Negotiation Hacks

Overview

Negotiation Hacks is a great way for women and any under-appreciated employees to gain the confidence to negotiate for a higher wage. Our tool helps women practice their pitches, allowing them to not only self-critique themselves but also to receive feedback from our research-based algorithm. With our tool, women and other underrepresented groups can hack the glass ceiling and continue to decrease the wage gap.

Why this project

Our project, Negotiation Hacks, arose from thinking about the many reasons for the gender pay gap. One powerful claim is that women do not negotiate for higher salaries as often as men. Research tells us that women negotiate 30 percent less often than men. The main reason cited for women’s reluctance to ask for raises and higher salaries is self-confidence. Our project this weekend aims to provide a tool to build self-confidence for women before they go into the salary negotiation meeting.

What it does

Negotiation Hacks is a platform that allows the user to self-record themselves giving a pitch. Once she finishes the pitch she has two options, one to play it back, or two to download the video and get immediate feedback. If she decides to playback the video, she can examine her body language and non-verbal cues. If she clicks the request feedback button, feedback on the content of her presentation will be provided on the screen.

How it works

Negotiation Hacks is built using HTML/CSS/Javascript, Bootstrap, for the front-end, node.js, and Python for the backend. We use two APIs: one is Google Cloud Speech API that transforms the user’s audio to text, and the other is CloudConvert which transforms the audio to a usable format for analysis. We developed the feedback by using linguistic and basic text mining techniques.

Next steps

There are so many places we feel we could take this project. For one, we would love to improve our algorithm to recognize even more features in the user’s text. We would love to be able to create a model using machine learning techniques that predict how good a woman’s pitch is. We also would like to incorporate computer vision techniques from the OpenCV library to analyze the user’s body language.

Inclusiveness

Our project was built with inclusiveness and diversity in the forefront. For one, the whole mission of having women practice salary negotiation is trying to end the gender way gap. This is clearly an exclusive process. Additionally, when given the choice of tools and APIs we consistently chose the more inclusive technologies. The Google Speech API is known to be the best transcription software for people with accents. It can also translate automatically to 80 different languages. We wanted this to be a tool for women no matter who they are or where they come from. While we built this tool for women, it can used for everyone, from women to students to any represented group in the workforce.

Possible Applications

The intended use for this product is to help women better negotiate salaries. But we also see that with a little tweaking this tool could help people master the behavioral interview.