Success story: Deloitte Digital design thinking - Riipen experience at a glance

Have you ever had difficulty finding and engaging tech-savvy talent for your organization? Riipen Challenges can help: here’s how.

In early 2018, Deloitte Digital launched three crowd-sourced community challenges on Riipen, North America’s leading platform for collaboration between companies, and students and young professionals. As a growing creative digital consultancy, Deloitte Digital was keen to find new and creative ways of attracting emerging talent that would thrive in their fast-paced environment.

The challenges were designed to assess participants’ ability to combine design thinking with business strategy, and creative and digital skills. Each challenge represented a typical project that a Deloitte Digital employee might work on. The “Ticket Purchase Experience” challenge asked participants to use design thinking to improve the user experience for purchasing tickets in the transportation industry. The “Digital Design for Field Workers” challenge tasked participants to identify and create a valuable improvement to the day-to-day experience of field workers carrying out their jobs. And lastly, the “Designing Onboarding Moments for the Future Workplace” challenge tasked participants to identify key moments in an employee’s onboarding process and design one of these moments to improve the employee experience and engagement when joining Deloitte Digital.

The challenges were deliberately designed to be simple and open-ended, allowing for maximum creativity and innovation on the part of participants. Participants—both students and recent graduates—had 10 weeks to submit their challenge deliverables online. The incentive: top-ranked participants could land an interview towards a job and every submission received valuable feedback and a rating from the Deloitte Digital team on Riipen.

Young professionals from Brainstation, Emily Carr, SFU, UBC, Red Academy and others signed up and got to work, putting many hours into their submissions. Participants conducted extensive online research, collected user interviews, interviewed Deloitte Digital staff, and even tested their prototype apps on users. This is not unusual: students are highly motivated by the opportunity to showcase their skills to potential employers, gain relevant work experience, and earn in-kind access for their efforts. Before submitting their final projects, Deloitte Digital hosted a Meet & Greet where participants had the opportunity to connect with the team face-to-face at their Vancouver headquarters.

The quality of the final submissions impressed the Deloitte Digital team: participants developed personas, experience maps, wireframes, graphic mockups, slide decks, videos, reports, and working app prototypes. Deloitte Digital was also impressed with the creativity and innovation of the submissions: for example, the Digital Design for Field Workers challenge came up with solutions for Child Care Workers, Therapists, Conservation Officers, and Care Aid Workers.

"The open briefs in terms of the deliverables allowed the participants to really showcase their understanding and application of the design process, and use of design tools to communicate their research and solutions. We were impressed by the amount of effort and consideration put into designs by grounding them in research and demonstrating their ideas through pitch decks, videos and well-designed mockups. It was interesting to see the range of use cases across the submissions from one same challenge brief. It was also great to see the creativity amongst the participants in both the design of their solutions but also how they tackled the problem and what methods they used to do so." -- Natalie Moore, Experience Design Manager at Deloitte Digital

The big takeaways and positive outcomes of this experience:

• Breaking out of the traditional hiring norm to draw top talent into the organization

• Providing a unique outlet to build lasting connections with future generations

• Opportunity for sharing working experiences and insights with students and young professionals in the community

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For more details on this initiative or questions about how to get your organization involved with students through Riipen, please comment below, connect with us on social or book a meeting with our success team.

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‍About Deloitte Digital:

‍Deloitte Digital has created a new model for a new age: the creative digital consultancy. We’re transforming the digital journey in a way an agency or traditional consultancy alone cannot – now leaders across their entire organization can come to one place to have their ambitions brought to life. We’ve combined the creative and digital capabilities of our studios and the broad reach of an advertising agency with the technical experience, deep business strategy, and relationships of one of the world’s largest consultancy brands to create something that is so much more than the sum of its parts. For more information visit us online.

‍Co-authored by Karen Bakker and Marek Filipiak