Runwayz: Student Profile Revisted

One of the core elements in Runwayz is the student profile. That is the place where talent is able to market themselves, and talent-seekers can evalute a match. As Runwayz scales, we realized that the student profile simply lacked some of the necessary elements to quickly communicate the readiness and exprerience of a student.

For this project I reevaluted what was important about the student profile, redesigned key elements, and scoped out a roadmap for future iterations. I will walk you through some of the key aspects we considered as well as the decision making behind them.

There were two main issues with the profile; verification and flexibility. Students did not have the ability to have their skills or experiences verified by mentors or professionals, and there were simply too many rigid ways for students to enter in their experiences.

My thought process here was simple: student skills should be verifiable. Borrowing endorsements from LinkedIn was a simple way for talent-seekers to see that students have verified talent or expertise. The question remained: what exactly should we measure that can be verified? More on that later.

The biggest change in the student profile was the introduciton of the portfolio. I learned through working with school districts that it is hard to encourage students to enter their experience. Moreover, most high school students do not feel like they have any relevant experience. The portoflio is a friendly and flexible way for young people to cultivate their own brand and tell their story, however they would like to.

Solving for student experience was only one piece of the puzzle; Employers still needed an easy way to assess readniess and understand a students preferences. Thus came the concept of preferences. We were already evaluating basic career-based traits with our career quiz (See Project Onboarding & Insights), but nothing in that quiz was directly measureable.

The evolution of the Runwayz career quiz is a roadmap item, but for this release, I simply made small tweaks to glean more practical insights from the quiz. When a student takes the quiz now, we gather basic workplace preferences to help any employer quickly understand if that student is a fit.

This is not only for employers to review. Our goal is to provide both talent and talent-seekers relevant prospects through skill-based mathmaking. The evolution of our career quiz is a step in that direction.

The introduction of preferences, portfolio and endorsements are all pieces to the broader puzzle of effective matchmaking. Moving forward, we hope to leverage these insights to seamlessly match talent with talent seekers. The result of this project was rewarding. I was able to leverage research insights to cultivate a roadmap for the vision of our profile and matchmaking, while implementing only the core pieces now to improve the current experienece. I am excited to see how this feature evolves.