Connect You
Job Hunting And Social Networking Website
#Web #UX & UI Design #Fullstack Design
Connect You is a job hunting and social networking website that provides company referrals for college students and strong candidates for recruiters.
There are two interfaces for students and employers respectively. For students, they could not only get socially connected with each other and also acquire job information on this website. The most exciting part is that students could easily submit their referrals. As for employers, they could post their jobs and view students resumes.
Background Story
I am about to graduate from college and am currently looking for a job. However, finding the first internship or job is hard, especially for a students like me because I do not know people outside of campus. It is frustrating that I sent out 100+ resumes and barely got any phone calls back. I wish I could know more industry professionals to get some interviews.
I felt that there should be more students like me who are having trouble with finding the job. Therefore, I came up with an idea: build a platform for students and make it easier to find jobs.
Interview and Research
To find out the pain point of students when finding the job, and to figure out what kind of employee is the company really want, I interviewed 2 sophomore students who want to find an internship, and 6 graduating students who are currently finding job, and 3 employers. I asked students the problems they have faced and what they need when finding the job. And I also asked employers what kind of staff they are looking for.
"I want to do some internships during summer vacation but don’t know where I can get those information."
—— Wu Yueze, Sophomore Students
"I have sent tons of resumes but haven’t got any phone calls back, not to mention the onsite interview!"
—— Yan Zhilong, Senior student
—— Luo Ying, Senior Student
"Hiring someone who are just graduated is not cost-effective. They don’t have much job experience. It takes time to train them before they could really do something in the job."
—— Conke Hu, CEO of Shanghai MaxWit Software Co. Ltd
"It's not easy to fully evaluate a recent graduated students just from an interview. I need to know them deeper before I could make decision."
—— Celine Sun, HR of Shanghai Wicresoft Co. Ltd.
Sketch & Wireframes
Based on students and employers’ expectations, I organised and summarised the functionality of the website and started to design the interfaces of websites.
Sitemap:
Sketch:
Implementation
I did all the job when designing this website, including researching, UX and UI designing and coding.
I used front-end framework Bootstrap to make it responsive. Besides, I used Django as back-end framework to make it dynamic and fully functional. Bootstrap and Django were both new to me, but it only took me two days for me to learn Bootstrap and I acquired basic part of Django within one week.
User Testing
After I've implemented all the functions, I invited some friends to test this website. It consisted of 2 rounds with a total of 10 participants.
For the first round, the participants are my classmates whose major is Computer Science. The main goal was to find bugs. By using Black Box Tesing, which is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures or workings, they've found some bugs, such as failing to store sessions when login.For the second round, the testers are all regular users, I just let them interacted with the website freely and interviewed them for their feelings afterwards.
Final Pitch
Everything was ready. I released my website in local campus and there are increasing numbers of students and employers to register.
"I'm so relieved when I saw your website. It would make job hunting a lot easier", says the student. "It is a brilliant idea, you should invite more employers to join", says one of the employer.
Based on this website, I even finished my graduation dissertation: The Designing of Campus Job And Social Networking Website Based on Django. After the dissertation defense, I got the assesment of 85(%).
Connect You is still on Beta version, and I am getting feedbacks from users.
I've also pushed all my code to Github page.
For more information, please refer to: https://github.com/Xiao-Ai/social_website
