Break the glass ceiling

This is the login page for our system
This is the unreviewed page.
This is the reviewed page.
After clicking names in unreviewed page, user can see resume for this applicant with name blurred.
This is the resume page after review.

Inspiration

When Erin McKelvey was getting zero responses to her resume after graduating college. Mack McKelvey, on the other hand, got a 70 percent response rate on applications. It turned out that Woman who switched to man's name on resume goes from 0 to 70 Percent Response Rate. It's indicative of a still-widespread phenomena in the working world called name discrimination (though perhaps it's more germane to just call it discrimination, considering the name itself is merely the vehicle for discriminatory assumptions about the person who holds it). The applications with male names get more responses than those with female names. The phenomena don’t just apply to sex: name associated with particular ethnicities are similarly disadvantaged compared to those with more conventional names.

What it does

Recruiters want to hire strong applicants based on their abilities, while they cannot be 100% rational knowing the applicants’ gender and race. Applicants want to be evaluated fairly no matter they were born men or women, black or white. Therefore, NoCeiling Recruiting Management System provided HRs to evaluating new employees’ resume without knowing their names, so that they are able to assess potential employees fairly. Using NoCeiling Recruiting Management System also certifies the company with the public image of paying attention to gender and racial inequality.

How I built it

We used a Python module called PDFMiner to analyze the content of the resume and then used regular expression to formulate and identify the name of applicants. When the name has been identified, we search and replace all names in the resume with mosaics and create a new PDF document that need to be graded by HR. This name vaguer is our recruiting system’s core function. We also designed the system prototype with Figma, detailing the interface’s look, reviewing interface, and how the recruiter can select the final applicants after they’ve been graded.

Challenges I ran into

Right now, to vague the name in the pdf, we transform the imported pdf into text and scan the whole fire. As the system detects the name, it will make all the characters into star. However, we face the technical issue of transfer the text resume back to pdf. This is an technical issure, and we believe it can be resolved if we’re provided more time.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We successfully designed the NoCeiling recruiting system’s prototype with a full consideration on customer’s experience. We have divided the main pages into “All Resumes,” where the recruiters are able to read all the reviewed and unreviewed resumes. The main pages also include “My Account” and “Teams” where one HR is able to group with other HRs and further recruit staff.

What I learned

First of all, through designing an application system, we learned to think as a product manager. At the same time, we dived into the social inequality of name discrimination. Discrimination in workspace started from an early stage in the process of recruitment, and we hope NoCeiling Recruiting System can solve this issue to some extent. However, an application can never truly solve the problem of name discrimination unless people recognized it and tried to make it a more equal world.

What's next for Break the glass ceiling

Right now, Break the glass ceiling only consists of basic features for a recruitment management system. In the future, more features will be added including in-site messaging and advanced searching.