Resume Best Practices With Quinncia

Best Practices For Getting The Most Out Of Quinncia's Resume Experience

Since the dawn of Quinncia, our partner universities have used our platform in a variety of ways. Last year, after launching our line-by-line resume analysis, our partners helped us refine it and build it to an even better platform.

This summer we spent some time connecting with some of our partners to learn how they are using Quinncia. We wanted to share some of the best ways that have prompted the most positive feedback from students, advisors, and professors.

Here are the top ways you can use Quinncia based on partner feedback:

1. Classroom Assignment: One of the best use cases we’ve seen is using Quinncia as a classroom assignment. Whether you are faculty, a career advisor teaching a course, or you make it a part of your freshmen experience, this classroom assignment is a great digital asset to your curriculum to prep students for the real world and the technology that companies are using to make it happen.

Have the students create and upload a resume to help them understand their current skill sets. This is a great starting point for a freshmen (or sophomore) experience course. Students can see personalized skills cloud to focus on the skills that they have and to think critically about the skills they’ll need to add or improve before graduation. This will help students think about what clubs, activities, experiences, internships, and jobs they should focus on getting involved with sooner rather than later.
Reaching a benchmark score in Quinncia and getting to zero improvements is the end goal! This is another common approach. Different benchmarks will be displayed for freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. If you have not done this yet, please reach out to your University Success contact at Quinncia. It’s critical that this is set-up with two tasks for the student to understand the correlation with a lack of experience and the skills listed on their resume. Understanding this helps them make improvements to what they have and how to add necessary skills that are missing.

After the assignment, take some time to discuss a few of the student’s resumes in class. Go over bullet points, improvements, and ask students about what they learned and what they still need help with. Make it a conversation! The continuous conversation about building the resume is infinitely better when talking about skills and experience, not margins and grammatical errors.

At the end of the class, you can export resume scores to load into your canvas, blackboard, or your old school physical grade book to give grades or extra credit for the class.

2. A fun group resume activity: Did we say fun? Yes, yes we did. A unique way that one of our university partners is using Quinncia’s resume platform is a fun group activity. Whether this is done in the classroom or if your school has a community/support ecosystem it’s a great interactive resource for students that meet each of them where they are.

Our partner is using this in a community of 30 students who were organized to help each other with their resumes. During the session, the students are placed into groups of 5-7 and all of them upload their resumes into Quinncia and discuss their suggested improvements from Quinn. They are able to provide constructive feedback to each other on their bullet points, quantifying their results, and understanding how their skillsets play into their career growth. These have been some of the most productive cohorts and some of the highest satisfaction scores we’ve ever received from students.

3. A tool for 1v1’s with students: Many students have trouble meeting with advisors or are online students (a sign of the times!). Many of our schools also have their Masters' students go through quinncia before they arrive on campus for the first time.

This is by no means a replacement of advisors and it’s never intended to be a replacement. Quinncia is a supplement and an asset to you and your team! The best use case we’ve seen is the advisor still meets with the student(s) but AFTER they’ve already gone through Quinncia’s resume analysis one or two times. Under this format, you make the conversation deeper and more engaging. You’re talking about improving bullet points, how to focus on results of their experience, and what they want to actually do after graduation.

The goal of the 1v1 is to get the student to “zero improvements” faster and then spend time focusing on the student’s goals, career aspirations, and possible next steps needed to get there (internships, part-time jobs, clubs to join, events to attend, industries, and companies, etc.). This had the most impact on the advisor as they could easily meet the student again in the future and easily continue the conversation. It’s easier to build trust in a mutually beneficial relationship with a student when talking about the items mentioned above than it is correcting grammar and margins.

It’s important to remember that in all scenarios within Quinncia, that you should tell your students to do the following:

Upload their edited versions
Upload their final versions into Quinncia.

It’s really that simple! Everyone can upload unlimited resumes. We dare you to try for the student record (it’s 31, right now). Each university’s data in Quinncia is unique so it continues to become even smarter as it learns from you and your students. Quinn already starts extremely smart but you can make her 5-6 times smarter by making sure the students follow these simple steps.