SkillTree

Job seekers today send out hundreds or thousands of applications and often receive nothing back. They have no idea why they’ve been rejected or passed over or what they could do to improve their candidacy chances for next time.

On the opposite end are the recruiters and hiring managers who struggle with finding qualified candidates. They receive hundreds or thousands of applications for each job, with the vast majority failing to meet even the minimum requirements. As a result, by 2030, 85 million jobs will go unfilled even though the talent exists to fill them!

I teamed up with product designer Kayln Kwan to design a new kind of job application experience...one that could do a better job at showing employers the true potential of job seekers, especially in regards to their soft skills and other qualities that are hard to see from a resume.

Organized by BCG:X, the design consulting arm of BCG, the DesignPreneur Hackathon sought to pair Designers and Entrepreneurs from New York's leading design schools to work on a design sprint over the course of a weekend. Participants had to submit either their portfolios (Designers) or a design proposal (Entrepreneur) by October 6, 2023, with the accepted applicants being paired by the BCG:X team and introduced to each other 1 week before the challenge. The schedule of the event went as follows:

• Day 1: teams must conduct user research with their list of participants and come up with a design
• Day 2, teams work with judges and a select panel of experts to refine their designs and create a prototype
• Day 3: teams put together a presentation to pitch to the judges

The final pitch is live-streamed at the end of Day 3, with 4 total winners being selected by the judges (and 1 extra team taking home an award as the Audience Pick, which is determined through online voting).

Kayln and I worked very well as a team and I cannot give her enough credit for being one of the best partners and designers I've ever worked with. Her portfolio site can be viewed here and I encourage employers to take a look at her work if they are in the market for exceptional design talent. I mention this because working with her felt truly collaborative the entire way through, as we were both simultaneously product designers as well as product managers.

The week prior, I had shared with her a quick-and-dirty sketch of the idea. See my kind-of-sort-of beautiful illustrations below :)

With this, Kayln was able to begin building an early wireframe. I focused on creating user research questions, from which I developed interview questions. As a result, by Day 1, we had a very basic wireframe prototype and interview questions ready to go.

After conducting 5 interviews, we applied the Design Thinking approach to build insights from the data, arriving at the following:

Job seekers found the hiring process to be difficult, opaque, and demotivating due to the lack of clear information, a method for gauging soft skills, and timely, relevant feedback.

Those who were on the hiring side found the process to be cumbersome, inaccurate, and stressful because they feel pressured to find the perfect candidate while working with less than perfect information and poor talent pools.

Building the User

Based on our interview data, we were able to visualize potential users of this platform.

Building User Flow

Before concluding our interviews the day before, we asked our participants if they could do some feature testing the next day after we had analyzed their input data. We did this in order to test some of our early hypotheses regarding features and were surprised to discover how some ideas we thought would go over well (like leaderboards) turned out to be unpopular while others (AI assistant) were universally liked.

Based on this information, we visualized what the user flow would look like in its most basic form before moving onto constructing a higher-fidelity model of the platform.

Bridging the Gaps

One of the biggest gaps that we identified regarding the modern job application experience was that there was a huge knowledge gap when it came to job seekers being unaware of HOW to best showcase their skills (particularly their soft skills). One of the main causes for this gap was that these kinds of soft skills are rarely screened for upfront but only after candidates pass the initial rounds of screening. But herein lay the disconnect:

Hiring managers wanted to know if candidates possessed these soft skills before moving them onto the next round, but it is usually only in the interview stages later when a candidate gets their first opportunity to showcase these skills?

The SkillTree Concept

This was where we decided that the core SkillTree concepts would come into play:‍

See All Requirements

Know exactly what all the specific requirements are (both hard and soft skills) for any job

• Complete job applications through fun, engaging assessments
• No more resumes or cover letters needed

Assess Soft Skills

Complete game-based assessment challenges

• Demonstrate your soft skills by completing scenario-based assessments

Discover Your Style

Complete scenario-based assessments

• Discover what your specific leadership style is like through scenario-based assessments
• Judgment-free assessments based on psychometrics (cognitive functions, MBTI, etc.)

We spent the final day before the pitch competition cleaning up our prototype and preparing our presentation. At this point, we were running on just a few hours of sleep (and a lot of coffee) but were still in good spirits. As luck would have it, we were the very first to be randomly selected to present.

Below is the prototype we used for the presentation. It begins with what the employer sees as they upload their job ad to the site and then moves into the user experience from the job seeker's point of view (when they are completing the assessment).

An expert panel of designers and entrepreneurs from organizations such as BCG:X, Duolingo, Deloitte, IBM, Brainstation (and several more) judged the competition and handed out awards to 4 teams, including SkillTree. A 5th award was given based on votes from audience polling, bringing the total number of winners to 5.

Reflections:

I think Kayln and I were able to kickstart an important conversation regarding soft skills assessment through our project. Based on my own self-study and research into Jung's cognitive functions, MBTI, change management, and leadership development over the years, I knew that there was still a lot yet to be done in terms of leveraging the theories mentioned above in order to most optimally develop human capital going forward. So far, we have a lot of training and development practices geared towards "hard" quantifiable skills, but a majority of the 21st-century skills we will need to learn going forward are actually soft skills.