Legisla Brasil: qualifying Brazilian politics

In Brazil there are more than 70 thousand parliamentary advisors who form the cabinet team of city counselors, deputies and senators. To a large extent, these professionals are poorly selected and qualified. Unfortunately, nepotist and clientelist practices remain very present, moving away people from politics and making it difficult for parliamentarians to hire talents.

We facilitate the access and development of people, as parliamentary advisors, in politics, supporting the composition and strengthening the teams of parliamentarians. Our solution consists of specialized selections and professional development through training, performance monitoring and career management.

Politics in any country could be composed of more people committed and genuinely interested in contributing to their countries through the legislative branch. These professionals can contribute to legislation in line with the reality of each country, promoting social development, equality and justice. Our solution, if scaled globally, could transform the lives of millions of people.

Brazil has more than 70 thousand parliamentary advisors, people who make the laws all citizens should follow. They compose the cabinet teams of city councilors, deputies and senators. To a large extent, these professionals are poorly selected and low qualified. Unfortunately nepotist and clientelist practices remain very present in the composition of parliamentary offices. Currently, the composition of offices is mainly based on personal network of contacts, political parties and the electoral base of legislators. All of these positions, which are paid with public money, are positions of trust and therefore of free appointment. Many politicians appoint people without the minimum qualifications to these positions, which are used as bargaining chips for corruptive actions. This situation leads to a political scenario highly disconnected from society, which is often not producing legislation in favor of society. Therefore most people avoid to work in the Brazilian legislature, commonly associated with corruption. That is, highly qualified people willing to contribute to our country through politics do not follow this path to avoid an environment seen as negative. This gives our current scenario of difficulty of access and, at the same time, difficulty of the parliamentarians to find talents to compose their teams.

We have a wide target audience.

First, citizens from anywhere in Brazil, who want to work in politics and are interested in applying to one of our selection processes. Here we have two main publics: (i) university students and young people in early stage professional carrier; (ii) senior professionals with extensive experience. Both audiences have one thing in common: they wish to impact institutional politics, working as parliamentary advisors.

Second, we work directly with parliamentarians of all levels of Brazilian legislature (city counselors, deputies and senators), who hire us to be a bridge between their offices and the public mentioned above: high qualified people eager to work in politics.

We are in constant contact with all these publics, through conversations and interviews, understanding both the difficult of talented people to work in politics as well as the difficult of parliamentarians to find qualified people to compose their teams.

Apart from giving access to politics, we also help the parliamentary advisors to deliver a better work, through specialized training. We map their skill gaps and personalize the courses, covering technical, hard and soft skills.

We work in two main fronts: selection and qualification.

SELECTION: through wide recruitment and selection processes we enable the composition of qualified and representative teams. Our processes allow a greater capillarity of applications, since they cover a larger and more diverse universe than the contact networks of parliamentarians (usually used) would allow.

Public selections for legislative offices also create greater transparency with citizens, who can have the chance to actively participate, applying for open positions and closely following the composition of parliamentarians’ teams.

Another consequence is a greater rotation between different sectors: people who would not normally seek a career within the legislature end up acting in politics. In practice, we reduce the opportunity cost to work in politics. To ensure expected results, our selection processes evaluate different aspects of a professional, in technical and socioemotional skills. We defined the evaluation competences matrix through research with several legislators from different parts of Brazil and validated it with specialists in recruitment. All phases of our selection processes are carried out online. We use technology tools such as online forms, videoconferencing, automatic scheduling of interviews, timed tests, etc.

QUALIFICATION: we work on two main fronts: (a) qualification through continuous training (presential or online), ranging from introductory (for those entering the legislature) to specialized themes (aimed at improving performance); and (b) performance monitoring and career management, where we provide the opportunity for each professional to understand and develop important skills to improve their performance within their domain. To do so, we develop and apply individual assessments. We are also in continuous contact with them.

All advisors that participate in our qualification programs also become part of our national network of advisors. They are able to exchange best practices and overcome political polarization in favor of the country's social development.

Our trainings are developed through surveys with target audience, benchmarks and evaluation surveys with former participants. Modules are made of theoretical base, technical content and interpersonal skills. The methodology and pedagogical basis of each module varies, but always include practical cases.

Our accompaniment program use performance measurement tools and support to individual career plan. This program is based on detailed methodologies from studies focused on people management (individual development plan, feedback, qualitative and quantitative evaluation, self-assessment). We generate individual strategies in order to boost the development of core competencies and improve performance.

Legisla Brasil's action has as its main innovation point its approach. We have broken a long established logic in the context of people management in politics. When making custom selections for parliamentarians, we generate a very high value for each candidate that is allocated. This happens because we not only think about allocation, but also their formation and development, so that the transformation we are looking for does happen. When we approach different parliamentarians and show that there is a new possibility of conducting a quality selection process for their offices, this brings the politician closer to innovative practices and, above all, shows a trend towards renewing traditional practices. In addition, we use the existing technology in our favor, as we develop an entirely online selection, increasing our regional capillarity. By using the theories and technologies around the subject of people management combined with innovative communication, Legisla Brasil shows a new range of possibilities on the subject in politics, which is a great differential of the organization. Our solution provokes an innovative approach as it focuses on the potential of people in politics.

The main technology we have developed in our organization is a social technology. We created personalized processes in all of our fronts of action (selection process, training, etc). In order to make those social technologies accessible for every citizen and politician in our country (which has continental dimensions), we have been using different technologies such as online platforms for video conferences, scheduling platforms, developing online timed tests, etc.

Furthermore, we see technology as a main key for our organization to scale up. We plan to automate the match between talented people and politicians and also to digitize channels for our net to interact within each other in an organic way. 

As a team, we are aware of the crucial importance that technology has to make our work thrive and that’s the reason why we want to bring a technology-oriented person to join our team. We want that person not only to implement what we have already planned for improving our solution, but to help us see where else could we be more technological and aligned with the world’s trends in that area.

With our solution more people can start working with politics, and be part of the development that they seek in Brazil. In the short term we make being a part of a politicians’ team attractive for talented people, in the medium term we develop public professionals that are designing Brazilian laws and lastly, as a long term outcome, we could see a better legislative production. Thus, our solution address access to politics and qualification of parliamentary advisors bringing Brazil to a cultural change.  With our efforts, we show that it is possible to practice good politics and we attract more people, that truly represents Brasil, to work with it. Reassuring faith in institutions and democracy. Furthermore, with the work of the people that we insert in politics we are helping the development of better laws. 

To better understand the number of users, we divide them into groups based on their point of contact with the organization.

(1) Users who participated in our personalized selections: +40,000

(2) User of the annual program: +2,000 with an expected +5,000 in the next cycle (August/2019)

(3) Training Users: 50 with an expectation of 100+ for upcoming services

(4) Accompaniment Program Users: 10

In one year our goal is: 

(1) Users who participated in our personalized selections: +80,000

(2) User of the annual program: +10,000

(3) Training Users: 100

(4) Accompaniment Program Users: 50

In the next five years: 

(1) Users who participated in our personalized selections: +120,000

(2) User of the annual program: +15,000

(3) Training Users: 300

(4) Accompaniment Program Users: 150

Within the next year we aim to be known in the sector among the entire country, so that people start to care about best practices to select and develop talents. In that sense, we look forward to be a hub of benchmarks when concerning people in the legislative branch. In order to do that, we have settled goals to scale up our services and to work on new projects as well. 

For the next five years our expectations are bigger: we want our social technology to be used all over the country. We want every legislative office to be able to access a lead guidance for a fair and well conducted selective process and the basis for a  good personnel development program. We are willing to disclosure the core of our services for we know the importance of solving the underqualified politics scenario in Brazil.

In order to accomplish our goals for the next year and for the next five years we need to overcome two main barriers. 

The first one concerns our financial stability and is more connected to the short-come goals. We work today on a basis of a hybrid model, but the revenues we receive from selling ou personalized selections heavily depends on electoral cycles. Therefore, we still rely a lot on raising funds. 

The second barrier is more related to the long term perspective, which is to scale up. To accomplish that we have one main challenge: to build the automatization of processes by using technology in order to further facilitate the access of different parliamentarians to the most diverse and qualified talents of our database. Hence, we can expand the number of parliamentarians seeking talents through an impartial and quality platform.

For what concerns the financial stability, we have planned other ways of raising funds. Besides that, we have rearranged the tasks in between our team, so we can destinate more attention to that front. Lastly, we are also bringing a person to develop a focused project on that.

When thinking about scaling up, we have focused on structuring the platform for automatization and also looking for funds to put it in practice.

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Full-time: 3

Part-time: 2 (cofounders of the organization)

Contractors: professionals hired on demand (in total we hired 10 people who worked in different projects)

We are a team that dreams together. From the beginning all of us worked voluntarily to make our dream come true: the organization that Legisla Brasil is becoming. We genuinely believe in the power of an efficient, social, transparent, people-oriented politics. For that we need to work with people, which is what moves us forward.

We are a diverse team and passionate about politics. Summary of our team's key experiences:

• Caio Rolim: has worked in the first, second and third sector, in areas such as strategic consulting, fintech and government. Passionate about social causes, he founded the supra-party NGO Legisla Brasil, of which he is president today.

• Ana Kuntz (cofounder): completed a one year Public Management Program when she worked in the Bureau of Strategic Affairs at Mato Grosso State Government. Today she is a strategy consultant at Monitor Deloitte.

• Luciana Elmais (cofounder): holds a degree in Public Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas. She worked on the Lemann Foundation, where she was involved in implementing educational technologies in public schools and leadership development programmes. Today she is a parliamentary advisor at Sao Paulo State Legislative Assembly.

• Marina Cano: holds a degree in Public Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas. She works at Legisla Brasil for more than a year, leading the institutional relations area. 

• Beatriz Saab: holds a degree in Public Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas. She works at Legisla Brasil for more than a year, leading the recruitment and selection area.

• Training: São Paulo State Legislative Assembly, Instituto Legislativo Paulista and Fundação Getúlio Vargas of São Paulo are key partners in our training programs. They provide location, and professionals to develop training for the parliamentary advisors that are selected in our programs. 

• Supra party organizations. We share knowledge about our specialities, attend events,  share relationship contacts, build partnership in our programs, etc.

Our main clients and beneficiaries are people who want to work in politics or are already working in the legislature, and parliamentarians who seek to professionalize the recruitment and training of their advisory teams.

Our main products and services are:

ANNUAL PROGRAM (“Talents of Legislative”): annual recruiting program in which  we select a diverse pool of young talents and match them with parliamentarians interested in hiring people with their profiles. Those people also participate in continuous qualifications focused on the legislative branch and professional accompaniment;

TALENT BANK: qualified recommendation of professionals to legislative offices;

TRAININGS: preparation of people who want to work in politics and qualification of professionals already working in the legislature;

SELECTION PROCESSES: recruitment and selection processes tailored to parliamentary offices.

Numbers of our impact:

• People who applied to our selection processes: 40,000+

• Talented people working in politics as a result of our work: 80+

• Participants of our Annual Program “Talents of Legislative”: 50+

• Parliamentarians who used our services of recruitment and selection: 10+

In terms of revenue, we have a hybrid model:

1. Donations: non-refundable investments received through fundraising with institutions, foundations and individuals

2. Sale of services: on-demand selection processes that are paid by the parliamentarians. Peak sales of personalized selections is seasonal, according to election cycles.

Our financial sustainability is supported by four pilars: 

1. Institutional grants: fundraising with more institutions and foundations that invest in nonprofit organizations in Brazil and abroad

2. Individual donations: we are already working with individual donations, and we are developing a plan to increase our revenue share coming from this model

3. Directed donations: we are looking for donations for specific projects. Examples: investment to carry out selection processes in other regions, to provide training on specific topics, among others.

4. Sale of services: in addition to the services that are already for sale (recruitment and selection for parliamentary offices), we are prospecting to start to sell new products, increasing our revenue opportunities. The possibilities come from activities that we already work on. We are studying the feasibility of monetizing the profile recommendations for parliamentary offices; consultancy  on performance and career management of teams in the legislative offices; specialized training, focusing on the core of a legislative office; etc.

Participating of Solve's 12-month program will be a unique opportunity to develop our organization and pursue new funding opportunities, as we are at a very important moment: taking a next step to scale our services. In this sense, receiving mentorship and strategic advice from Solve and MIT networks would be very helpful and enriching.

In addition, it would be very valuable to be in contact with other organizations that also seek to solve our world’s most pressing problems. We will be able to exchange experiences, solutions, challenges and learn more about entrepreneurship.

The main challenges we want to tackle in the program are:

1. Preparing for scale: improvement of the organization's social impact measurement, fundraising and investment strategies, and structure for growth;

2. Structuring new technology projects: Using the knowledge and support of Solve’s program will be extremely important for developing our own platform for recruitment and selection; to automate the candidates evaluation online, and ideally through artificial intelligence.

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Types of organizations that can help accelerate our solution:

• HR Companies: with these companies we want to learn more about people analytics, team building, new technologies applied in the HR sector, etc;

• Organizations working with acceleration of political leaders: learn more about leadership in politics,  and the main competencies and skills for an effective work in the legislative branch;

• Legislative Houses: be in close contact with the institutions that host the parliamentarians and learn the most effective ways to support them with people management in their offices;

• Universities: partnerships to improve our training programs.

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Our solution brings a new form of political participation, strengthening Brazilian democracy. Our goal is to bring common citizens closer to the decision making process, making them part of the design of the country's public policies through the legislative branch. We are aligned with the Morgridge Family Foundation’s Prize and we will use the prize to invest in more technology, in order to scale our solution and reach new territories. The prize will allow us to create our own online platform for recruitment and selection, with tools to attend in an automated way a greater number of candidates and parliamentarians. We also want to use artificial intelligence to automate the match of the political profiles.

As we have more participants in our network, this platform will also standardize our interaction more effectively with all members, and ensure that good practices are exchanged between them, developing the legislative work as a whole throughout Brazil.

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