Turning a high-touch internship program into a scalable talent platform

Code Like a Girl’s internship program had strong demand from both sides: women and gender diverse people looking for their first paid role in tech, and companies looking for emerging talent with meaningful support wrapped around the placement.

The problem was that the program had outgrown its operating model. Applications, candidate reviews, partner communication, placement workflows, and reporting were being managed across spreadsheets, emails, and manual coordination. That worked while the program was small, but it was becoming harder to scale without creating more operational load for the team.

I led the discovery, build, and rollout of a custom internship and talent community platform designed around the specific needs of applicants, approved candidates, hiring partners, recruitment partners, and the internal administration team.

The goal was not simply to digitise an existing process. It was to understand what each group was trying to achieve, where the friction lived, and what had to be true for the program to scale without losing the quality and care that made it valuable.

The product challenge

Off-the-shelf recruitment tools did not fit the model.

Code Like a Girl’s internship program was not a standard job board or applicant tracking system. Applicants often needed feedback before they were ready to be presented to employers. Hiring partners needed confidence in candidate quality, but they also needed to understand the support model around the internship. Recruitment partners needed a structured way to review applications. The admin team needed visibility across the full lifecycle.

That meant the product had to support several connected workflows:

• applicants submitting and improving their applications
• recruitment partners reviewing applicants
• approved applicants becoming candidate profiles
• hiring partners browsing and filtering candidates
• the admin team managing candidate status, partner activity, and placement workflows
• companies moving from interest to contact to placement
• candidates carrying evidence of learning from School of Code into the internship experience

A key product decision was to treat the platform as a talent community, not just a recruitment database. Candidates were not just records to be searched. They were people moving through a pathway: learning, applying, receiving feedback, becoming job-ready, and being connected to paid opportunities.

Discovery

I worked closely with the program coordinator to map the full workflow behind the internship program: how applications were reviewed, how candidates were assessed, where communication broke down, what hiring partners needed, and what the admin team was doing manually behind the scenes.

I also worked with the design lead to interview interns and hiring partners, turning those conversations into user personas, user stories, and a functional specification.

The discovery process surfaced an important business insight: companies were not only paying for access to candidates. They were paying for a high-quality internship program. The value came from the wider support model: coaching, monthly meetups, free training, events, mentors, the Code Like a Girl community, and the DEI credibility of the program.

The platform needed to make that model scalable, without flattening it into a generic marketplace.

What we built

The candidate side supported applications with save-and-return functionality, review outcomes, feedback, resubmission, and candidate profiles for approved applicants. Once accepted, candidates could add skills, location preferences, and other profile information relevant to hiring partners.

We also integrated the internship portal with School of Code, so candidates could display badges from completed courses. This connected Code Like a Girl’s education pathway directly to its employment pathway, helping candidates show evidence of learning and giving hiring partners more context when reviewing emerging talent.

The hiring partner side allowed companies to browse and filter candidates. Partners could explore talent for free, create an account when they wanted to contact candidates, and only pay on placement. We also built self-service lead capture and email onboarding to help bring new companies into the platform without relying entirely on manual sales follow-up.

Behind the scenes, the administration experience supported the team managing applicants, approved candidates, hiring partners, recruitment partners, and placement activity.

Rollout

We rolled the platform out in stages.

First, we migrated and onboarded existing candidates. Then we brought in recruitment partners who would review applicants. After that, we opened access to hiring partners, followed by a broader public launch.

This staged approach gave us a way to test each part of the system with the people who depended on it before adding the next layer of complexity.

The public launch created immediate demand. Within the first weeks of opening the platform, around 400 applications came through. Not every applicant became an approved candidate, but the platform made it possible to provide structured feedback to people who needed to improve before being presented to employers.

Outcomes

The platform supported a program that placed over 200 women and gender diverse people into paid internship roles, with 75% or more going on to receive full-time job offers.

It also gave Code Like a Girl a more scalable foundation for working with hiring partners. Key accounts included IAG, which consistently placed 10 interns at a time, along with partners including Victorian Government cyber security and TikTok.

For hiring partners, the platform created a clearer way to discover and engage emerging talent. For candidates, it created a more structured pathway from application to feedback to profile to opportunity. For the internal team, it reduced dependence on fragmented spreadsheets and email-heavy coordination.

What I learned

The most important product lesson was that the visible platform was only one part of the product.

The real product was the whole system around early-career tech talent: education, confidence-building, candidate readiness, employer trust, community support, and paid work experience. The software mattered because it made that system easier to scale.

That shaped the way I approached product decisions. The goal was not to automate every human touchpoint. It was to preserve the moments where human support mattered, while removing the operational drag that stopped the program from growing.

This project sits at the intersection of product strategy, technical delivery, marketplace design, and equity-centred service design. It required understanding the needs of multiple user groups, turning a complex manual workflow into a product, and making sure the platform supported both business sustainability and meaningful employment outcomes.