Internships On Demand (IOD) exists to recreate the early talent experience for college students and employers. Their product called “pre-internships” allows employers to share company culture, career readiness skills and open roles with incoming talent.
Pretty cool, right? We thought to too and when IOD asked us to recommend new features for their platform we jumped at the opportunity.
My Role: UX research, design and writing
This is where UX comes in
Internships On Demand asked us to suggest new features that they can use to build the hiring manager side of their platform which would facilitate better matches, efficient placement and optimal interactions.
Methods: Competitive analysis | Stakeholder interviews | Journey mapping | Feature cards | Kano analysis | Annotated Wireframes
Deliverables: Current state journey mapping | Feature concepts | Annotated, high-fidelity wireframes | Feature proposal slide deck
Tools: Figma | GoogleSheets | Zoom | Pen and paper | KeyNote
Problem
Currently, Internships On Demand does not have a way for hiring mangers to access the platform or interact directly with pre-interns. All of the communication and matching goes through IOD and as you can imagine, that requires a lot of resources making the program difficult to scale.
Solution
In the future, they would like to give companies access to the platform so that employers can search for and interact with pre-interns in the program.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Phases: Identify, Prototype, Evaluate
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Our focus with the competitive analysis was on tools that connect people to employers. Established competitors like Handshake, RippleMatch and Linkedin have job seeker profiles and company profiles in their tools and we evaluated them to see in what ways and how effectively they made connections.
Phase: Identify
Insights
After completing the competitive analysis, we found that IOD’s request for the new feature to recommend candidates that are evaluated by the best over all “fit” to be a unique feature across similar platforms.
JOURNEY MAPPING
After the stakeholder interview with the founder of Internships on Demand, I created a Journey Map to illustrate the experience a hiring manager has with IOD.
Major pain points for hiring managers:
Lack of transparency
Inability to customize
Little interaction between the hiring manager and the students
The inability to make fully formed decisions as to which pre-interns companies would like to employ.
Phase: Identify
EARLY IDEATION
Informed by the competitive analysis and stakeholder interview, concepts were prototyped to illustrate new or expanded features that will meet IOD’s goals.
List of candidates is based on pre-defined values set by the hiring manager. Hiring manager can edit the applied filters selecting things like location, industry, values, school, GPA etc. to further refine results.
Once a hiring manager has favorited or saved a candidate, they can review them in their own profile and set rankings there. The rankings indicate preference in candidate selection. For example, the highest ranking is attached to the first choice when it comes to making the candidate an offer.
Feature Proposal 1 - Candidate Discovery
Feature Proposal 2 - Candidate Organization
Phase: Prototyping
KANO ANALYSIS
A survey was sent to a handful of current hiring mangers that asked them two questions regarding each feature concept: How would you feel if this feature was present? How would you feel if this feature was absent? Responses from the survey and subsequent analysis, revealed what features had the greatest impact on customer satisfaction
Attractive: This feature is a delighter meaning that it is unexpected and desirable. The amount of delight going forward will depend on how functional it is for the user.
Performance: This feature is expected and the amount of satisfaction a user will get from it depends on the breadth of functionality within.
Performance: This feature is expected and the amount of satisfaction a user will get from it depends on the breadth of functionality within.
Phase: Evaluate
Insight
The Kano analysis is a powerful tool to use when a budget is restricted as it relies on feature cards and brief descriptions accompanied by a survey that gets to the heart of what the most important features are.
HIGH-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES
Given a budget of 40 hours of development and armed with data from four research and analysis methods, high fidelity wireframes illustrated to our client the features that were most necessary to move forward with. I captured three necessary features in the following wireframes: a dashboard-landing page, candidate organization page and a discover feature.
Company landing page and dashboard
Phase: Prototyping
Candidate Organization
Candidate Discovery
Insight
Giving hiring managers effective tools like a company landing page to set their company values will be crucial for IOD to implement. Hand the controls to the experienced driver and they will get there much faster.
Insight
In theory, companies will want to keep their eyes on multiple candidates for internships. If there is no way to organize candidates the process becomes overwhelming and inefficient. Give hiring managers a way to organize candidates to their liking.
Insight
IOD plans to use AI technology to recommend successful matches which can be a powerful way for companies to find new talent. A discovery page that, in addition to typical search functions, includes recommendations by IOD can cut down on the time it takes to fill open positions.
SUMMARY
Internships on Demand proposes that skills and schooling are only one part of finding an ideal candidate for internships. They find that “fit” is just as, if not more important in ensuring that an intern will convert to an employee and in a way that will benefit both candidate and employer. By applying factors like control, organization and recommendations, the process for hiring manager and intern alike will set IOD apart and facilitate scaling.
