Week 1 September 15 - September 21: Pain points and user story
Who are your clients/users?
There are two main targets for the app:
Tech companies looking for talent to acquire but are having a hard time finding qualified applicants due to a gap in skills.
Talent/potential candidates who have the intellectual capabilities needed for specific technical jobs, but lack certain skills and do not have the financial means to take courses that would help them fully realize their potential and build a meaningful career.
Demographic: Smart, ambitious, driven, always looking to learn new things beyond what the academe dictates; Age range: 18-30; Most probably comes from a low-income background.
USER STORY: “Undiscovered geniuses” The user is the type of person you see in feel-good movies. If you have seen “The Pursuit of Happyness,” then that quickly paints a picture of who the users are going to be. Their struggles usually revolve around getting through each day when they’re not sure whether they would even have enough to eat.
They acknowledge the fact that there is an inequality in the way the world works and that they were not lucky enough to born with all the resources they need. But they hustle on. For now, they focus on getting by, but they constantly have one eye open for much more than just surviving.
While they do not have a lot of credentials in terms of degrees under their belt, their years of struggle has made them far more creative, far more resourceful, adaptable and hardworking than an average person who didn’t have to navigate difficulty on a daily basis.
What are their pain points?
Candidates College degrees are usually a prerequisite for certain jobs. However, in countries like the Philippines, the main thing a college degree really guarantees is that you found a way to finance your studies, whether it’s by being supported by parents, by securing a scholarship, or by making it into a state university. So what about the rest of the population, who may be just as smart, as talented, just as driven, but were not lucky enough to have any of these? There are many ways to conduct an elimination process that would leave companies with only the best talent. But financial capacity should not and should NEVER be the main qualifier. How can talented and driven but underserved people be included in the workforce, and be given a chance at better job prospects, and subsequently a better future?
Companies As technology accelerates, what jobs require of applicants becomes ever so much higher, and at a significantly faster pace. The current education system cannot keep up and is obviously lagging behind in terms of producing talent that would supply the needs of the tech industry. The current education system (in the Philippines, at least) requires students to take up a lot of subjects not necessary for the profession they chose. Most of these general education subjects have also already been covered in high school.
What is your product's value proposition?
PRODIGY connects companies with talent for training and/or hire using skills-specific, logic-based tests tailored for specific positions. Unlike conventional recruitment sites and applications, PRODIGY does not just give up on “less-than-qualified” candidates. PRODIGY encourages and facilitates bridging the skills gap through education.
What is your distribution and go-to-market strategy? Who can you partner with?
Partnerships can be made with: Schools/universities for user acquisition - local campus tours Schools or training centers Testing authorities Research facilities, statistics, psychology research on education, intelligence, and employment Recruitment for tech companies
Distribution channels: Social media marketing - ads, competitions, forums Campus tours - establish partnerships and create events with local campuses that involve small competitions, career orientation, etc. Reaching out to tech companies, starting within Asia and eventually expand globally
What are the risks associated with your solution?
As with all agreements, there is always a risk that one of the parties involved will not honor the terms agreed upon. a. Employees can fail/fall out of the program due to unforeseen circumstances, or intentionally ghost out on their sponsor; b. Companies can fail to provide the financial assistance consistently
Apart from this, one of the biggest challenges for the project is fraud prevention and detection, deploying mechanisms to ensure the integrity of exam results such as online proctors, and making sure that all of this function properly and smoothly altogether.
What is the impact of your solution? How will it be measured?
The impact will be measured by how many successful hires companies get through the app, and how long the employees stay with their sponsor companies. A cross-comparison between the success of this project and conventional recruitment processes may also be employed.
Long-term, we hope to see more and more Filipinos (and nationalities of other poor countries) succeed in breaking through the global workforce. Since we plan to use the Philippines as the starting point, we hope to raise the quality of the Filipino worker into an internationally competitive professional.
Globally, the project aims to produce more experts on different fields at a faster pace through targeted, skill-based education, while trying to alleviate poverty and student debt.
We aim to put intelligence back on the pedestal where it belongs and subsequently create more masters of specific skills—specialists instead of generalists. Should the project succeed, we expect to see competitors doing the same thing. This would actually be helpful in the advocacy and may help alleviate the overall global talent gap. This would be a win for all.
Define the technical specifications and development roadmap
PHASE 1: InVision prototype At the end of the hackathon, the end deliverable will be a prototype that focuses on the UI/UX flow. Time frame: 2 weeks (October 5) PHASE 2: Pre-alpha Initial testing Alpha Official testing Beta
Define your impact criteria and how you measure it
In the trial run, we would like to get the numbers on the following: How many people sign up How many people reach the scores desired by companies How many candidate sponsorships were made How many sponsored candidates successfully finish their programs and proceeded with employment These data can easily be pulled out from the application.
Ultimately, on a business perspective, the overall impact of the project is defined by the following criteria: How satisfied the companies are with their hires Overall reliability of the platform in acquiring qualified talent Ease of process from both ends How likely more companies will use the platform
Testing and QA, as well as surveys of clients/companies/users can be conducted to acquire these data.
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