TrueTalent

TrueTalent is a comprehensive job search platform and workplace tool that promotes transparency and equality by implementing anonymized applications and clear insights into employee compensation.

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Inspiration

After seeing stories online and listening to Rinad Al Adani, the keynote speaker for this hackathon, share her experience about the blatant discrimination ethnic minorities face in the hiring process, it provided us with a new perspective on the issue. Her story revolved around how she submitted two identical resumes, with the only difference being one featuring her actual name and the other a standard White name, and the one with the White name was the one hired, presenting the inherent bias employers may have between White names and ethnic names. This new insight, along with other similar stories, inspired us to create an anonymous application workplace tool aimed at eliminating these biases.

What it does

The primary objective of TrueTalent is to establish a platform where job seekers can upload their resumes or details about their talents and skills to job listings, without disclosing personal information such as names, photos, addresses, educational institutions, or any other identifying details. This approach aims to eliminate potential discrimination, such as bias based on a name that reveals an individual's ethnicity. A secondary feature of this website is a tool that helps businesses to display and improve its transparency regarding the workload each employee receives in relation to their compensation. This aims to encourage employers to eliminate discrimination by ensuring that employees with the same skill set and workload are paid equitably, regardless of personal biases. TrueTalent, being a comprehensive workplace tool, also features a blog that would feature information aimed to spread awareness about common workplace biases, how to avoid and address such biases, etc. so that more people are aware and educated, as well as a forum that would feature a safe space where people can ask questions, share experiences, discuss ideas, and collaborate on solutions to workplace bias where people can respond, conversate, empathize, and provide solutions to each other's posts.

How we built it

We used Google Slides to make the demo and Canva to make the logo and use for icons. We used ChatGPT to generate resume exemplars to be used in our demo, sample workloads for our workplace analysis, and the blog and forum posts.

Challenges we ran into

Our group has technical skill limitations, which made any programming-related tasks in languages we were't familiar with beyond our capabilities. As a result, we opted to create an interactive Google Slides presentation. Due to our limited knowledge of what AI is capable of and other technologies, we encountered the challenge of not knowing what is really feasible to add to the website. We also faced an ethical dilemma while planning our project concept. While the idea was to base hiring on talent and skill alone, an individual who lacked the opportunities to develop those skills or experiences might be overlooked by the employer. A solution we thought of to this was a written response question/prompt given from the employer to the applicant. The inclusion of a written response helps to give a chance to applicants with no experience to showcase their ideas, creativity, and problem-solving abilities to potentially get hired.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our work-around of not having to code a website and using Google Slides instead. We found something that could still work interactively that is within our skillsets and the demo turned out better than we expected considering that it was done on Google Slides.

What we learned

From this hackathon we learned that even if we try to be unbiased, because of our social locations there will always be some sort of bias, as how we were raised and the experiences we have many differ from those of other people, and we may not always understand and be aware of our bias. So while we were creating our project, we tried to be aware and find any bias we may have had, and then thinking of solutions on how to eliminate these biases. By doing this we were able to create a project that is hopefully mostly unbiased (we say mostly because how we perceive bias stems from our own experiences and perceptions, so what is unbiased in our eyes may seem biased to others because of their own unique experiences). Ensuring that our project was unbiased was important to us, as it would have been conflictive to create a solution aimed at fighting bias while allowing biases to exist within the project itself.

What's next for TrueTalent

Next steps for TrueTalent include enhancing the user interface and user experience while developing it into a fully functional website. Realistically, a Google Slide doesn’t work with how users would interact with an actual website, which if we were to implement, there would be much more to consider. Another step we could take is implementing artificial intelligence technology and analysis into our website which could in return improve the results we could provide to our users. For example, AI could analyze for any biased language in an employer's job listing and help them with what they could do to improve what they're saying. These changes would make the site have a better lasting impact on society.

Built With

  • canva
  • google-slides
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