Among all of the prompts given to us, the Hootsuite prompt to build a solution that amplifies voices of minorities stood out to our group. We decided to take inspiration from the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which was intended to inspire and encourage us to achieve a better and more sustainable future. We believe Goal #10 (Reduce Inequality within and among countries) was best suited for our solution.
After discussing, the idea for AmpTalent was developed. If you google “Hiring Diverse Talent” you are simply met with blog posts or news articles that give you various ways your business could attract diverse talent. Reading the long exhaustive articles makes it clear that the majority of businesses would opt for using more direct tools such as LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor etc to find hires instead of spending additional resources on finding diverse talent.
This is where AmpTalent comes into play; AmpTalent is a Freelance Marketplace where businesses can find and hire diverse talent, including minorities for contract positions. In turn, people that identify as minorities can create a profile and search the Marketplace for contracts or jobs listed by businesses.
When launched, AmpTalent will be a free platform for businesses and contractors to get buy-in from various industries. AmpTalent can be monetized by using google ads until it can be turned into a paid platform. In the future, AmpTalent will charge a subscription fee to businesses to maintain their database of listings and manage their contractors on AmpTalent. On the other hand, contractors can choose various plans which will give them an array of advantages on the platform. Types of plans will include:
Basic Plan: allows contractor to simply view listings Professional Plan: allows contractor to view listings, create a professional profile and have the ability to be added to a business favourites list making their chances of re-hiring better Advance Plan: will include everything from the Basic & Professional Plan as well as give contractors an advantage of claiming contracts prior to the other users
The business subscription in addition to the contractor tiered subscription will create a strong monetization model for AmpTalent in the future.
In order to build AmpTalent, the team first created a template of the site using NicePage which enabled us to create the exact UI / UX that we had envisioned. Using Firebase and Google Cloud tools, we were able to create two login / registration pages that we used for the Business side and Contractor side. In addition, we used Javascript to add functionality to the login / registration pages as well as adding animation to our main page.
A challenge we had during this Hackathon was that we were all very new to front-end development and using web development tools such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As such we spent a lot of time learning how we could use these tools to build AmpTalent. In addition, integrating a database into AmpTalent also required a lot of trial and error to get it to function. It was also new for us to try to get an animation to work on the front page of the AmpTalent application, but with a bit of research we found a clever solution for it.
Despite the many challenges, we feel we accomplished a lot in terms of learning what we had to do to complete our AmpTalent tool. We were eventually able to link the firebase database to our sign-up system, which took a lot of web-searching and research, but it was well worth it. We also succeeded in getting the fading word animation figured out for the front page of AmpTalent, which made it look more professional and also gave us a sense of achievement. Lastly, as a group of fairly new programmers, we are proud that we were able to work together in incorporating each of our ideas, utilizing what we knew, learning what we did not know, and getting AmpTalent completed.
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