Question

Riipen Case Study The Situation:

Riipen’s mission is to end the very real social problem of underemployment. Employment or income as the number 1 reason students list for choosing to attend post-secondary has grown from 50% to 90% since the year 2000 (Source: New America). Disturbingly, nearly 1/2 of university and college grads are underemployed in North America (Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York). We also know now that if a recent graduate starts their careers underemployed, they’re more likely to stay underemployed 5 years (67% likely) and 10 years (50% likely) later (Source: Strada Education, Burning Glass). Lack of relevant experience is listed as one of the top three reasons why recent grads are rejected from the candidate search. This means first jobs matter. We can no longer rely on a recent graduates first job as the landing pad where they gain the experience to launch their careers. Students need to gain relevant experience throughout their degree to set themselves up for success upon graduation and for the rest of their careers. Riipen aims to solve this problem by bringing the relevant work experience to students right in the classroom where it’s for course credit and doesn’t require them to put off their graduation by taking an internship or co-op. To date, Riipen has enabled 50,000 students at 150+ post-secondary institutions to partake in 1.5 million hours of applied learning with over 10,000 industry partners. Beyond experience, students’ need a way of connecting to the right potential employers and articulating their skills and experience to increase their chance of finding relevant employment. Currently, Riipen solves this challenge by offering a student portfolio where students can collect skill verifications, written recommendations and now even badges for their work that they can market to employers in their network to increase their chances of being hired. Now that we’ve built up global talent pool of industry-vetted student profiles, our organizations want the ability to search through the data base and invite students that have chosen to opt in to gain access to exclusive job opportunities only available to students the can demonstrate experience and skills through Riipen projects. The goal is to a) increase the number of channels that students and employers can connect to make better employment matches b) to increase revenue streams so that Riipen can invest in growing the student, employer, educator, ecosystem and increase access to project-based learning and better employment outcomes for students/companies.

The Ethical Dilemma:

As seen in the scenarios included in the link below, Riipen is debating whether to charge more for this service (let’s call it “Riipen.Recruiter” [play off of linkedin recruiter]) and increase revenue which in turn would allow Riipen to reach more students but may reduce the % of students that get hired through the app in the short term or whether to charge less for the Riipen.Recruiter so that more companies can access and a higher % of students using the platform get hired, however, growth is delayed and Riipen reaches fewer students in the longterm.

Question: You are the Director Operations and Client Success or the Director Technology, develop your own personal position on what you think the company vision should be for the future; Eg. what kind of values and role do you see the firm playing in the next 5 to 10 years? and then answer the following questions as the director of one of those roles.

2. Who are the stakeholders?
3. What is their influence? When preparing this section discuss the other strong, competing interpretations of the situation, who holds these interpretations and what their influence is over the decision. Discuss who’s support in the organization that you might need to obtain support for your recommendation and their influence over the decision.
4. Development of decision criteria and alternatives;
5. Justification of selected alternative. In steps 6 and 7 include identification of the short and long run revenues/costs and positive/negatives value outcomes of your proposal and discuss why it is better than competing proposals. This question is intended to address the “cash value of your proposal in experiential terms”.
6. Implementation: how would you orchestrated a process that can make the values you care about become the truth for your organization?

Answer 1

As a visionary leader of the company which is built to impart practical skills to the students in the long term and since my organization was started on this vision itself and not solely on the profit-making point of view. As a Director of Technology, I would try to incorporate the following stance in the company's working :

• Creating a simple model which the employers and the students can easily understand and use.
• A holistic view based performance indicator i.e The KPI calculated for the students should be carefully calibarated to differentiate between the levels of acheivements of the students .
• Consistency in rating parameters.
• Incorporating different types of learning programmes where students from all educational backgrounds can participate and showcase their skills . For ex : Campus Ambassador Programmes.
• Enabling a system which incorporates all the technological tools needed for an employer to coordinate the activities on this sysstem itself and not third party applications.
• Setting up MOU's with various universtites around for them to incorpoarate this model in their academic methodology.

1.Who are the stakeholders?

The stakeholders are the students; the employers; the institutes where these students study; the managers who will coordinate the student activities and tasks. on the platform and the team of Riiken.

2. What is their influence? When preparing this section discuss the other strong, competing interpretations of the situation, who holds these interpretations and what their influence is over the decision. Discuss who’s support in the organization that you might need to obtain support for your recommendation and their influence over the decision.

• Students: They are the most important part of the value chain as they will be the face of the company or brand they will be assigned to. They will be in contact with the company managers or the managers of the respective company they are assigned to. For ex : Suppose a student is working as a Campus Ambassador for an Energy Drink company, in this case there will be a company representative from this energy drink company who will assign tasks and duties to the student. In addition to that, there will be an assigned employee of Riiken who will coordinate the system activities i.e Uploading of the student details, filtering the applications, coordinating with the institutes for tie-ups, etc.
• Employers: These employers will be the clients Riiken has who will be providing various opportunities to the students and will assign them tasks and activities. They will have a manager to coordinate with the students and the Riiken executive for technical coordination.
• Institute: The institute will function more of an environment for facilitating the learning opportunities and initiatives and will play more of a secondary role .
• Riiken : It will be the technical backbone of the entire process that will provide the technological tools to carry out the entire process. For ex : An app where the students apply for tasks and activities and get their badges and certificates on the successful completion of the programs. They will also have a marketing team to approach various organizations to partner with them.

3.Development of decision criteria and alternatives;

The decision criteria are:

• Ease in Implementation
• ROI (Return on Investment )
• Satisfaction Level
• Increase in Market Share and revenue
• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Adoptability

Gathering the data and on the basis of the various parameters considered above in the decision criteria we see the following alternatives :

Alternative Number 1: Increasing the Service Charge to increase the revenue and the return on investment on the multi-channel system which will be developed using an in house highly qualified technical team.

Alternative Number 2: No change in the Service Charge to increase the market share with little or no change in revenue in the short term while delegating the work for the development of a multi-channel system which will be developed by third-party developers.

The Choice that the company needs to make is Alternative number 2, the reasoning behind the same decision is mentioned below :

Based on our stance which is not concentrated on gathering profits in the short term rather it is more about creating a brand name and an image about our organization of remaining true to our cause of facilitating student learning experience for which we need to onboard a maximum number of clients in the form of firms who will provide different projects that the students can choose to work on our system i.e Since our prime concern is to reach a maximum number of students and for that, we need to onboard a maximum number of clients in our system i.e Focus should be on market share rather than increasing revenue in the short term and to boost the return on investment we can cut the costs by delegating the developmental work to a third party organization who will design and develop the IT system thus overcoming the high-cost investment of hiring an expert team of developers which will be heavily cost-intensive.