Vitae: Digital Hiring Halls for On Demand Workers

From The Theme
POTENTIAL, PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY

WHAT IF
What if we could improve the hiring experience for on demand workers and employers?

On Demand Workers Image

WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO
We set out to develop and test an online tool (Vitae) designed to improve the presentation and evaluation of worker qualifications. Researchers hypothesized that aggregating work history from a variety of sources would enable on demand workers to develop a more comprehensive professional identity and credibly signal their specializations. Employers could use criteria developed by workers to quickly evaluate qualifications and access high-quality work.

For this project, researchers added functionality to an existing online platform, Vitae, that aggregates workers’ information from disparate sources into one place, facilitates the creation of professional communities, and enables groups of workers to trade on their collective reputation. The team revised Vitae to function with the new user interface for Amazon Mechanical Turk and integrated the system with Slack, so that discussions and votes can be hosted in a shared venue for workers. Researchers are also investigating how to enable workers with shared expertise to control the supply of labor. Workers are regularly using Vitae and engaging in tasks launched by Vitae researchers.

LEARN MORE
Akhatib, A., Bernstein, M., Levi, M. 2017. “Examining Crowd Work and Gig Work Through The Historical Lens of Piecework” CHI 2017, Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Pages 4599-4616.

PEOPLE BEHIND THE PROJECT
Michael BernsteinMichael Bernstein is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on the design of crowdsourcing and social computing systems. This work has received five Best Paper awards and eleven honorable mentions at premier venues in human-computer interaction and social computing. Michael has been recognized as a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar, and awarded the George M. Sprowls award, NSF CAREER Award, and Sloan Fellowship.

Margaret LeviMargaret Levi is the Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She has been a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University.

Ali AlkhatibAli Alkhatib is a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford University, studying Human-Computer Interaction. He studies digitally mediated communities of workers, including workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Uber and Lyft drivers, or even YouTube and Twitch streamers .