Fliegen

Let your career take off with Fliegen!

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Inspiration

Have you ever sent a resume to a recruiter and not heard back? Messaged a professional on LinkedIn and got a "seen by" with no reply? You are the victim of bad hiring practices, and you are not alone.

As Seniors who are graduating soon, we are desperately trying to find jobs before we graduate. However, we find that the current hiring practices are unfriendly to jobseekers. There are cocky recruiters, professionals in the field who don't give a damn, and more. Ever paid for the premium on LinkedIn? Let me tell you, as someone who paid for LinkedIn premium for a few months, "competitive analytics" that they provide don't increase your chances of getting a job. And this is how we came up with the idea to make this Web application.

What it does

Fliegen is a novel approach to recruiting: It rewards recruiters based on their performance. Think of it as the Uber of recruiting; Professionals and recruiters get rated for establishing good rapport and networking well with job-seekers. These ratings get translated into cash incentives. Yes, we mean getting $5 for chatting on the web with a potential hire. Professionals and recruiters, think of it this way: You were already going to reach out to that fresh graduate anyway. Why not have some money in your pocket for it? Now imagine if 10 jobseekers contact you to enquire about opportunities. That's $50 worth of extra pocket money in a day! What do you do to get all this? Just be a good sport to jobseekers :)

How We built it

First, we had to come up with a topic. We naturally chose the topic closest to our hearts: the fear of being unemployed upon graduation. Next, we did some research into general UI/UX design as well as color theory to come up with a seamless user experience. After that, the fun stuff: design! We created app mockups using Adobe Illustrator. These app mockups were then translated into actual user interfaces using HTML and CSS, and made interactive with Bootstrap and Javascript. For our Backend, we initially experimented with Django, but ultimately we thought it could overcomplicate things and made a major design to use Node.js.

Challenges We ran into

Since we had nobody experienced in backend development, but had two guys with experience in Python, we initially decided to use Django and hit the ground running. However, it was proving too steep a learning curve in such a short period of time, so we dropped the idea. The second major bottleneck was implementing the web chat application. Being a real-time app, it had to run on Websockets for automatic updates. We would have liked to incorporate Authorize.net's API into our project, but couldn't due to time constraints. A general lack of sleep was also our major enemy as we rushed to complete our beloved hack before the deadline.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very proud of our frontend team for being able to realize the designer's vision and make the app look minimalist yet beautiful. Our backend guys, despite getting major coder's block for prolonged periods of time, managed to learn a lot throughout the process, as they had virtually zero experience in backend web dev.

What I learned

Don't try to learn Django during a hackathon. It's too complicated to stomach down in 10 hours.

What's next for Fliegen

We want to incorporate AI and Machine Learning to generate better professional-jobseeker matches. We would also like to implement added functionality such as searching for professionals by scanning business cards and "Meetups" where we bear the cost of Starbucks for a professional wanting to meet up with a jobseeker.

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