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Published: July 2, 2020
COOP Careers ("ko-op") is a nonprofit "overcoming underemployment through digital skills and peer connections." COOP closes the social capital gap by recruiting and investing deeply in diverse, low-income, and first-generation grads from the City University of New York, San Francisco State, and other urban public colleges. Four-in-five alumni work full-time, earning an average of $45,000 after 12 months (3x pre-program average) and almost $70,000 after three years (2x peer baseline). Long-term, COOP aims to double lifetime income of COOP alumni—fueling upward mobility and fulfilling our collective promise of higher education.
COOP has two tracks: digital marketing and data analytics which tackle the hard skills. Both tracks encompass soft skill training for career readiness preparation. We wanted to partner with Talk Hiring to help with the soft skill training surrounding interview prep. Our graduates apply for jobs in the highly-competitive media and tech industry and we know that digital skills are not enough to land the job. COOP's curriculum puts a lot of emphasis on interview prep and all participants (known as COOPers) are required to do 2-3 mock interviews with volunteers in the community. With Talk Hiring, COOPers are able to practice their interviewing skills more than a few times. Additionally, Talk Hiring's dashboard can be shared with cohort captains to track where COOPers are doing well and where they could improve.
Rychelle McKenzie and Jennifer Matos lead up Partnerships at COOP. Jennifer and Rychelle were excited that Talk Hiring could help quantify how COOPers were becoming stronger interviewees. They wanted to see a clear improvement in interview content, confidence, and the way that COOPers present themselves. As Jennifer said, "Interviewing well is such a huge part of your career."
*How are we measuring improvement in interviewing skills? Measuring interviewing competency objectively is tough. What we do is, we take the first time a user answered a specific question and the last time that user answered that question. We compare the two answers across a variety of dimensions (number of relevant details, conciseness, delivery fluency, length of speaking time) to evaluate if answers improved.
The COOP Partnerships Team surveyed users in the winter of 2019 to get their feedback on Talk Hiring. 77% of users thought that COOP should keep using Talk Hiring in future cohorts!
