A platform that redefines internship searches for employers and students through a portfolio-driven approach.
Genuintern
jan 2021 - apr 2021
genuintern.com
genuintern
genuintern.com
Genuintern
genuintern.com
Genuintern
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Maisy Jones
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Opportunity
Students & employers are dissatisfied with the current internship hiring process.
The current intern hiring system values work experience, which makes students feel inadequate and employers dissatisfied, as they often don’t hire students based on their experience.
How might we make the process of searching and applying for internships more satisfying for college students?
💡
Concept
Genuintern
Enhancing internship applications for transparency and authentic student-employer interactions.
Initial Research
For students, these challenges can include limited access to opportunities and a lack of transparency.
As we learned from interviews, major pain points in searching for an internship were related to:
Empathy mapping
We gathered information from recorded interviews and created empathy maps to analyze how college students felt while searching for internships.
Empathy map of a college student's internship experiences
Ideation
We brainstormed potential solutions for student pain points.
Concept brainstorming
We brainstormed for three minutes and grouped our ideas into four categories: technology, services, physical products, and miscellaneous.
Grouping ideas
We refined our ideas by choosing those that aligned with our goals and grouped them by the types of interactions they offer.
A Lesson Learned
TIP - Prioritize user pain points for impactful solutions.
Our team learned this the hard way during our ideation process. We attempted to address all the pain points we found in the internship search process with a single solution, which resulted in many complications such as confusion, time constraints, and burnout.
Spoiler: We went with this sketch
Low-fidelity Wireframes
We put our focus towards designing a user profile page for more authenticity.
Our research shows that students want authentic interactions with employers. We believe a user profile page would help users present themselves effectively while allowing employers to share their company values transparently.
The wireframes our team decided to pivot towards when designing the profile pages; designed with Figma.
Further Research
Employers are more interested in an applicant's mindset over their resume.
To refine our design focus, we gathered insights from employers, who are key stakeholders in the internship search and hiring process. We interviewed a co-op employer from a music management company and a hiring manager for a hackathon.
Realized talented people would pass a suitable opportunity due to affordability
(began to pay interns for
social justice)
Focuses on a candidate’s skills as opposed to their prior work experience
Seeks students with organization, an attention to detail, “can they think?”
Seeks students who “want this specific internship and not just an internship”
Prototyping - Profile Builder Activity
We designed a card sorting activity to understand how students wanted to present themselves to employers.
We provided 19 college students* with a list of profile items, including a customizable option, and asked them to select and arrange the information they wished to include when presenting themselves to a potential employer.
*Our team also took part in this activity
Hypothesis
Students will feel more satisfied when applying to internships if they are able to present themselves more holistically to employers.
A screenshot of a blank Profile Builder Activity; made in Miro.
Key Insight
94% of participants preferred to showcase their work to potential employers.
Regardless of their chosen field (e.g., criminal justice, construction, digital marketing, zookeeping, medical, etc.), most participants chose to showcase their work on their profiles. Below is a screenshot from the Profile Builder Activity, emphasizing selections related to student work, such as portfolio, work samples, or personal projects.
This observation proved our hypothesis and also led to our focus on redesigning the student profile building and viewing experience to a more portfolio-based approach.
Highly individualized
The student is in control of how they want to be presented
Gives a more specific and visual representation of current skills
High-fidelity Mockup
We designed mockups that mirror students' interest in presenting their work to employers.
Profile page (template)
High-fidelity
Student chooses how they want to represent themself
Organize their info however they want
Customizable templates
Profile page (finished profile)
High-fidelity
Search card
High-fidelity
Condensed version of student profile
Role and skill-related tags are included for easier applicant filtering on employer's side
Choice to display personalized features such as banner and fun fact for student's side
Employer Feedback
Employer feedback highlights a preference for accuracy, fairness, and efficiency.
In interviews, we introduced the high-fidelity mockups to employers, in hopes of seeing how attractive Genuintern seemed to one of its intended key users. The key feedback they mentioned were:
Design Decision (Employers)
Profile pictures will stay as optional in Genuintern.
In regards to the feedback:
While this is an important point to note and something we had previously considered, we decided to keep the option of having profile pictures for the following reasons:
Identity represents who we are. In addition to appearances, names can be a cause for unintentional biases. To many, names and appearances are important identifiers and can play a big role in the way people represent themselves.
Profile pictures maintain their appeal. Other popular job application and media platforms continue to utilize profile pictures. We believe that this feature would have dwindled if it wasn’t as popular among users.
It can also be considered that profile pictures are optional so a user can choose to add an image to represent themselves or not. This also applies to using profile pictures in Genuintern.
Iterations
As suggested by the employer, we decided to remove the proficiency bars from the profile.
We intended the proficiency bars to be a way for students to highlight their skills. In our feedback session, an employer mentions that people tend to overestimate their capabilities and advises to have them removed. As our goal for Genuintern is to encourage transparency, we understood and followed their suggestion.
Profile page (finished profile)
High-fidelity - revised
Student Feedback
Students shared a common concern about the level of employer interest in Genuintern.
College students are also crucial users of Genuintern, so we conducted interviews with them to gather their feedback. We asked students, Would you use Genuintern based on these key screens? and we captured these two notable quotes.
Design decision (Students)
Don't worry, employers have found Genuintern effective.
The students have a valid concern - why choose Genuintern if the employers they aim to impress won't utilize it? However, based on the information we found from our previous employer interviews, we can prove that our portfolio-based solution works for employers. These are two notable quotes from our employer interviews in support of this idea:
genuintern.com
Genuintern
Search view
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Genuintern
Scroll view
Search cards
Final Design
The key screens in Genuintern.
Profile page (template)
Profile page (finished profile)
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Genuintern
Reflection
My take-aways.
Kelly Dang, UX Research & Design
Genuintern has been one of my longest case studies, and the process was very insightful. I created various deliverables using new tools like Figma, which was a great challenge!
What I learned
A key takeaway is that research informs design. Every design choice we made was based on evidence, which contributed to Genuintern's success. For instance, many students expressed feeling underrepresented in the internship process, a theme we identified from speaking with over 40 students during our research.
What I would do differently
Next time, I would gather more perspectives, especially from employers and co-op advisors. Their insights would have enriched our research, as they play a crucial role in the internship process. Unfortunately, we struggled to get responses from them, and that limited our understanding. I believe including their viewpoints would have strengthened our final product.
If Genuintern becomes a real product, it might look different than it does now, mainly due to the question of whether employers would use it. We only had feedback from one employer and one hiring manager. More perspectives would likely lead to changes in the portfolio-based approach. Still, I’m grateful for the insights we did gather, as they significantly shaped Genuintern's design!