Hack the Job

landing page of our application, users are ready to input their desired location and import their PDF
After users click the submit button, top 6 jobs that are most related to their resume are shown
This time a location is entered so results are further filtered

Inspiration

We are CST students so we are finding it hard to find time out of our days to try to apply and look through all the different job listings to try and finds one that suit us well. We also noticed that a lot of CO-OP students were facing a lot of stress trying to apply for jobs while managing the CST workload. Which is why we figured this would be a good solution to save us time and allow us to spend more time actually preparing for interviews rather than just applying for jobs.

What it does

The python application takes in two inputs from the user. First is the location area where the user would like the jobs to be. The second is their resume or cover letter. The program will then parse through multiple websites and compare job listings to keywords found in the resume or cover letter which we also parse through. It will then return to the user webpages of job listings that are relevant to them and are recent.

How we built it

Using python we built the entire thing. The window that pops up and all of its UI is built in python using the tkinter library and the different parsers are built using libraries such as requests. The keywords that we are looking for are stored in a JSON files.

Challenges we ran into

Parsing websites was the biggest challenge. The reason this was challenging was because we had to figure how each website that we wanted to pull from was storing the job listings and how we could search keywords to find the job listings in the first place. Each website was different so what worked for one didn't necessarily work for another and made this part take up the most time by far.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were eventually able to parse all the websites we wanted to. It was very difficult and frustrating to try to figure it out for each so the feeling of relief and satisfaction after getting them all done was amazing. Overall we are also proud that we were able to complete anything at all and happy with the results of our hard work.

What we learned

We learned just how difficult it is to work with other websites and try to get something done on a very tight time schedule. Originally we tried to work with websites API's but it was too confusing so we went with a different route of parsing from straight from the HTML on the site and this was hard too but much easier for us to understand.

What's next for Hack the Job

Next if we would have like to add integration to more websites. Maybe some of the bigger platforms. We would also like to get our front end to be in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript instead of python as it is easier to style with that and if we have our project uploaded online as a website it is also much easier for people to use.