Today's Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are designed to address one of society's most pressing problems---unemployment. These technologies support job seekers' ability to search for jobs, create resumes, highlight skills, share employment opportunities, and even transport to work and job counseling. However, the benefits of employment tools and technologies are unequally distributed and provide limited advantages for certain populations in our society. Like other valuable resources, ICTs have done little to support individuals with limited knowledge, skills, or experience to leverage them and who often face geographic and social isolation. Without an understanding of how people from low-resource settings use ICTs for job seeking, the same employment inequalities that occur offline will be repeated in online contexts. In this presentation, I will discuss the results of several studies that investigate how ICTs could improve employability, particularly among job seekers with limited digital skills, education, and income, and those who are geographically and socially isolated. I will also discuss new principles for fostering innovations among these populations and identify barriers for designers and technologists to address in the future.
Tawanna Dillahunt is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information and holds a courtesy appointment with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. Tawanna earned her Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from Carnegie Mellon University. She now leads the Social Innovations research group, an interdisciplinary group of individuals whose vision is to design, build, and enhance technologies to solve real-world problems affecting marginalized groups and individuals primarily in the U.S. Our current projects aim to address unemployment, environmental sustainability, and technical literacy by fostering social and sociotechnical capital within these communities.