Meet Iron

Iron Kim is a third-year, part-time student in the LTXD program. His current focus is his thesis, a design project called SkillTree. This is also the idea he worked on for the competition with his designer.

Initial motivation

Iron: My project, SkillTree, is a solution to help fix what I think is broken in the hiring process. There are many people I know who are very qualified for at least entry-level roles. For one reason or another, their resumes never get past the initial stage.

My primary motivation comes from my introverted friends who are just as skilled as extroverted people. However, their weaknesses are that they are unable to speak for themselves and unable to "sell themselves" nearly as well as somebody extroverted. And I think this causes an unfair advantage. Also, it's going to come at the cost of quality, in many cases, to organizations.

One thing I am tackling is the information gap. For the fact that companies use automated algorithms to screen out candidates who don't use the exact right words. That's an information gap. I noticed and identified the problem. I didn't know exactly what the problem was, but I knew there was a problem.

The second thing that is important for me is I like working on problems that are very relevant. I understand there are some really big problems like climate change that people also need to focus on. But for me, I want to work on something very topical at the very precise moment now, so that I can develop a solution that hopefully can be used right away.

Can you describe the process of engaging in this competition?

Iron: I participated in this competition as a founder. The founder is expected to come in with more than just a basic idea. They should have as much of the concept conceptual explanations already figured out. So by the time they come into the hackathon, the designer they're paired with should not be creating something on their own now. It should be with guidance and through conversation with the founder and their ideas.

Some people start with their own prototype and then the designer can make it look better. In my case, I started with just a sketch. So where you start is not as important as the bare minimum. Every founder should have an idea of what the problem they are solving looks like.

Iron's Competition Experience

Could you share your experiences during the competition?

Iron: I imagine it looks like the collaboration between a product manager and a product designer, where I, as the founder, play the role of product manager. The product manager will have an idea of the overall overarching view, for example, what does the idea look like? who are the end users? who are the consumers? what do we need to test out? who do we test with? The designer then applies technical expertise to these ideas, working closely with the founder to refine and visually execute the design.

In my case, my designer and I worked as a team and started off with general ideas and a sketch, then narrowed down together. The work involved user research, ideation, creating a storyboard and a user journey. After narrowing down those ideas, the designer will use their technical skills to deliver a Hi-Fi prototype.

A subtle approach: focusing on hiring managers instead of job seekers

Initially, we had two user groups, job seekers and hiring managers. Then, we narrowed it down to just meeting the needs of the hiring managers because we determined that if the hiring managers adopted our solution, then job seekers would have to use it anyway.

In user research, we took a look into what the hiring managers were saying about their pain points, and there are two things they wanted to have fixed. Number one is that they wanted qualified candidates. They received thousands of resumes for a single job and the vast majority of them, the people who are applying, have no relevant skills. They're just throwing out their resume without having any background at all. Even though a lot of bad candidates get filtered out, but also quite a few good candidates who didn't know how to word their resumes correctly are filtered out too. So they're worried about that - the quality of candidates.

The second thing is candidate assessment. Not all hiring managers know how to assess candidates correctly. For example, a behavioral question like, how would you approach this situation where you have a conflict with a colleague? What would you do? As a candidate, you will probably just give a very politically correct answer. But it's so different from actually behaving as they say.

Our solution, therefore, focused on creating scenario-based assessments that enable candidates to demonstrate their abilities in a more authentic and unbiased manner. Just like a video game, gamers control their characters to navigate in a more instinctive way. We're hoping to design gamified assessments that sidestep the self-reporting bias so that candidates can give an honest answer without feeling like they are being judged or that they have to say the right thing.

Keeping introverts in mind

Another thing that I saw worked really well is a different mode of communication. Extroverts love to speak, whereas introverts are somewhat comfortable with writing. So one potential solution is after a question is asked or after, an option is presented where they can choose how they want to respond, either through spoken words or by writing something.

I think by giving these options, you allow the candidates to present themselves in the best way they can. It is only a theory that we're testing right now. But, yeah, it's important to me that the end product is a very fair representation addressing all candidates.

Iron's Takeaways And Advice

What is the biggest challenge you encountered and how did you overcome it?

Iron: The challenge was the research bias. We interviewed a lot of extroverts because extroverts are the people who were more willing to be interviewed. We only had the chance to interview one introvert, but thankfully the one introvert is also a very deep thinker and was able to tell us her needs and why things are difficult for her. Her needs were very different from those extroverts' needs. She wants guidance on interviewing, networking, and how to reach out to people where extroverts had no problems with that.

We had to also take a step back while we were doing the research and ask ourselves, where are the biases coming in? You should never say, there's no bias at all. Yeah, there's probably bias. So I would say to overcome the bias, people should be aware that there is bias and then take a step back to reflect on what that could be.

This is also why I really believe in collaborative work when you have a bigger team because you will have people from different backgrounds who share distinct perspectives. They will be able to catch things you will not.

What are some general advice you would like to give to our current students?

Iron: Well, I think some of the stuff is just general life advice that hopefully everybody knows at this point. Number one is the marketplace does not care that much about the degree anymore. I understand it is especially hard to hear this for people in a degree program. We spend so much money on it. I am not saying the degree is useless. What that means is the market will be emphasizing skills much more going forward. The key advice I’d offer is to focus more on acquiring real-world skills and experience. Internships and volunteering can be incredibly valuable in building a network and enhancing your portfolio.

For taking courses, I think the core classes were very helpful. Also, students can take one course from each concentration to discover their career path. Also, you will notice there are not many classes in our program focusing on Figma or other software. I always saw that as a weak point. I wish that we had had more technical skills classes, but when I was competing in these hackathons, I noticed what investors really looking into, is the quality of your design, which is your thinking process. So I think what's really great about, especially our program at LTXD is they emphasize your thinking much more than your actual technical skills.

In the end, your thinking informs how you make decisions. A fancy visual deliverable is not enough if the underlying design rationale is not logical. As a founder, if the most you come up with is just a sketch or just a Word document, that's fine, as long as you come up with that one document, it shows that you spent 90% of the time really thinking about the problem. As a technical designer, you are going to spend 90% of energies actually designing, and the prerequisite to success is you are designing for the correct idea. That is one of the most interesting takeaway from this competition.