About Candorful
Industry: Nonprofit
Location: Boston, MA
Company size: < 10 employees
What they do: Career support for military service members transitioning to civilian life
Website: https://www.candorful.org/
Q&A with Pat Hubbell, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Candorful
Q: How does the D'Amore-McKim Community Impact Initiative differ from other internships?
A: What distinguishes D'Amore-McKim interns is the robust career advising support. During the hiring process, the career center facilitates connections with candidates. We then hired a team of Business Analytics, Management, and MBA students with diverse skills essential for strategic business development and advanced data analysis.
Having a dedicated advisor guide the interns throughout the internship alleviates the need for intensive supervision, allowing me to focus more on the internship's overall benefit. This support ensures that interns stay aligned with our goals. In other situations where I managed interns one-on-one without career center support, I spent significant time onboarding and guiding them through tasks.
Anytime I work with interns, I do a cost-benefit analysis: What is the benefit I'll receive compared to the amount of time I spend bringing them up to speed? Thanks to the career center's comprehensive support, this balance has been favorable, enhancing our ability to achieve our goals efficiently.
Q: Describe a typical project for your graduate business students.
A: Our mission is to help military veterans and their spouses transition to civilian life with job interview preparation. We collect a lot of data that provides insights into candidate experiences and progress. Candidates answer questionnaires, coaches fill out scorecards, and we send out surveys. Therefore, projects often involve business analytics or data analysis. Students with expertise in these areas can help us analyze trends and improve our strategies, leveraging our extensive data to make informed decisions.
I look for projects that are “containable,” meaning they have a clear scope and end goal and can be completed within the internship timeframe. For instance, if I need specific information or research, I might ask interns to answer a particular question or gather and analyze data before making recommendations.
Q: How have D'Amore-McKim students added value to your organization?
A: Overall, the Community Impact Initiative teams deliver innovative ideas and practical solutions. They also help us identify and avoid ineffective strategies, leading to significant time and resource savings. In past summer internship projects, the interns developed a social media strategy centered around shareable and viral content using hashtags and tags. I was able to present their work to our board of directors, to encourage their involvement. This exercise was a great experience for the students—they created a presentation and delivered it in a way that stuck and made an impact.
We challenged another group of interns to develop a way to track where our alums have gained employment. Initially, they explored automating data scraping and collection from LinkedIn but ultimately found that it wasn't feasible. Their thorough approach and honesty about the limitations of our request were valuable. In the end, the students learned that they had to use a more manual and pragmatic approach to gathering the data. The data they obtained was extremely valuable for us. I believe the students benefited even more because they saw a real-world, inconvenient, and difficult challenge and solved it. Although the solution was not fancy or technical, they got the job done. At the end of the day, in the working world, this is what is essential.
Q: Would you recommend the Community Impact Initiative?
A: I wholeheartedly would recommend hiring graduate students through the Community Impact Initiative. I've shared the positive experiences we've had with your students and the impact they've made on our organization with our Board, highlighting their contributions and the value they bring. I plan to hire more interns from the community impact initiative in the future, for sure.
