Koru Hire

Launching a start up is no small feet. I was hired as the first designer at Koru, one of a few individuals brought in to form a digital product team to sit alongside the company's bustling early-career bootcamp program. Our job was to use technology to scale what Koru had learned about helping recent college graduates land jobs in tech, finance and marketing companies.

During our three years as a team, we launched multiple different products into the market, learning with each one as we sought to hone our product-market fit. As a product designer and product manager, I was responsible for understanding our users and customers (who were not always the same persona) and ensure that we were building tools that aligned with their needs.

I used a blend of Lean UX and traditional Scrum methodologies to build and execute against roadmaps that blended input from internal brainstorms, customer feedback, user research, insights from the sales team and product analytics to identify new features and refine the existing product.

Our journey through the early career landscape eventually settled around using data science to predict the likelihood that an applicant would be a good fit for the job they were applying for. We designed a "pre-interview" survey that used behavior sciences to measure seven core competencies: grit, rigor, impact, teamwork, curiosity, ownership, and polish. These "Koru7" were shown to have less adverse impact than traditional measures like GPA or college pedigree when used to screen candidates, and our predictive scores gave recruiters a new tool to "screen-in" candidates to diversify their hiring funnels.

We had many successes (and failures) as a team. Before being acquired, we had multiple HR teams relying on our software for their internship and associate-level hiring programs. We were processing thousands of candidate records a day, and seeing steady and positive candidate feedback through NPS analysis. I wrote about the journey of moving from designer to product manager and shared some of my takeaways from that experience.