Talent Fest — Rodrigo Dyer

How might we place tech talent effectively while giving a holistic hiring experience to companies?

Role: business developer, user researcher, project manager

Skills: primary and secondary research, analysis and synthesis, low & high fidelity (physical) prototyping, resource planning, effective communication, project management

Team: Regional job placement team for the co-design, and 20+ Mexico teammates for the implementation & prototyping of the experience. I orchestrated the latter.

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Killing two birds with one stone

Context

Laboratoria is one of the most innovative, recognized education nonprofits in Latin America. Under a bootcamp model, Laboratoria trains underserved women to be web developers and UX designers. Moreover, it provides them with relevant soft skills such as leadership, teamwork and effective communication. Twice a year, around 50 women graduated from each campus.

Challenge

As Laboratoria’s popularity increased, job placement challenges emerged. The regional job placement team needed to work out a way to display the many talents of our graduates to hiring companies explicitly and efficiently. Furthermore, accomplish it in a way in which every graduate felt truly empowered by their recently acquired skill set.

We ran remote design sprints with teammates from four different countries. The experience would be piloted and iterated. Learnings had to be gathered and shared nimbly.

Mexico City, Talent Fest #3. Our students working closely with Walmart Mexico, a local partner, to build a tech solution for their internal teams.

Tiago Spritzer, Citibank Mexico CIO, chatting with a group of students during the event. Citi became Laboratoria’s most prominent partner in Mexico, a top employer of our talent.

Mexico City, Talent Fest #2. Debriefing the team on the positive and constructive highlights of the day after 12 hours of hackathon. Clear communication was essential to improve on the go.

Mexico City, Talent Fest #3. We incorporated a third day to conduct interviews. We learned that promoting them during the hackathon was counterproductive for our students.

Mexico City, Talent Fest #3. Demo Night. At the end of the hackathon, students presented their designs. Here I am MC’ing the event, as usual, in front of 100+ people, partners and companies.

Teamwork. I orchestrated the effort of 20+ people during those events, each had their own role. I was both designer and implementer of the Talent Fest, which gave me a more extensive perspective.

Actions

It was a real-life problem with severe consequences to our business model if not addressed. During our planning phase, we ran biweekly remote design sprints with teams from four different countries. Each local job placement manager was in charge both of co-designing and implementing progress.

We moved back and forth between secondary and primary research. While we built context by comparing practices from diverse geographies, we interviewed tech recruiters and talent managers from different industries to understand the pains of the traditional hiring process.

Key findings materialized: building internal design and development teams became urgent in every large corporation, no matter the industry; traditional education sources could not cover the huge talent gap; the need for empathetic, communicative tech talent became apparent; and the process for hiring sucked significant resources - time, effort, money - with uncertain, sub-optimal outcomes. We built from them.

Some of the highlights from the event we organized in Mexico City a few years ago. Relevant partners defended our education model and the more effective way of hiring!

Results

We created the Talent Fest, a recruiting event, with companies working alongside our students in real business challenges during an exclusive 36-hour Hackathon. Hiring managers assessed soft skills while product developers evaluated tech skills in a very demanding environment. They could ‘try before buying’ and hire talent right after the event, which coincided with each cohort’s graduation.

Product success demanded more conscious iterations. Every six months we needed companies that could match the increasing skill set level of our graduates. Not only were a significant portion of the students placed in jobs with great conditions but the event became a relevant revenue stream for Laboratoria.

Learnings

Running remote design sprints wasn’t a novelty but converging efforts towards a single regional goal while navigating local adaptations required cultural agility. Also, moving back and forth between clients’ and students’ expectations I developed confident communication skills and emotional dexterity. In addition, business development strategies, resource planning and management, effective leadership throughout the process (especially during the event, I lead a team of 20 people). Finally, we developed a talent app with our internal dev team, so I also learned a little product management.

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