Being Capable Anonymous

My award winning app, Cappable, built to help people with disabilities find employment had just made a record of sorts. We had faced our 100th rejection.

Cramped into my bedroom, the four members of our team stared at the dashboard. After months of mock interviews with Prasanna from Samarthanam, we could not offer him a real interview to attend. The penny dropped for me when Prasanna said to me, ”I don’t need your app, I need a job.” I had been so in love with my app, that I wasn’t thinking about the people that were using it. I set up our next team meeting; two things were different this time—the venue and the attendees.

The venue had moved from my bedroom to the Samarthanam office and the attendees had grown from four to fourteen. For the first time, Accenture recruiters were coming to the non-profit’s office for a recruitment discussion. Very soon we realised that we had only been a team on paper. We knew we had a common goal but in reality, we barely knew each other’s names. We took it upon ourselves to bridge this gap.

The new process we proposed included candidate role-matching and training needs assessment as two mandatory steps. It was a longer process, but now we were also a larger, unified team. The non-profits were...