🎩
Choose one role to start: candidate, recruiter, hiring manager, or interviewer.
Roles Project 🔗
Link to the coursework
https://cyf-roles.netlify.app/roles/
Why are we doing this?
As you explore the Google AI Essentials course, you will apply what you are learning to this project. In Roles you will act as different people participating in the hiring process. Each role has its own perspective through which you are seeing the same information. You’ll come to understand:
- why recruiters only spend six seconds reading a CV
- why interviewers don’t always pick the “best coder”
- what drives the use of AI to filter out your application before a human ever sees it
- why your cover letter reads just like everyone else’s
…And many other things besides. You must take on all 4 roles during your three weeks of this course. So you will need to find efficiencies to get through the work.
Starting role
For this project to work, you can’t all do the same role at the same time. Therefore, we will assign based on quarters of the year. If your birthday is Q1, start with Recruiter on sprint 1.
| Birthday Quarter | Role in Sprint 1 | Roles in Sprint 2 | Roles in Sprint 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan, Feb, Mar | Recruiter | Hiring Manager | Interviewer, Candidate |
| Apr, May, Jun | Hiring Manager | Interviewer | Candidate, Recruiter |
| Jul, Aug, Sep | Interviewer | Candidate, Recruiter | Hiring Manager |
| Oct, Nov, Dec | Candidate | Recruiter, Hiring Manager | Interviewer |
Maximum time in hours
4
How to get help
There isn’t a mentor to lead your team: all trainees must work together to complete the project. How will you share the work so you can get it all done? What tips can you share with each other? How can teamwork, including robot friends, help?
How to submit
You must produce at least one artefact per role. The documents are described in the role assignments.
- 🎯 Topic Communication
- 🎯 Topic Problem-Solving
- 🎯 Topic Requirements
- 🎯 Topic Teamwork
- 🎯 Topic Time Management
- 🏕 Priority Mandatory
- 🐂 Size Medium
- 📅 Sprint 1
🕵🏿 Recruiter
In this role, you’re going to act as a recruiter. You have just a few hours to find the best 8 candidates to put forward for 1 job. You have piles and piles of possible candidates, so you cannot read them all. But as a recruiter you make your money when a candidate you find is offered the job. How will you evaluate candidates quickly, efficiently and fairly, whilst:
- Finding strong candidates the hiring manager wants to interview?
- Finding the candidate the interviewer wants to hire!
How do recruiters do this? Well, they use all kinds of technology, professional experience, and existing APIs. But what will you do?
📋 The Format
What You’ll Get
You’ll get this mini website, right here, filled with made up jobs and people. It has lists of:
- Job descriptions for entry level jobs in tech
- Candidate profiles, with attached CVs and cover letters for jobs they have applied for
Choose one of the job descriptions to work on first.
What You’ll Make
- Screening checklist
- A shortlist of 8 candidates
- A pitchdeck presenting your choices to the hiring manager.
✅ Worked Example: Software Developer Screening
Sample Job Description : Junior Dev
📝Note
Required:
- JavaScript fundamentals
- Git version control
- Team project experience
- Problem-solving ability
Preferred:
- React experience
- Node.js knowledge
- API development
- Testing experience
Sample CV Analysis
📝Note
Candidate: JS-Dev-123
Essential Criteria:
- JavaScript: Portfolio shows 5 JS projects
- Git: Active GitHub profile with 200+ commits
- Team Projects: Led 3-person project team
- Problem-solving: Debugged payment system
Score: 3/4 - Advance to shortlist
🧪 Activities
🕹️1 - Planning
Review a provided job description and create your screening checklist:
- What are the must-have criteria?
- What are the nice-to-have criteria?
- How will you score each element?
🕹️2. Testing your checklist
Before you start, review just 5 candidates and do the following evaluations:
- Rank the profiles from best to worst.
- Analyse your ranking: what are the key differentiators between the bottom and the top?
- Test your decision: can you spot any red flags or missing information that affected your choices? Could you add this to your checklist?
🕹️3. Screening
Use your checklist system to create a shortlist
- Screen all the profiles, CVs, and cover letters
- Select 8 candidates using your system
- Document your reasoning
- Present selections to hiring manager
📝 Reflection Questions
After each screening session, consider:
- What patterns did you notice in strong applications?
- Which criteria were most helpful in making decisions?
- How did you handle borderline cases?
- What would make your screening more efficient?
- If you used AI, did it help?
🤹🏾 Hiring Manager
In this role, you’re going to act as a hiring manager. You support several teams and they all desperately need new workers to help. Each team has different needs, and you have just a few hours to find the best 4 candidates to interview for each job. You definitely cannot interview hundreds of people. As a hiring manager, you are successful when the candidates you put forward are not just hired, but bring value to the teams they join. How will you evaluate candidates quickly, efficiently and fairly, whilst:
- Recommending good candidates that the interviewer wants to hire.
- Recommending people who do their new job well.
There’s another thing hiring managers worry about a lot. Sometimes even more than someone who does well, they want to make sure they don’t hire anybody who does badly. This usually means someone who can’t work with the other people, as this actually brings down the performance of the whole team. How do hiring managers do this? Well, they use all kinds of technology, professional experience, and existing APIs. But what will you do?
📋 The Format
What You’ll Get
You’ll get this mini website, right here, filled with made up jobs and people. It has lists of:
- Job descriptions for entry level jobs in tech
- Candidate profiles, with attached CVs and cover letters for jobs they have applied for
- At least one pitchdeck from a recruiter with their preselected candidates (and maybe more)
Choose one of the job descriptions to work on first.
What You’ll Make
- Screening checklist
- A shortlist of 4 candidates
- A pitchdeck presenting your choices to the interview panel.
✅ Worked Example: Software Developer Screening
Sample Job Description : Junior Dev
📝Note
Required:
- JavaScript fundamentals
- Git version control
- Team project experience
- Problem-solving ability
Preferred:
- React experience
- Node.js knowledge
- API development
- Testing experience
Sample CV Analysis
📝Note
Candidate: JS-Dev-123
Essential Criteria:
- JavaScript: Portfolio shows 5 JS projects
- Git: Active GitHub profile with 200+ commits
- Team Projects: Led 3-person project team
- Problem-solving: Debugged payment system
Score: 3/4 - Advance to shortlist
🧪 Activities
🕹️1 - Planning
Review a provided job description and create your screening checklist:
- What are the must-have criteria?
- What are the nice-to-have criteria?
- How will you score each element?
🕹️2. Testing your checklist
Before you start, review just 5 candidates and do the following evaluations:
- Rank the profiles from best to worst.
- Analyse your ranking: what are the key differentiators between the bottom and the top?
- Test your decision: can you spot any red flags or missing information that affected your choices? Could you add this to your checklist?
🕹️3. Screening
Use your checklist system to create a shortlist
- Screen all the profiles, CVs, and cover letters you can stand
- Select 4 candidates using your system
- Document your reasoning
- Present selections to the interview panel
📝 Reflection Questions
After each screening session, consider:
- What patterns did you notice in strong applications?
- Which criteria were most helpful in making decisions?
- How did you handle borderline cases?
- What would make your screening more efficient?
- If you used AI, did it help?
🧑🏽⚖️ Interviewer
In this role, you’re going to act as an interviewer. In your team, someone has just left for a new job. You really need a new team member because you are all delivering a huge project. It’s really stressful! But your team had a bad experience last year with a colleague who wouldn’t work with others, so you also want to make sure this person will not upset your friendly, productive working environment. It’s a challenge. You know you can’t find this out for sure in a twenty minute conversation, but that’s almost all you have to go on. How will you evaluate interviewees quickly, efficiently and fairly, whilst:
- Finding someone who can do the work you need
- Finding someone who can work with the people on your team
How do interviewers do this? Well, they use all kinds of different systems. But what will you do?
📋 The Format
What You’ll Get
- You’ll get a job description, that the candidate has seen.
- You’ll get each candidate’s application: CV and cover letter
- You’ll also get a team description, that only you know.
What You’ll Make
- An interview plan
- A way to score the candidates
- A job offer
- If you are asked, feedback for unsuccessful candidates
✅ Worked Example: Software Developer Interview
Sample Team Story (the part we don’t tell the candidate)
Our team has one senior developer part time, and two very junior developers on it. Last year we had two mid level developers, a UX designer and a Scrum master. But the UX people were all laid off and the Scrum master is on Maternity leave and hasn’t been covered.
Our two mid level developers fell out with each other because one, a React expert, started unilaterally rewriting features in React and didn’t document or explain their changes. It caused a fight. They have now both left in a huff, we are trying to deliver a whole new transactions front end for our main client and half our codebase is now React, which we don’t really know yet!
It’s been a dreadful mess, but the good news is our little team is now really working well
together. We have reflected and learned from our mistakes and now we all review each other’s code before we merge it. We also now have headcount to hire either two more junior developers or one senior.
We really just want friendly colleagues who know how to do proper code review. They don’t need to be React experts, they just need to be willing to learn and explain what they have learned to the team.
Sample Job Description : Junior Dev
📝Note
Required:
- JavaScript fundamentals
- Git version control
- Team project experience
- Problem-solving ability
Preferred:
- React experience
- Node.js knowledge
- API development
- Testing experience
Sample Interview Plan
📝Note
Interview questions and weighting, 10 points in total
- What experience do you have with code review? Up to 2 points
- Tell us about a time you handled a conflict in your team. Up to 5 points
- Tell us about a technical risk you handled on a project. If you have ever worked with payments and transaction flows, tell us about a risk you handled on a project involving these. Up to 3 points
Then a Yes/No from each* interviewer.
🧪 Activities
🕹️1 - Planning
Review a provided job description, backstory, and candidates and create your interview questions:
- What are the must-have criteria that you need to find out?
- What are the nice-to-have criteria that you can be flexible about?
- How will you score each element?
- Will you ask the same questions each time or different questions based on their application?
- You only have one hour to interview people. Will you interview 4 people for 15 minutes each? 4 people together for an hour? Will you team up with other interviewers? Can AI help?
🕹️2. Interviewing
You need some classmates to act as candidates to complete your project. (You will also need to take on the role of candidate to complete the whole Roles project.) You can do this in class after the workshop or arrange it during the week.
- Open a Google Meet or sit down with your candidate
- Conduct your interviews.
- Score your candidates.
- Hire one!
📝 Reflection Questions
After each interview, consider:
- What patterns do you notice in strong candidates?
- Which criteria were most helpful in making decisions?
- How will you handle borderline cases?
- What would make your interviews more efficient, fair, or reliable?
- If you used AI, did it help?
Submitting Your Work
There’s no submission step. Your work is complete when you have hired a candidate. You can reflect on your experience in your notebook.
👰🏾 Candidate
In this role, you’re going to act as an candidate. You are looking for a job. You need to find at least one job description, submit your CV and cover letter, and prepare for an interview. As a candidate you have several challenging goals:
- Finding a way to get your application noticed!
- Finding a job you can do well in
How do other job seekers do this? Well, they use all kinds of different systems. But what will you do?
📋 The Format
What You’ll Get
- You’ll get a job description
- If you contact the hiring manager, you might also get extra information about the role
What You’ll Make
- A tweaked CV that targets the specific job description
- A persuasive cover letter that helps you stand out
🧪 Activities
🕹️1. Applying
Review a provided job description and write your CV and cover letter in order to apply:
- Use everything you have learned to tailor your CV and cover letter.
- Make sure you show how you meet at least 60% of the job criteria.
- Please anonymise your application: use a random fake name and contact details. Do not put your own phone number or email address on your application, though you should use your real experience and education. This is to protect your privacy.
- Please submit your application by pull request to this website using the detailed instructions below.
🕹️2. Submitting
- Fork this repo to your own GitHub
- Make a new branch from main called applicant/fake-name (e.g. applicant/john-smith)
- Duplicate the folder Candidate/Template-Candidate.
- Rename Template-Candidate to your fake name. If you can’t think of anything use John Smith.
- Complete the CV and Cover Letter in the folder.
- Submit your application by creating a pull request to this website.
🕹️3. Interviewing
You need some classmates to act as interviewers to complete this candidate project. (You will also need to take on the role of interviewer to complete the whole Roles project.) You can do this in class after the workshop or arrange it during the week.
- Open a Google Meet or sit down with your interviewer
- Conduct your interview.
- Ask for feedback from your interviewer.
📝 Reflection Questions
After your interview, consider and write down in your notebook:
- What questions did they ask that suprised you?
- Could you have prepared better?
- What will you do differently next time?
- If you used AI to prepare, did it help?
📥 Submitting Your Work
Your work is complete when you have submitted your application and completed your interview. You can reflect on your experience in your notebook.