Winning team of London Business School Hackathon 2021

In Feb 2021, I participated in a virtual international hackathon organised by London Business School.

I led a team of 4 to compete against teams from 76 global universities with 250+ participants to become the winning team of Hacker's Paradise Challenge.

Our project, FairInterview, is a blind hiring interviewing tool that removes bias during live interviews, making diversity recruitment fair, engaging and simple.

It was a fantastic experience. My first hackathon ever!

Inspiration

As female visible minorities, recruitment diversity and inclusion have always affected members of our team. Despite many companies saying they take it seriously, countless studies and research have shown diversity recruitment has remained a challenge.

Moreover, COVID-19 lockdowns have shown us that video call interviews are essential and the trend is likely to proceed. We think a virtual blind hiring interview tool will be in high demand.

Problem statement

Research shows that unconscious biases based on Age, Gender, and Race hinder diversity hiring. This makes blind hiring a fast-growing trend.

However, recruiters believe existing blind hiring tools for CV screening & pre-interview assessment are not sufficient. Bias can still happen during the interview phase.

Time pressure tends to enhance stereotypes, making the Interview phase particularly Vulnerable to Bias​. However, current interviewing solutions still have bias & cannot meet the hiring manager’s expectations.

The solution

FairInterview is a comprehensive blind hiring tool that minimises bias factors during Live interviews.

It preserves candidates’ personalities by keeping real-time facial expressions & voice tunes.

The main features include face swap, voice changer and name auto-hide.

Market validation

Recruiters and candidates support our product!

We sent out surveys to selected samples such as anonymous hiring managers from Unilever, Deloitte and Shopee. We also conducted qualitative 1-to-1 interviews.

Findings show that people are willing to pilot & pay for our product.

We also successfully addressed some potential concerns about the product concept.

Go To Market Strategy

We adopt a SaaS model to target the global market.

In the global employment services market, with a customer segment of Mid to Large corporates, we position ourselves as a diversity interviewing tool targeting Early-stage and Back-office role interviews. We expect to gain a 5% market share in 5 years with a tiered pricing monthly subscription model.

From seed users to corporate customers, we will keep product upgrading and aim to build an ecosystem - an all-in-one hiring platform.

Challenges

The time limitation of the hackathon is definitely the biggest challenge. We are working on UK/Canada time zones, which makes it more challenging.

The second challenge is asking for quality feedback. Because we are targeting hiring managers that can make purchase decisions, it was not easy to find a large number of respondents within 2 days of the hackathon.

Finally, it’s the technical side. Obviously it’s impossible to build a GAN model in two days. Therefore, we found a workaround to utilize existing GAN technologies first from apps like Avatarify.

Learnings

Among my contributions to this project:

• Applied design-led innovation framework to identify the nature of the problem, deconstruct it and generate ideas to find the entrepreneurial opportunity from the problem.

• Conducted market research including 1o1 interviews with hiring managers and a quantitative survey with both interviewers and candidates to identify the pain points during diversity hiring and to revise our product concept.

• Conducted usability study to test the flow of the prototype.

• Collaborated with the designer to refine the overall UX.

I learned a lot about the importance of talking to users and hearing their different perspectives; not everyone was an instant fan of the product’s features and we learned how to take constructive feedback but also know when a test user wasn’t necessarily a target user.

A huge thanks to LBSHACK 2021 team HACKLBS, to the amazing mentors and to all the friends and colleagues who helped us with our user testing.

Check out a pitch that helped us win the LBS Hackathon 2021!

Link to this project on Devpost: https://lnkd.in/eMAfFSQ