The Rockefeller Foundation supported IDEO.org to identify insights and opportunity areas for addressing long-term unemployment in low-income communities. Through a human-centered design approach and in-context interviews in several metropolitan areas in the United States, IDEO.org developed a set of insights and a video sharing stories based on the real-life experiences of job seekers and employers about long-term unemployment.  

Opportunity for Design

Long-term unemployed job seekers face a range of challenges in seeking, interviewing, attaining, and retaining satisfying work experiences. From stigmatization due to past history to the inability to properly translate valuable skills developed during unemployment, job seekers often face storytelling struggles during the application process. To add to these barriers, the modern online method of job seeking has led to aimless applying, ignoring qualifications or level of interest. 

Unemployment issues are also compounded by the challenges that face employers. Due in part to a slow economic recovery, employers are increasingly hesitant to hire, risk-averse, and rigid in enforcing requirements. Also when aimless applying becomes an issue, hiring companies tend to run superficial and often arbitrary screenings, filtering out qualified long-term job seeking candidates. 

The design brief, as defined by the Rockefeller Foundation, was to develop insights based on the human-centered design process and identify opportunity areas for interventions and potential innovation in the space. Using a human-centered design lens on the unemployment experience, our team was asked to identify themes that have the potential to anchor solutions to the long-term unemployment challenge.

What We Designed

To inform our client about the opportunities for growth that were uncovered during the human-centered design process, our IDEO.org team took an innovative approach in producing a short 10-minute film. This video shared key stories and insights, told through the experiences of three job seekers and two employers. Using a documentary-style and “creative non-fiction” format, the characters’ stories were based on real people whom we’d interviewed in Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area.

In addition, the team produced a deck to complement the video, anchoring key moments in the video to insights and opportunity areas. The team hosted a “learning lunch” at Rockefeller Foundation to share IDEO.org’s human-centered design process and included examples of how HCD applied and contributed to insights during the project.