MBA Career Services realizes that EC students may have experienced some technical difficulties last week with the resume submission process. We appreciate your patience and feedback while we worked to address the problem. We’d like to provide the following information in an effort to clarify what went wrong, identify the action steps we took, and explain the process going forward.
In order to apply for jobs, HBS students convert MS-Word documents to pdf format and submit them to companies through HBS Career Link. Companies are then able to retrieve and manage these documents directly through the system. On Wednesday, September 26, some students experienced significant delays converting their documents.
MBA Career Services immediately contacted Experience.com, the company that produces the eRecruiting software, to resolve the problem. MBA Career Services also extended the common resume submittal deadline from Friday, September 28 to Monday, October 1 at 7:00 AM to give students additional time to submit applications. The following items were implemented by Experience.com to address document conversion:
o An updated conversion process was installed that is 3-4 times faster than the previous process. This new flow reduces the time it takes to convert a document as well as improves the triage process for documents that are unconvertible.
o Additional converters were put on stand-by and were available to manage overflow.
o Experience.com’s Engineering and Client Services teams and MBA Career Services actively monitored the document conversion process through the weekend to ensure that the process was successful for HBS students. In addition, Experience.com continues to monitor the system and specifically the doc conversion queues on a 24-7 basis.
o As a result of these actions, students successfully converted and submitted several thousand applications over the weekend. With the exception of one 20 minute outage on Sunday, the system converted documents properly with minimal delays.
o MBA Career Services, in partnership with Experience.com, is reviewing the entire document submission process from both a technical and logistical perspective to identify and implement future improvements. HBS Career Link provides students, employers, and Career Services staff with several new features and enhancements. We appreciate the partnership of students as we work to leverage technology and enhance the job search process.
