The struggle:

As companies are moving to remote/virtual work in droves because of COVID-19, many people are becoming virtual employees for the first time. Entire departments and companies are learning how to be a virtual team in a trial by fire.

One of the key challenges for companies on the other hand, is maintaining the workplace culture and keep the team skillset aligned. Especially in a position that requires specialization, hiring the right candidate becomes key in this process.

With this big responsibility, companies are becoming more dependent of their HR workforce to attract new talent, ensure the capability of the candidate and avoiding misalignment.

What is our offer?

To help you out, Deeplo AI has created a unique approach for candidates and for companies by redesigning the employment journey of a tech talent through Virtual Experience Programs.

Virtual Experience Programs, also known as VXP’s, a place for companies to inspire tech talent by showcasing their workplace and hire work-ready candidates. For candidates, it is an opportunity to explore career paths, get insights about the company culture and mission, and learn the nuance of work through simulated tasks. Since the programs are self-paced and online, you can simply experience working for the company, anywhere and anytime!

How does it work?

You might wonder, “What does a virtual experience program look like?” We keep things simple at Deeplo AI. To simulate a business area, our partners select a role-based program they’d want to spotlight, and then we join forces to design a sequence of tasks involved in completing the program.

For example, imagine a role-based program focusing on becoming a Data Scientist at your dream company. This experience program might include the following five tasks:

• Your manager has sent you a client proposal, instructing you to gather background information on the client, investigate the potential causes of the company’s problem (in this case, clients leaving the company), and draft a scope of work (SOW) document.
• After project objective has been set, you have been requested to further analyze the given dataset and employ data analysis techniques to gain more insights regarding customers and client’s services.
• Your manager request you to build a churn modeling that predicts future occurrences and help client take actions before the customer leave the client.
• You will then be expected to finalize your findings in a report and create visualizations for your client using your team’s preferred tools and frameworks.
• Finally, you will record a 3-minute presentation pitching your solution.

Virtual experience programs have the elegancy of portraying not only the tasks but also the environment of the company. Each task in our programs includes videos from actual employees who present the program and walk the participant through the tasks. We essentially replicating the work experience in a way that the participants gain a holistic understanding of the company and that feels like they really work for the company.

Many reasons to have Virtual Experience programs

The beauty of Virtual Experience programs is that they solve fundamental problems of companies, learners and universities all together. Issues such as inefficient company recruitment process, learner inabilities, and university subject mismatches have posed significant challenges.

Let’s have a look at how VXPs address these issues from the perspective of each stakeholder.

For companies, finding highly specialized, work ready candidates for example, requires substantial amount time, cost, greater talent streamline and additional information about candidate’s abilities more than a CV and motivation letters can provide. By simulating their workplace through role based VXP programs, companies will be able to:

• build a powerful employer branding
• attract specialized candidates that know the nuances of the company’s work practices
• reduce time search
• minimize onboarding dependency since they are able “first train, then hire.”

From learner point of view, main challenges are elongated and unreasonable job searches, skill gap for the role, not knowing what to expect and what they want. With the help of VXP’s learners can explore the carrier opportunities, improve their workplace skills, gain hands-on experience, showcase their skills through simulated tasks and understand the nuances of the company practices and become work-ready and desirable candidate. This will enable more informed and motivated decisions to be made.

And Universities are also facing the challenge of quickly outdated or uninterested content that caused by fast-paced technological developments This can also cause demotivation. Our partnership with universities can make this experience go away. Universities can:

• Implement some of the VXP contents created by the top companies in their curriculum.
• Create their own focused programs that help produce work-ready and motivated graduates
• Foster student engagement

You only heard some of the benefits of virtual experience programs, and we’ve only scratched the surface. If you’re interested in learning more, stay tuned and follow us on Linkedin to be the first to know.

Also please note that, new programs are on the way. Stay tuned!