This is post number 6 of the remote Internship series during Covid-19 times. For a collection of all installments, click here.

Weeks 5 & 6

Week five has been all about deep work on beautifying and increasing the seamless navigation of the e-commerce area of the website. I have not worked every day this week due to university courses and a two-day conference I took part in. During the days I did work, the main focus has been the re-design and improvement of the e-commerce. This has been a relatively challenging process that took around one full day's worth of deep work and problem-solving. We made some substantial tweaks and are waiting for feedback to see what is good and whatnot in the eyes of the supervisor/client. I also bought the first Squarespace plugin in my life this week. It's an add-on that allows having a "Load More" button when displaying a long list of items (which is the case for the products sold on the website we are working on). It works very well at the moment.

The iterative process of web design has also been at the core of week six. Once I received some additional feedback from the firm's founder, I got to listen carefully and begin the improvement process. It may be one of the last significant interventions on the website, which is now fully functioning and in constant motion. The second crucial activity I carried out this week on the internship front has been the first screening of SEO freelancers, mainly from LinkedIn. I gathered the most appropriate candidates (in my estimation) and their essential information in a table, which I then sent to the final decision-maker for feedback. Let's see how this project will unfold. I have noticed how difficult it is to be transparently unbiased when screening candidates' CVs and profiles. While it appears to be rather simple to condemn bias in theory, this is more complex in reality, and it sure requires significant experience and training to master. Even though not completely obvious, cognitive biases and preconceived notions often are prominent in every choice and analysis we make in our lives. When you are hiring someone, you need to decrease your cognitive fallacies to the extreme, if you want to do your job most optimally. Why is this precisely the case? Well, in my view, you want to hire purely based on competence (and possibly also personality characteristics and attitudes - which you will likely discover in a second interview stage, however) and not based on your perceptions of the world and individuals. This is particularly tough due to the instant judgmental mode our minds tend to get into when seeing another human being. I noticed the mind wants to jump to conclusions very quickly (maybe making instant judgments based on the picture of the person or the CV layout). That's dangerous. There is a well-balanced spot to be found when reviewing candidates. That sweet spot is one in which decision-making and complete objectivity meet.

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