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Published: December 31, 2019
KindWork helps low-income younger adults with barriers to career-ladder employment transform their economic outlook through career training bootcamps, individualized coaching, and job placement support. The NYC tech sector is booming, representing 330K roles in 2018, nearly half of which don’t require advanced STEM or technical skills. These include entry level openings in customer support, operations, sales, and many more—and the majority of these roles don’t require a college degree. Yet, low-income New Yorkers are rarely connected to these career-ladder roles. Creating career pathways for low-income younger adults to entry level, in-demand roles in the tech sector is a potent opportunity for economic transformation. KindWork used Talk Hiring during their pilot cohort in the fall of 2019.
KindWork offers extensive interview instruction and mock interviews in a 1-1 and group setting. 1.5 weeks out of their 6 week program is dedicated to in-classroom interview prep. Interviews at tech companies are notoriously challenging. Using Talk Hiring, KindWork was able to support their cohort with unlimited mock interviews at home. The KindWork team was able to track who was practicing at home and who wasn't through the Talk Hiring dashboard.
"The difference when people practice is huge. The most important thing to me is that students are practicing their interviewing skills. I know that if they keep practicing, they will improve." ~ Jeanine Mendez, Co-Founder and COO
*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 2 answers across a variety of dimensions (number of relevant details, conciseness, delivery fluency, length of speaking time) to evaluate if answers improved.
"In class, one of the students got his Talk Hiring automated interview feedback, and it said that he talks too quickly. He didn't believe it. I asked the rest of the class if they thought he talks too quickly, and everyone agreed with Talk Hiring. He then realized that he should try to slow down his speech. Our students thought that the automated feedback was really cool!
One of our students who really struggled with his interviewing skills at the beginning of our program put in the work, and did a lot of Talk Hiring interview prep. He really improved throughout the KindWork program, and it's not surprising that he's one of the top users of Talk Hiring. He put in the work to practice, and was one of the first people in our cohort to land a job." ~ Jeanine, Co-Founder and COO
