Frequently Asked Questions

Note: If you are a user, then please refer to our help centre for frequently asked questions and support.

What is CareerSet?

CareerSet is an AI-powered online platform designed to empower students and job seekers, enabling them to independently improve their CVs and cover letters via personalised, actionable feedback. Users (students) can take charge of their career development, while career advisors can monitor their progress and leverage data-driven insights to provide tailored guidance that meets individual needs.

Who does CareerSet work with?

We already work together with the career centres of more than 45 leading education institutions and support over 1 million active students. Our partner institutions include prestigious universities like the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics, leading business schools such as SDA Bocconi and Mannheim Business School, and specialised colleges like Hartpury College and the Atlantic Technical University. We have developed specific scoring algorithms based on institution type and provide the necessary customisations to make sure we can meet institution-specific needs. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you or request to speak with a reference customer, please do not hesitate to contact us.

How can CareerSet support our career centre?

We support career centers to enhance their services in the following areas:

• Student reach: We can help career centers reach all of their students with personalised and actionable CV and cover letter feedback, available 24/7 and delivered efficiently.
• Online support: Our solutions level the playing field with employer's recruitment systems by equipping students with the necessary tools to succeed in today's job market.
• Personal sessions: By requesting a threshold CV score in advance and providing insights to address individual student needs, we help career advisors optimise personal sessions.

Our services align with three primary strategic objectives that are typically top-of-mind for career centers:

• Increasing engagement: Our online solutions help career centers boost student engagement and reach all students in an efficient manner.
• Using data insights: We enable the use of data to monitor, understand, and improve student employability and graduate outcomes.
• Integrating employability: We help career centers embed employability as part of the curriculum and integrate it with courses, modules, and activities.

If you're interested in learning more about how our solutions can help your career center achieve these strategic objectives, please don't hesitate to contact us.

What does an implementation process look like?

At CareerSet, we've designed our implementation process to be effortless for our career centre partners. We can have you fully up and running in a matter of days, without requiring any resources from your careers or IT teams.

When we partner with a career centre, we launch a dedicated portal with a unique URL, such as careerset.com/institution. This allows us to offer certain customisations during the implementation process.

Once you've had a chance to evaluate our solutions, we can follow up with a proposal tailored to your specific needs. Our proposal will include a detailed implementation plan for your consideration.

Can you assist with our approval processes?

We are more than happy to assist you with any approval processes you may have, including those related to IT, privacy, or procurement. Our goal is to help make the go-live process as smooth as possible for you.

To get started, you can forward any relevant documents to us, and we will work to complete them promptly. Alternatively, if you prefer, you can put us in touch with any relevant colleagues directly, and we will collaborate with them to ensure a streamlined process.

Are you GDPR compliant?

CareerSet is fully GDPR compliant and registered with the UK's protection authority, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). We have implemented appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk associated with the data stored. We store the absolute minimum level of data required to perform our services, and we do so in a very secure environment.

What does information security at CareerSet look like?

Users (students) accept our terms and privacy policy prior to accessing the service. They retain ownership of their data with all GDPR rights including the right to view, edit, and delete their data anytime.

We don't require any data from the university to run our services, and no data transfer takes place from an institution to us. In terms of student data, we have taken the necessary technical and organisational measures to ensure mitigating any risks. This means that we don't work or share data with third parties (other than our data hosting provider), and we currently don't store CVs either.

Please reach out to us for more information about information security or request our brochure with information security key points.

What is your pricing model?

At CareerSet, we work directly with career centres, without involving any third parties or monetising data. Our pricing model is based on the size of the institution, expected user numbers, and any customisations that may be required. We offer a range of standard plans, but we can also tailor our pricing to meet your specific needs. To learn more about our pricing, please contact us directly.

What kind of checks and feedback do you offer?

With our CV feedback solution, we offer a comprehensive range of core checks that recruiters and hiring managers commonly look for. Our users receive personalised feedback related to the impact, presentation, and style of their CV. We also provide line-by-line feedback, allowing users to improve their CV one line at a time.

To make a strong first impression with recruiters and rank higher in recruitment systems, it's important to tailor a CV to specific roles. Our CV tailoring solution includes an instant skills-gap analysis. Users can upload any job description, and we will highlight all keywords and skills, including soft skills. Our analysis shows exactly which keywords and skills have been found in the CV and which ones are still missing.

To get a better idea of what our solutions look like, please check out the preview videos on our product pages. If you're interested in a demo, please get in touch with us.

How does CareerSet help beat Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)?

Applicant Tracking Systems are recruitment software that is used by employers to filter and rank candidates based on relevancy to a role. CareerSet helps create a level playing field by equipping candidates (students) with the right tools to beat these so-called robot recruiters. We do so in two different ways:

First, as part of the ‘sections’ check in our CV feedback solution, CareerSet checks that a CV is ATS-compatible and that all sections and information can be picked up correctly, including education, work experience, and contact details.

Secondly, our CV tailoring solution enables students to conduct a skills-gap analysis between their CV and a specific job description. All relevant keywords and skills are instantly highlighted in the job description, and the student is presented with a clear overview of the key ones that are still missing in their CV, as well as with an overall relevance score. The recommendations are that, if the candidate has any level of exposure to these skills, they incorporate them into their CV. This will make their CV stand out.

What kind of customisations do you offer?

In order to ensure our feedback solutions are in line with your specific standards of advice, we can accommodate several adjustments to resources, scoring and feedback text. Based on your trial, you may already have some requirements in mind already. If not, this can be revisited during the licensing term as part of our regular business review meetings.

• Resources: CV templates can be replaced with your own templates and/or other CV-related resources made available to students via CareerSet.
• Scoring: The strictness of scoring and the weight of individual scoring criteria in the overall CV score can be adjusted based on institution feedback.
• Language: Adjustments to the feedback text, as long as this is consistent with general CV writing best practices and in line with employer standards.

Can you customise the actual CV feedback?

We are able to accommodate customisations in the categories above, but we look for generally applicable best practices in the market when it comes to the actual CV feedback. We are more than happy to consider customisations as long as they are relevant to other institutions in the market as well. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our solutions and add new checks, and would be glad to learn more about your specific requirements. If you have any questions about our customisation options, please don't hesitate to contact us.

What is your authentication method?

By default, CareerSet utilises secure passwordless authentication. This means that your institution’s (academic) domains are whitelisted, and students can simply log in by entering their email address to request a unique link via email. Clicking on this email link logs them in for the duration of one session (and sets them up as a new user upon the first login). Why? This approach has several benefits, including, 1) it’s easy to implement without requiring any IT resources, 2) it’s very secure as no passwords are stored, and 3) it suits the usage of our platform by students, which is limited to a few times a year.

In case you have other authentication needs such as SSO, we are happy to look into the possibilities to facilitate this. Please reach out to us.

What kind of customer support do you offer?

We offer various channels for user support, including our 24/7 help center, as well as email and phone support during UK business hours. Our team takes care of all support-related issues for users.

For careers centres, we provide a dedicated account manager. Customer success is a top priority for us, and we ensure this through quarterly business review meetings, as well as remaining available for ad-hoc support. We support career centre partners with the necessary marketing material to promote CareerSet to their students. Our account managers are focused on helping our customers get the most out of our solutions, optimise engagement and achieve their goals.

Is CareerSet available in other languages?

If you're an institution based outside of the native-English speaking world, you may be wondering if we support other languages. While we don't currently offer CareerSet in languages other than English, we still believe our solution could be a great fit to complement your existing career support strategy. Here's how:

• English language support: Benefit from our native English support for students with international ambitions - particularly if your career advisors aren't native English speakers.
• Recruitment system optimisation: Increase your students' chances of getting hired by enabling them to understand and beat recruitment systems.
• Attractive pricing: Our pricing is adjusted based on expected user numbers, resulting in significantly lower costs for non-native English speaking countries, ensuring a great deal.

Which type of documents are accepted?

We only accept documents in PDF format to ensure that our system can accurately review a CV, just as a recruiter would receive it. Our feedback includes checks for formatting, which can only be conducted on the final version of a CV. These checks cannot be performed on text-editing formats such as Word documents, where margins are not yet fixed. Therefore, we have restricted CV uploads to PDF format.

What sort of analytics do you offer?

Career centre 'admin' accounts contain two functions: 1) analytics and 2) student search.

The analytics contain stats about the user number and total uploads, but also the uploads per product (Score My CV, Target My CV, and Cover Letter Feedback), the average number of uploads per user, and the average score increase. It is possible to filter on upload date range, join date range, and graduation year. We display graphs to visualise the data.

Then, as part of the student search function, career advisors are able to view all individual student results, including the number of uploads, scores, and score improvement per product. The data is fully exportable to excel in case you wish to match it with other sources via VLOOKUP or upload it in a BI tool.

Career advisors can access individual student feedback reports anytime and open these in advance of personal sessions. This enables them to address any individual weaknesses or needs. Every individual feedback report can be accessed anytime.

What type of integrations do you offer?

User (student) data can be viewed anytime via a career centre admin account. We can also set up an integration with certain Career Centre Management System that have an open API, where we can send student results across (CV and cover letter scores), so this can be maintained in one place. Finally, when required, CareerSet also enables career advisors to export usage data, which can be imported into any student record system. If you have specific integration needs, please let us know and we'll work with you to find a solution.

How important are CVs?

CVs are still the primary document used in job applications, and they play a vital role in the hiring process. A well-crafted CV can make all the difference in securing a job. Particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) realy heavily on CVs, which accounts for over 60% of employment in the UK.

In addition, CVs serve as the foundation for creating profiles in other systems such as recruitment systems, applicant tracking systems, or job boards. Even with the rise of platforms like LinkedIn, CVs remain relevant, as evidenced by LinkedIn's recent move to allow users to export their profile as a PDF.

Therefore, it's crucial to have a compelling CV that showcases one’s skills and accomplishments to stand out in the competitive job market.

How do recent AI developments such as ChatGPT compare with CareerSet?

While GPT is an impressive technology that will increasingly be adopted for the drafting of various documents, CareerSet remains an important solution for career centres. Here's why:

1. Our focus is on actually educating students and job seekers on employers' perspectives. Rather than doing the work for them, we empower students and job seekers with the feedback and skills they need to improve themselves and gain a better understanding of employer needs.
2. A CV is a reflection of someone's unique experiences, achievements, and personality, and it's often considered the most crucial document one ever writes. If there is one document you don’t want entirely written by AI, it is your CV.
3. Our solutions are specifically designed for career centres. We provide analytics and insights to monitor student employability, enabling career advisors to track individual students' progress and use insights to address specific needs during personal sessions.

We ourselves leverage AI (Natural Language Processing) to automate CV feedback, CV tailoring advice and cover letter feedback. We wouldn't rule out leveraging technology such as GPT ourselves as the technology advances and can be adapted to be fit for purpose.

Could you offer us a trial?

Certainly! We would be happy to offer you a trial of CareerSet. Our trial program gives you unlimited access to our platform for a fixed period of time, so you can invite as many colleagues and students as you like to try it out. Please note that trial accounts don't include analytics, but we can share the trial results with you manually.

To learn more about our trial program and to schedule a demo, please contact us. We will be happy to discuss the details with you and help you get started with CareerSet.

Anything else?
If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, please get in touch via email.