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Job training programs and employer partners were struggling to connect low-income young adults with relevant opportunities. My team created a talent sourcing tool that translated job and training offerings into terms and a format that young adults could intuitively understand.
Problem
A group of nonprofits and employer partners, brought together by Grads of Life, were all experiencing the same problem: They couldn’t fill jobs and training opportunities, despite knowing that millions of low-income young adults were struggling to find employment.
Discovery
My team developed and executed a research plan to understand young adult experiences seeking employment and employer experiences seeking entry-level hires. We engaged over 80 young adults, employers, providers, and field experts in interviews, focus groups, and prototyping.
Journey mapping
Young adults took many different journeys to early employment. We synthesized these into an over-arching journey, while noting key variations.
Mindset-based personas
We developed personas based on different mindsets young adults brought to job-seeking, which often determined their behavior.
Learning prototypes
Employers and providers used the term “sourcing” to cover a very broad set of challenges. We used an exercise to more precisely articulate what they needed solved.
Insights
Even when they were looking for each other in the same place (i.e. job sites), young adults and employers were speaking completely different languages.
Young adults wanted to know if a job would fit their unique life equation, usually in terms of pay, commute, and skills
Employers wanted applicants motivated to learn. They did not know how to put jobs in terms that were meaningful to young adults, making existing tools unhelpful to both parties
Specific needs and challenges of low-income young adults required specialized translation. (For example, someone facing homelessness could be set up to fail in a customer-facing job requiring “professional presentation.”)
Opportunity
We saw an opportunity to rethink the introduction between a young adult job seeker and a prospective employer.
Our design criteria:
Guide young adults in figuring out whether a job might be a good fit for them, and how to apply
Translate employer opportunities into terms that made sense to young adults
Generate a qualified pool of job applicants for employers, in a way that can scale
Concept
We ran several concepting sessions that included young adults and employer-facing staff.
Together, we came up with a “Google Translate” for entry-level jobs. Our sourcing tool would be a two-minute online introduction that empowered young adults to assess relevance to them and decide whether to explore further.
Testing
We prototyped the sourcing tool by creating mock-ups on paper for users to “click through," and gathered feedback from 28 young adults and 6 employer partners.
We used the feedback to flush out a version of the tool that could be built and piloted.
Results
At the conclusion of our team’s work, our sourcing tool was considered a validated concept and approved for a pilot by Grads of Life leadership. We advised on pilot planning in Baltimore and Charlotte.
In addition to developing the tool itself, we recommended developing partnerships withmajor job boards and began discussions with potential partners. We felt the tool would achieve greater scale, and therefore impact, if distributed by a go-to connector of talent and employment opportunities.
We also had a list of 20+ young adult testers who had asked us to let them know when they could use this service. We considered these future advocates if we delivered on our promise of guiding them to relevant opportunities.
Not just connecting, but improving
We hypothesized that, if adopted at scale, our tool had the potential not only to connect young adults with relevant jobs, but to improve the jobs themselves.
Organizations like Grads of Life would be able to quantify the impact of doing well in young adults’ terms, and use that data to advocate for those terms with employer partners.
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