Jobcase AI Career Coach
20+ customizable coaches generated and animated using AI tools (MidJourney + Runway)
Problem
Members often struggled with confidence and direction in their job search.
Many didn’t know how to start, lacked guidance, or didn’t feel represented by traditional job platforms. Leadership challenged us to create a career coach that could feel personal, supportive, and approachable — but the investment needed for fully lifelike, talking AI avatars wasn’t practical at scale.
Hypothesis
If members could choose a coach that felt relatable and alive, they would feel more engaged and supported.
We believed that a library of personalized, animated coaches, each with a distinct style and personality, would make members more likely to interact with the app, apply for jobs, and return for ongoing support.
Creating the Coaches
We combined generative design exploration with AI tools to create a lifelike set of career coaches.
Leadership tasked us with designing a full library of coaches that reflected different coaching styles and personalities. Members could pick combinations like Motivational + Strictly Business or Laid-back Guru + Warm & Friendly.
Illustrated vs. a more photorealistic style
We began by exploring both illustrated and realistic styles in MidJourney, generating a wide range of coach directions that varied in age, attire, tone, and cultural background. To understand member preference, we ran a quick test with 30 users.
Twenty-two participants chose the more realistic style over the illustrated one. They explained that job searching is a serious, real-world task, and realistic coaches felt more appropriate for the context. The illustrated versions, on the other hand, were described as cartoony, silly, and game-like, too playful for the purpose. Realistic coaches were consistently described as professional, trustworthy, and relatable.
Illustrated had 8 preference votes
Photorealistic had 22 preference votes
Based on these insights, we curated down to 20+ final coaches, each with a distinct persona and style that felt approachable and trustworthy.
Solution
I designed the profile builder, a guided, modular experience that increased completions and improved data quality.
Step-by-step Approach
Broke the profile into clear, digestible sections that felt achievable aimed at reducing cognitive load.
Progress Tracking and nudges
Introduced a progress indicator and celebratory messages to keep members motivated and reinforce the value of each step.
Partnered with the brand team and motion designers to create custom Lottie animations, ensuring the interactions felt on-brand, lightweight, and engaging.
After uploading a resume…
Users can then review what the API was able to parse from their upload, and add quickly and easily those entries to their profile.
Resume upload and parsing
Identified that manual resume entry was a major drop-off point.
Partnered with engineering to evaluate parsing APIs and integrated a more reliable provider, enabling members to upload a resume and instantly populate key fields.
