Let's research!
Desk research
To start our project, we did a desk research to understand exactly what are the minorities and what is the reality of this people on the job market nowadays. Look what we found:
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The "minority" concept is about social groups that were prevented to be socialized. They are excluded because of their skin color, gender, sexual orientation, body type, social positions, nationality and other things.
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Using "minority" doesn't always means that they are less. In Brazil, for example, women represents 51,8% of the population, but only 37,4% of the top work positions are occupied by women, even although they are better-educated than men (IBGE, 2019).
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20% of the Brazilian women receives less than men even when they have the same education, age and work position (IBGE, 2019).
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This pattern is the same for black and LGBTQIAP+ people or people with disabilities. According to Forbes (2021), the minorities represents less than 10% on Brazilian companies.
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Black women are affected two times for this stigmas. Once for being women, and twice for being black. On a research made with black women, 63% of them said that they suffered from prejudice on selection process. Also, 62% of them suffered it more than once (G1, 2022).
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On the other hand, companies that has more gender diversity are 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies that don't (McKinsey, 2019).
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Companies with gender diversity are 21% more likely to have a higher profitability and the ones with ethnical and cultural diversity are 35% more likely to have it too (McKinsey, 2017).
Interviews
After doing a CSD Matrix, we did interviews with recruiters and persons that are part of a minority, and we got this information:
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According to the recruiters, it's hard to recruit this people for higher positions because they are usually less educated.
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Recruiters may not be prepared to deal with this kind of hiring, even if they are part of a specialized consulting. One of them even said:
"I've heard prejudiced speeches about the candidates inside de consulting team…"
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Commonly minority people are hired just to be a number inside the company, because once they are in, they don't have support and opportunities to get a better position.
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The managing positions are mostly composed by white, cis and heterosexual men.
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Interviewed people that are in higher positions had recommendations to join their companies.
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Even when they are high educated, they face the prejudice and racism:
"Even though I have a bachelor's degree, I had my work questioned because
I'm not a "standard ballerina", related to my color and hair."
Business and competitive analysis
To understand what are the existent digital solutions to this social problem, we did a business and competitive analysis. We find out that there are digital communities where these people are reunited on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, but usually it is not focused on working discussions. Other solution is the specialized consultings on black people hiring or people with disabilities hiring, but normally this business does only the recruitment process and after that, there isn't a support on the new job.
Persona
To organize and summarize all this information, we did a Affinity Diagram. After that, we decided to focus on black women on our MVP because we had more information about this people and also more possible users. According to the desk research and the interviews, we build our persona: Manuela Silva.
The problem statement showed that:
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Manuela can't grow her career, she left her last job and now can't find a new job. Although she has a nice resume and experience on her area, she has difficult to get in and stay on the corporate world.
So, how might we help Manuela to build a good network, get information about the job market and get in and stay into this on a health way?
Ideation
After brainstorming, we got our solution: a social media focused on work, made for minority people with three main features for this MVP:
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Job openings;
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Discussion forums;
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Anonymous reviews about companies.
Branding
The app is named "together" because it reunite people and gathers everything they need to get there on their careers.
The primary color (#88CFCE) was chosen thinking on mix the main colors we found on job websites (as LinkedIn and Glassdoor) and to make the users experience be less heavier than the problems they deal with on a daily basis, like racism, misogyny, and others. The secondary color (#F7D239) came from a testing to discover the opposite colors of the first one, so we could have one to use on attention points on Together.
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The font-family chosen is Montserrat to bring a simple, modern and less formal environment. The logo also follows this line of something practical.
Prototyping
We started with a lo-fi and then, a mid-fi prototype. The last one was tested by a Concept Test and a Usability Test where we found out some problems with the menu and buttons that users were missing while using the app. After iterating those things, we designed out hi-fi prototype that you can test right here (just click on the screen to start).
Next steps
After designing the hi-fi prototype, we presented it to other product designers and a recruiter that made a design critique, and some of their feedbacks are already iterated. So, for the next steps, we need to
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Keep testing and iterating it.
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Design the desktop and the recruiters version.
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Programming and launching it.
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Keep updating and improving Together!