Case study · NGO & white-label
BFI-2-S Big Five plus the O*NET Mini Interest Profiler. Invite code plus parental consent. Fully Ukrainian-language, Foundation-branded, hosted at zirka.mktrl.foundation.
Career orientation for Ukrainian teens during the present generation-defining disruption is doing more than picking a major. The Foundation's working brief named the work as helping teens find their guiding star — a usable mental model of who they are and the kinds of work that fit that profile, deliverable while the teenager is still in the conversation with parents, teachers, and counsellors. Off-the-shelf consumer personality tests do not fit. The MBTI-style four-letter type fails the validity bar an academic donor expects. Brand-led products like 16Personalities or Red Bull Wingfinder either age-gate at 18+, are not available in Ukrainian at adequate translation depth, or — in the case of 16Personalities — compete head-on with JobCannon's own consumer brand, making the white-label arrangement awkward.
The Foundation's requirement set was specific. Tests had to be peer-reviewed psychometrically — Big Five and Holland Codes were both name-checked. The teen-facing surface had to be Foundation-branded, not JobCannon-branded — donors and partner schools work with the Foundation, not with a US-based consumer brand. Distribution had to be controlled by the Foundation through partner schools and youth programmes, not open registration. Parental consent had to be a real gate, not a checkbox — the programme runs on 13-17 personal data and GDPR Article 8 is not negotiable. And the report had to be teen-toned Ukrainian — not the corporate JobCannon consumer voice — and arrive while the teenager still cares.
The instrument stack is two short forms. BFI-2-S is the 30-item short form of the Big Five Inventory-2 (Soto & John, 2017) — peer-reviewed, age-appropriate, and short enough to keep a teen engaged. RIASEC is the 30-item O*NET Mini Interest Profiler maintained by the US Department of Labor — also peer-reviewed, also short, and it carries the explicit institutional weight a Foundation can point at when an academic donor asks where the instrument came from. 60 items total. Roughly 20 minutes for a teen at a comfortable pace. Scoring runs server-side; no third-party processor sees the personal data.
The architectural decision that took most of the engagement is how the white-label tenancy sits relative to the JobCannon engine. Two gates protect the teen on the way in. The invite code carries the distribution channel as a tag, so the Foundation can see whether codes routed through a particular partner school produce more completed assessments than codes routed through Foundation social channels — attribution analytics by channel come for free. The parental-consent form runs before the teen begins, records the consent legally for GDPR Article 8, and ships the data-subject rights pack on the same form so parents know what they signed up for. Both gates have to clear before a teen ever sees a test item.
The tenant-host registry in JobCannon (the host map in lib/i18n.tsx that routes zirka.mktrl.foundationdirectly to the Ukrainian locale) ensures a teen arriving on the Foundation host never sees a stray English string, never gets bumped to consumer JobCannon, and never sees a paywall. The brand on every page is “Зірка” in the masthead, MIR purple throughout, and the footer reads “Зірка майбутнього — проєкт Make It Real Foundation”. The JobCannon engine is invisible to the teen, and that is the design.
The engagement uncovered a problem JobCannon had not known existed. The Ukrainian-language Big Five that had been running on the consumer surface was not, in fact, a translation of an IPIP-50 instrument. It was a workplace-scenario rewrite from the consumer product with a mixed 4-and-5-option Likert scale, and that mixing silently miscalibrated scoring for every Ukrainian-speaking user who took it. The miscalibration was small enough not to be obvious in everyday use and large enough to be unacceptable for a programme that has to be defensible to academic reviewers.
The fix shipped as pull request #116 in the JobCannon engine. A faithful Ukrainian translation of the IPIP-50 (Goldberg, 1992) replaced the workplace-scenario rewrite. The Likert scale was standardised to a single 5-option response set across every item. The teen-tone overlay required by the Foundation engagement layers on top of this clean base, not on top of the old scenario-style copy. The reach of this fix is wider than the Foundation engagement: every Ukrainian-language JobCannon user — consumer and B2B — now runs on the rebuilt instrument. The Foundation engagement paid for fixing a problem the consumer product had been living with quietly.
NGO case studies routinely soft-focus the scope to make the engagement read larger than it is. We are noting the scope of this one explicitly so the reader can calibrate.
zirka.mktrl.foundation with Foundation brand “Зірка” in the masthead, MIR purple palette throughout, and Foundation attribution in the footer.lib/i18n.tsx so the host serves Ukrainian directly with no fall-back to consumer JobCannon and no English string drift.The questions partner schools, academic donors, and Microsoft Nonprofits reviewers tend to ask.
The original director-proposed name was "Аудит майбутнього" (Audit of the Future). The Foundation renamed it to "Зірка майбутнього" (Star of the Future) on 2026-04-22 — the foundation's working note flagged "audit" as corporate-coded language that does not land on a 13-17 audience, and the Ukrainian cultural idiom "путеводна зірка" (guiding star) carries the warmth the brand wanted. The short form "Зірка" reads as a one-word brand in the same family as Duolingo or Canva — easy to share, easy to remember, and the grant narrative writes itself ("we help children find their star").
Two scientifically validated instruments, scored together, no third-party tests in the funnel. Big Five via BFI-2-S — the 30-item short form of the Big Five Inventory-2 (Soto & John, 2017) — reads Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism on a 5-option Likert. RIASEC via the O*NET Mini Interest Profiler — 30 items maintained by the US Department of Labor — reads Holland's six occupational interest dimensions (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional). 60 items total, roughly 20 minutes for a teen at a comfortable pace. No MBTI, no 16Personalities, no Wingfinder — those were in the director's original spec and were dropped because they either lack peer-reviewed validity (MBTI), age-gate at 18+ (Red Bull Wingfinder), or compete directly with JobCannon's own consumer product (16Personalities).
Two gates filter different problems. The invite code is distributed by the Foundation through partner schools, youth programmes, and Foundation social channels — gating the test entry means a random visitor cannot start the assessment without first having been routed in by a trusted distribution channel. Distribution attribution comes for free (each code carries the channel tag). Parental consent is a hard legal requirement for processing personal data of 13-17 year-olds under GDPR Article 8 — the parent submits the consent form before the teen can begin, the consent is logged, and the data-subject rights pack lives on the same form. The two-gate design also doubles as a small natural barrier against the cohort being flooded by bots, abandoned attempts, or curious adults — both have to clear, both are honest.
During the Zirka build the engineering team discovered the existing JobCannon Ukrainian-language Big Five had not been a translation of an IPIP-50 instrument — it had been a workplace-scenario rewrite from the consumer product, with a mixed 4-and-5-option Likert scale that silently miscalibrated scoring for Ukrainian users. The fix shipped in PR #116: a faithful Ukrainian translation of the IPIP-50 (Goldberg, 1992) with a consistent 5-option Likert across all items, validated against the original English psychometric properties. The MIR engagement uncovered this as MIR-1 in the engineering log and bore the cost of fixing it — every Ukrainian-language JobCannon user since then has run on the rebuilt instrument.
A participant arriving at zirka.mktrl.foundation sees the Foundation's brand wordmark — "Зірка" — in the masthead, MIR's purple brand palette throughout, and footer attribution that reads "Зірка майбутнього — проєкт Make It Real Foundation". The result page renders with the same brand context, not the JobCannon consumer chrome. The dashboard host registry in JobCannon (lib/i18n.tsx TENANT_HOST_LOCALE) routes the host directly to the Ukrainian locale, so a teen entering the funnel never sees an English page, never has a chance to fall back to consumer JobCannon, and never sees a paywall — the entire experience is free and Ukrainian end to end.
The report is generated automatically from the BFI-2-S and RIASEC results — no manual review step. The Foundation's original specification called for a human-review gate ("Маша" was named as the reviewer in the early draft); the Foundation removed that gate on 2026-04-22 with the explicit note "забудь про Машу" (drop Маша) because speed-to-value beats third-party review for a teen audience where the report needs to land while the conversation is fresh. The report is teen-toned UA — not the corporate JobCannon adult voice — and the layout is being iterated in response to a 2026-06-04 user-test note that the type-portrait section read as a dense four-paragraph block. Density is being broken up with structure and visual hierarchy.
Three reasons recorded in the engagement notes. First, scientific rigour — Big Five and Holland Codes are peer-reviewed, the Foundation wanted a programme it could defend to academic donors, Microsoft Nonprofits, and school partners. MBTI and 16Personalities fail that bar. Second, age-fit — Red Bull Wingfinder was in the original draft but gates at 18+, so a 13-17 cohort cannot legally use it. Third, white-label economics — running the programme as a Foundation-branded surface (not "powered by 16Personalities") keeps the grant narrative clean and the donor relationship with the Foundation, not with an external brand. JobCannon ships the engine; the Foundation owns the relationship with teens and donors. Same flow runs for any NGO with the same shape — get in touch on the contact form.
JobCannon keeps a permanent free educational access path for schools and NGOs running ongoing cohorts — no per-seat fees on the participant side. White-label tenancy, locale routing, parental-consent gates, and the BFI-2-S + RIASEC stack used in the Зірка engagement are repeatable across NGOs serving the same age range; scope is set on a discovery call. If your Foundation runs a career-orientation, vocational, or workforce-readiness programme that needs a defensible, branded surface for teens or young adults, get in touch.
Or email hello@jobcannon.io. NGO partnership engagements are scoped on a discovery call.