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Published: January 17, 2020
Only 25% of about 1.2 million low-income, first-generation college enrollees will attain a quality first job or go to graduate school. That’s nearly one million college students every single year who are not on a path to maximize their potential. Braven empowers promising, underrepresented young people with the skills, confidence, experiences, and networks necessary to transition from college to strong first jobs, which lead to meaningful careers and lives of impact. Braven partners with large public universities who are looking to innovate, such as Rutgers University-Newark, San José State University, Lehman College, and National Louis University. As of 2019, they have worked with over 1,800 students.
One piece of Braven's career-development curriculum is called "Hustle to Career." During this portion of the curriculum, students learn and practice the mechanics of what it takes to land an internship or job. Students enrolled in the Braven course, known as Fellows, used to video record themselves giving their answer to "tell me about yourself" and shared those videos with TAs for grading and feedback. Many Fellows had privacy concerns, which were addressed by implementing the use of Talk Hiring. Talk Hiring conducts mock interviews over the phone and is audio-only. Additionally, Talk Hiring offers automated feedback on how to improve and helps Braven Fellows prepare for their graded in-person mock interviews later on in the course.
Tess Brustein and Jenna Carlson design the curriculum at Braven. By using Talk Hiring, their TAs could grade the Fellows' responses to "tell me about yourself" from the dashboard while offering more interview questions and automated interview feedback to Fellows. They also found it easy to embed Talk Hiring into their curriculum.
Ayodele Akosile is a Data Analyst at Braven. At the end of the semester, Braven runs in-person mock interviews with Fellows and grades them on 12 interviewing characteristics. Ayodele was able to run a statistical analysis by comparing the scores of Fellows who used Talk Hiring to those who did not. Fellows who used Talk Hiring had higher average scores across all 12 rubric categories. Using a one-tailed T-Test and a 95% confidence level, Fellows that used Talk Hiring had statistically-significant score improvements in 9 of the 12 rubric categories! Take a look at the data here.
