It’s been a while since Confluence, Carnegie Mellon’s job conference for designers, where we foolishly fearlessly set out to design a service in one day and, defying all odds, actually pulled it off.
Well, we decided to revisit the concept and give it a name + obligatory promotional PDF (mostly because we felt like playing with InDesign). So without further ado, Pink* is proud to present: Confetti!
Designing the Service
5:30p - 6:00p
Our service essentially developed out of a lack of west coast companies at Confluence. We figured if Carnegie Mellon couldn’t get those companies to come to Pittsburgh, why not take a cue from what students were doing outside of Confluence and send them, the students, to the west coast. With that in mind, our service was designed around three themes:
1) turn logistical problems into assets;
2) reverse their roles: student as interviewer, company as prospective employer;
3) create a venue for real conversation.
Turning Logistical Problems into Assets
Our research showed that many students were traveling to interview with companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, sometimes 4 or 5 times in a single semester. Even though these companies tend to cover travel expenses, this amount of travel takes a huge toll on the students’ school work.
We saw that a few resourceful students organized a group trip to California to connect with several companies at once. The problem with their ad hoc field trip, however, was that they had to take care of every detail themselves: coordinating with each company, arranging for group rates on flights and hotels, collecting money, and as more people got involved, the trip became almost impossible to manage.
This is completely backwards.
Instead of thinking of California as a barrier to connecting students with employers, why not think of it as an asset? I mean… it’s California.
Our field trip service aims to bring back the fun of going to a new place and reduce the headaches associated with planning and coordinating the trip. Instead of shopping for tickets, organizing group rides to the airport, and calling to setup interviews, our service lets students sign up, choose the companies they’re interested in, and watch the attendance go up as the price of the trip goes down, letting someone else worry about everything else. And the more top design students we have going on these trips, the more we can expect companies out west or in other countries to pay attention and subsidize the service as a serious way of finding new talent.
Student as Interviewer, Company as Prospective Employer
Another advantage of the field trip model is that students get a better perspective on what these companies are actually about. Instead of meeting two people from HR or a particular design group within the company, why not meet the people that might actually be on your team? Why not visit the city and get a good sense of corporate culture instead of asking someone on the other side of a folding table to try and describe San Francisco and what it’s like to work at Google, all within a seven-minute time span.
Creating a Venue for Real Conversation
And finally, what we at Pink* are really excited about is using this service as a platform for real conversation. If we had blindly followed our research, we would have ended up improving or redesigning TartanTrak. While we believe that incremental improvements in efficiency can relieve tension, it could never make for a meaningful experience.
Our service aims to get students and employers interacting away from the booths at a conference, away from the suits and resumes and portfolios. It aims to tap into the School of Design alumni who can act as leads within hiring companies to interact with students not only during interviews but over beers, on the town.
It’s a refreshing concept.
One student suggested online dating as a model for the hiring practice, but we want to bring it back – bring it back to analog. Getting a job and hiring for a position are a lot like dating, and using the online dating model could be a great way to get companies and students to learn about each other. And without qualification at all, I’d say some people do fall in love over the phone or over the internet, but for the rest of us, the thing that makes us love another person or place or job has nothing to do with stats or pictures or descriptions. It has everything to do with that which can’t be related through pixels and text. It’s the smell, the flavor, the vibe of a place.
And essentially, that’s what we’re bringing back to the hiring process.
We designed a service in one day.
A very special thanks to everyone who participated! If you didn’t provide your contact information, please email steve (at) pinkservicedesign.com and remind me of our conversation. We definitely want to include everyone in our project documentation, you deserve it.
What follows will be a series of posts on how it all went down. We’ll spend a significant amount of time elaborating on all aspects of the project, with new posts every few days, so stay tuned.
If you’re attending the conference, we’ll be handing out cards with sticky notes attached. Everyone who returns their sticky note to our booth between 3pm - 6pm will have their names added to our project documentation as participants (here’s your chance at immortality).
On the sticky note, please write either:
a) something anecdotal about your job search experience, or
b) an idea inspired by the oblique strategy written on your card, with regard to Confluence.
Wait, what?
Yeah, it sounds crazy. Who knows what we’ll come up with. But this is an exploration of the design process and its possibilities, finding opportunity in uncertainty.
We’re setting out to design a service that is in line with the goals of Confluence, specifically for students in search of jobs in an economic environment riddled with uncertainty.
Our venue, Confluence 2009. The day, Thursday February 19th.
Giving back to our Alma Mater.
We see Confluence as an opportunity to better understand the dynamic between students in search of their dream job, employers in search of new talent, and universities seeking to unite the two.
With more resumés submitted for Confluence than jobs posted by employers attending the event, it’s clear that we’ve got a problem here worth addressing.
So to give back to the community that helped us get where we are, we have tasked ourselves with designing a service that supports students during this time of uncertainty, and developing the resulting service into something that can be offered to future generations.
Designing for the students, with the students.
We’re used to having a lot more time for this sort of thing, but let’s face it, the challenge is exciting. We’ve tweaked our design process to make up for the time constraint and came up with a way to engage students during both the research and brainstorming phases.
This blog will document our process, from initial research to final concept.
Stay tuned.