Applico

Your best buddy on the job-hunting journey!

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Inspiration

Have you ever looked at a position opening and thought to yourself “wait, have I applied to this one before?”

What it does

With Applico installed on your chrome browser, you can instantly see how many jobs you have applied to over a period of time, the titles, and the status of each application. Given the aggregated information, Applico tracks all the important details in your job hunting journey, and can even show you who your most-aspired employer is at the moment, based on the number of applications you have sent out to that company.

How we built it

The applico google chrome extension is built using html css, javascript, gmail API, google authentication and tableau to make the graphs easily. It does not use any fancy frameworks such as react as we were trying keep a simple design. The data flow of the application works as follows. Applico first authenticates that the user is allowing us to access the gmail use google authentication which the secret key that is not stored on any database for security reason. Once authenticated the users cookies are saved on there browser which allows for simplicity in the use of the extension. Then a request is sent to the gmail api with an API key and JSON data is returned which is parsed for specific keywords such as “thanks for applying” to find job specific emails and further parsed into a tabular format for creating graphs and other metrics for the user. We currently dont have custom graphs so we used tableau to display sample data.

Challenges we ran into

The technical difficulties we faced while building this extension were bypassing the Content security policy. So we had some inline javascript in our code and that was somehow violating the CSP. To troubleshoot this problem we spent a significant amount of time google about it and try various configurations of CSP. At first, we thought it was because of the way our react code was making the request to the API and then decided to change it to a normal HTML CSS JavaScript project but we still ended up encountering the same problem. Furthermore, we tried a second approach to make a GET request to Gmail but it was failing too because of the OAuth problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I learnt how to make extension in google chrome and how to troubleshoot errors by narrowing it down to a particular error. - Divanshu

I am proud of contributing an idea that we all found helpful for job applicants! - Lowell

and proud of signing up to a hackathon when i technically know nothing about the coding world - Lowel

What we learned

"We learnt alot about how google has CSP to perevent possible atacks. We also learnt about the various CSP configurations and what they mean with manifest files" - Dhruv

"I learnt about handling API request in react using react-Thunk and redux" - Divanshu

"I learned how to collaborate remotely with other developers and designers to integrate our work together in the final product" - Jayson

What's next for Applico

With the potential and foreseeable popularity of Applico, we anticipate it to expand on its functionality to make it more than just a job application organising tool. To go beyond (or to build up on) its basic features - namely organising, tracking, and categorising job applications, Applico can analyse and learn about a candidate’s profile by looking at existing application history. By linking up with Linkedin API, Applico will be able to make a recommendation of jobs that one may be interested in applying. Based on the rich database of a candidate’s application history, Applico will be able to perform highly matching results and point candidate to the right opportunities.

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