience. Grinding through the job market as a young adult is a painful rite of passage, and while there are countless online resources to support applicants, the struggle is real.
But spare a thought for the hiring managers, too. They want to bring in fresh talent, but how do you pick a promising entry-level hire when you’re buried under an avalanche of nearly identical resumes? With no direct experience to go on, most young applicants default to listing sports, clubs, volunteer work, and personal interests. Do you hire the volleyball player or the marching band trumpeter? GPA might factor in—but does academic performance really reflect someone’s ability to collaborate, communicate, or grow within a team?
A Foot in the Door is a website designed to help young job seekers connect with meaningful, entry-level opportunities that can lead to long-term careers. Our team, however, was tasked with a different challenge: improving the experience for HR professionals and hiring managers—helping them navigate stacks of sparse resumes to identify the candidates who best meet their needs.
3 person project team
20 day project October 2024
14 research interviews - 8 initial, 6 usability
Competitive analysis, affinity mapping, user journey
Low and high fidelity final prototype
“Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” – Steve Jobs
Our team:
Joy Edgehart - Project Manager
Melody Tank - Research Lead
David Inman - Design Lead
Hiring for entry-level roles is challenging because most candidates have limited work experience, leading to resumes that appear nearly identical. This makes it difficult for hiring managers to identify top talent efficiently. The process of sorting applicants and scheduling interviews becomes time-consuming and ineffective without clear differentiators.
How might we help hiring managers quickly identify promising candidates and streamline the interview scheduling process?
Problem Statement
Adaptability, Communication, and Problem-Solving: Recruiting professionals rank adaptability (36%), oral communication (24%), and problem-solving (19%) as the most crucial soft skills for entry-level positions. These skills often outweigh technical abilities when evaluating candidates.
Challenges in Assessing Soft Skills: Employers frequently find it difficult to evaluate soft skills during the hiring process, leading to challenges in distinguishing between candidates with similar technical qualifications.
Impact on Employment Opportunities: Participation in extracurricular activities has been shown to positively influence employment chances, sometimes more so than academic performance indicators like GPA.
Development of Transferable Skills: Engagement in activities such as sports, debate clubs, or volunteer work helps candidates develop transferable skills like teamwork, leadership, and time management, which are highly valued by employers.
Research Highlights
The core concept behind A Foot in the Door is not to reinvent the job board, but to enhance it — giving hiring managers a smarter way to evaluate entry-level candidates who often look identical on paper. The platform would function similarly to existing job sites, but introduces an additional layer of insight by incorporating soft skills and personal interests gathered from applicant profiles.
These “secondary traits” would be filtered through a combination of AI modeling and human oversight to surface distinguishing patterns among applicants. Over time, the AI would learn which traits correlate with success in specific roles by analyzing thousands of placements and outcomes.
Example Use Case
Over time, the platform might discover, for instance, that candidates who participated in high school debate excel in law office mailroom roles, or that former football players tend to thrive on construction teams. When a hiring manager posts a new job, the system could suggest these traits based on prior outcomes, allowing them to quickly focus on candidates likely to succeed.
Once applications are in, the system assigns each candidate a Match Score based on how well their background and traits align with proven success indicators. The manager can invite, say, the top 10 scorers to interview with a single click. If none are a fit, they can move to the next batch — all while the AI continues to refine itself based on real hiring outcomes.
Process Overview
Visual UX
If fully realized, this platform could significantly streamline the hiring process for entry-level roles — a notoriously difficult space to recruit in due to resume similarity and lack of experience. The success of this concept hinges on data scale, computational power, and most importantly, human-centered research.
At the outset, many of the trait correlations would be educated guesses informed by recruiter interviews and logical patterning. But over time, with proper training data and recruiter input, the system could evolve into a valuable tool that hiring managers rely on to quickly surface promising candidates and reduce time-to-hire.
In short, this concept aims to give both applicants and hiring managers a better shot at success — offering candidates a foot in the door, and offering companies a clearer path to finding their next great hire.