`I Know I Can Do the Job, It’s Just Putting It Down’: Using Personas as a Mirror to Identify Strengths

Paper Title

‘I Know I Can Do the Job, It’s Just Putting It Down’: Using Personas as a Mirror to Identify Strengths

Publication Info

• Topic area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and employment technologies for resource-constrained contexts.
• Keywords: personas, reflection, employment profiles, informal work, digital skills training, participatory design, marginalized communities, workforce development, articulation support, professional identity.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Employment platforms like LinkedIn favor traditional credentials and linear career pathways, excluding individuals with informal work experiences or non-traditional career trajectories. Resource-constrained job seekers face barriers in articulating their strengths and translating informal experiences into professional profiles.
• Significance: Addressing these barriers is critical to improving employment opportunities for marginalized populations and adapting employment technologies to the evolving nature of work.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research highlights the importance of reflection in job-seeking but has not sufficiently addressed how to facilitate this process or translate reflections into employment profiles. Existing tools like SkillsIdentifier and DreamGigs offer limited scalability and accessibility.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A persona-based activity designed to help resource-constrained job seekers reflect on their strengths and articulate them in professional profiles.
• Novelty:
  1. Development of a group-based reflection activity using a relatable persona to guide participants in identifying transferable skills.
  2. Empirical insights into how resource-constrained individuals articulate informal work experiences in employment contexts.
  3. Design implications for employment technologies that challenge traditional resumés and support non-linear career pathways.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Creation of a persona (Jordan Davis) based on ethnographic data and community input.
  • Deployment of a workbook with scenarios describing Jordan’s strengths and challenges.
  • Group discussions to connect participants’ experiences to Jordan’s narrative and scaffold the creation of their own employment profiles.
  • Analysis of workshop data, including written responses, audio transcripts, and demographic surveys.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants struggled to articulate their strengths in writing but found it easier to describe them verbally during group discussions.
  • The persona-based activity helped participants reframe personal challenges as professional strengths and recognize transferable skills from informal experiences.
• Advantage over baselines: The activity provided a structured, low-pressure environment for reflection and skill articulation, addressing gaps in existing employment tools that do not support pre-work reflection or informal skill recognition.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Nine participants from a public housing community attended a three-hour workshop.
  • Data collected included completed workbooks, audio recordings, and feedback surveys.
  • Analysis revealed themes such as the value of group discussion and the role of relatable personas in fostering reflection.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The persona-based activity requires significant upfront work to develop relatable narratives and scenarios.
  • Future research could explore scalable digital tools, such as AI-generated personas, and evaluate the efficacy of the activity without group discussion.
  • Additional studies are needed to understand employer perspectives and develop new mediums for communicating informal work experiences.

Summary

This study introduces a persona-based activity to support resource-constrained job seekers in reflecting on their strengths and translating informal work experiences into professional profiles. The intervention leverages psychological distancing and mirroring through a relatable persona, Jordan Davis, to guide participants in identifying transferable skills. Group discussions facilitated reflection and helped bridge the gap between verbal and written articulation of strengths. Findings highlight the importance of designing employment technologies that accommodate non-traditional career pathways and suggest opportunities for integrating AI and hybrid approaches to scale such interventions.