Problem

Operation code helps military veterans, service members, and their families achieve a career in the technology industry by providing career guidance, mentorship, scholarships, coding camps, and several other services. Operation Code mainly provides job opportunities through a Slack-based community. This Slack has ~11k members which consist of both veterans/service members/families and recruiters/companies where ~1.8k of them are active every week. For organizations and recruiters that regularly post job opportunities from their company onto the Slack, they have a very minute idea of how effective this Slack is towards their company’s applications and whether it provides the company with full-time workers or not. For Operation Code’s staff, it is very important to understand how effective their service is for their members and if it does provide meaningful job opportunities and experiences.

Solution

We want to design a web application that will serve as a job board for Operation Code. The web app should include extensive and detail-oriented analytics across all users and report that data to organizations and admins for better understanding of the community. The data should be accompanied by visualization and representation of detailed analytics and user demographics for each job posting and aggregate that data for each organization. Community members should be able to easily access this job board resource. Also, the app should have secure referral-based authorization for organizations that want to post jobs of their own on the job board.

Design

There are many job boards available online for anyone to use so we had to make sure that our job board was specifically designed with military veterans in mind. These veterans want to be able to see jobs that will specifically highlight them and look for veterans which was a key because we could separate those jobs from others. Ease of use was definitely a priority because we wanted our veterans to be able to use this as a quick tool for job search as their main goal was learning software development which they learned with other Operation Code programs. However, we also wanted to centralize a lot of their job search needs which meant there would have to be multiple features across multiple pages. This was a big design and product challenge where we had to tradeoff certain uses for ease of use and vice versa.

Tech Stack

Operation Code is a full-stack web application that uses the T3 stack for the codebase. This stack is built on top of NextJS and uses Typescript as our language, tRPC for query routing, Prisma as an ORM for database, TailwindCSS for styling, and NextAuth for authentication. Additionally, we used Supabase as our relational database along with authentication and storage needs.

Features

Onboarding

To help veterans most effectively, we needed to tailor the job board to their specific needs as best as possible. To accomplish this, we created a questionnaire, displayed after sign-up, that collected information on military and disability status, work preferences, experience, and demographic information. We then used this information to show jobs postings on the dashboard that reflect the veteran’s preferences, such as company size, goals, location, and more.

Job Analytics

To help Operation Code staff find jobs to feature across the platform for all users, every job posting collects several analytics. These include number of applications, number of offers vs. number of rejections, and other applicant information. Operation Code staff can then view these analytics on the job posting’s page to determine which jobs they want to feature for all users.

Job History

To help users track their job application, we created the “Job History” section. In this section, users can see which companies they’ve applied to on the platform, and update what stage of the application they’re in as they move through the application process for each job. If a user hasn’t updated their status for a job for a prolonged period of time, the platform will automatically email them to remind them about the application.