Monash Talent
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Monash Talent is a transformative project poised to disrupt the graduate and early-career talent recruitment market. At the heart of this innovation is a sophisticated smart search system that analyses thousands of data points about students to identify the best-matched candidates for specific job opportunities. This enables industry partners to efficiently review a select group of highly qualified candidates instead of reviewing thousands of applications.
Given its innovative and groundbreaking nature, the project team faced the challenge of navigating and preparing for a go-live within a stringent zero-risk tolerance environment. This required developing efficient solutions to meet the Data, Privacy and Protection Office’s imposed data security requirements, ensuring the highest standards of data protection and privacy were upheld throughout the product.
Product Management
Stakeholder Management
Product Strategy
Workshop Facilitation
Process Mapping
Solution Design
UX/UI Design
Documentation
Product Strategy
Monash Talent has an opt-out business model, which automatically enrols students in its services, granting access to a pool of 100,000 students and recent graduates. While this model offers a competitive advantage, it raised concerns from MU's Data Privacy Protection Office, particularly as a third-party technology partner, Weploy, is involved as part of the MVP solution. MU also enforces a data minimisation strategy and maintains a zero-risk tolerance for student data. To address these concerns, a comprehensive strategy was devised to meet MU's stringent data, security and privacy requirements.
Solution Design
To comply with data minimisation policies, two solutions were implemented. First, the Monash Talent database would only ingest non-PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data, with PII being retrieved via a secure API when a student actively engages with Monash Talent, either by signing in to enhance their profile or by responding to a job match. Second, a weekly PII purge process was established, evaluating each student record containing PII and determining whether it could be stripped of PII based on set business rules. To address concerns regarding third-party technology partners, a solution was created where students must log into an MU-owned environment to consent to sharing their details with third-party partners. The new solution required Monash Talent to develop an app where students can register their interest in job matches and consent to Monash Talent services instead of relying on solely on Weploy's technology.
UX/UI Design
The new MU-owned app focused on providing a seamless and intuitive user experience. Collaborating closely with Monash University's branding and marketing department, new user interface screens were designed to effectively showcase the Monash Talent brand as the first impression for students. The newly designed screens also needed to ensure the new interfaces aligned with the existing Weploy platform, maintaining a consistent user experience.
Stakeholder Management
Managing stakeholders across Monash University was crucial for approval and go-live. The Monash Talent team prepared extensive documentation, solution diagrams and presentations, engaging in numerous discussions to gather requirements, solicit feedback and gain buy-in from stakeholders at various levels and across multiple business units.
The technical solutions designed and developed for Monash Talent successfully addressed all the data, security and privacy requirements imposed by Monash University. Despite the significant pressure to meet a tight go-live date, the redesign process resulted in an efficient and effective solution. There were initial concerns that the re-engineering efforts might delay the launch, potentially causing Monash Talent to miss its strategic timing for release. However, the final solution not only met all data, security and privacy standards but was also straightforward to develop, allowing the project to stay on schedule and launch at the desired go-live date.
The Monash Talent project was poised to make a significant impact on the graduate and early-career talent recruitment markets. For students, the platform would have provided access to pre-qualified job opportunities with minimal competition, offering job matches tailored to their skills, interests and preferences. For industry partners, Monash Talent promised to greatly enhance recruitment efficiency, enabling them to focus on a select group of highly matched candidates instead of sifting through thousands of applications. For Monash University, the platform would have strengthened industry relationships, improved graduate outcomes and provided direct insights into industry hiring trends, thereby informing and improving educational programs.
Unfortunately, due to a shift in priorities for strategic projects in the current financial climate, the project has been put on indefinite pause and was unable to launch to the market.
“Daniel is an absolute gun, I was lucky enough to work with him on the Monash Talent project and the quality of work was exceptional as well as the depth of thought and strategy, more than once I asked, "who did this?", due to the quality of the work, only to find out it was Daniel, absolute gun.” - Andrew Pritchett, CIO at Monash College.
"Daniel - Such a privilege for me to have worked alongside you since you joined the team. Your unique multidisciplinary mindset and skillsets allowed you to adapt quickly and make great contributions to the team. Your presence will simply infuse great energy and the positive 'can-do' energy to any team." - Steve Wu, Senior Business Analyst at Monash Talent.