CareerQuest

Inspiration

Resume building and preparing for technical interviews can be both challenging and demotivating. By transforming the process into a gamified experience, users gain a fun, engaging way to continuously level up as they refine their resumes and sharpen their technical assessment skills.

What it does

CareerQuest makes resume building and technical interview prep engaging and fun. It turns the process into a game where every improvement you make earns you experience points and helps you level up your skills.

With our AI chatbot, you get personalized suggestions to enhance your resume. Each time you apply the feedback and resubmit your resume, the AI recognizes your improvements and rewards you with experience. The higher your resume level, the more polished your resume becomes.

On the technical interview side, CareerQuest uses AI to generate interview questions tailored to your current skill level. For every question you answer correctly, you earn experience points. As you progress, the challenges become tougher, pushing you to continually refine your problem-solving skills.

In short, CareerQuest transforms the often daunting tasks of resume building and technical interview preparation into an interactive journey where every step forward is a win.

How we built it

CareerQuest was built with Next.js, integrating document processing for PDF/DOCX uploads with real-time text extraction. The UI features a responsive dark theme design with drag-and-drop capabilities. AWS powers AI resume analysis and interview prep through an interactive chat interface. We implemented client-side state management and modular components using TypeScript and React hooks for a seamless user experience.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a number of issues throughout the build. Deploying the front-end to AWS was tricky, and Bedrock wasn’t working as expected. The technical interview page also gave us trouble. The coding window initially struggled with compiler issues and wouldn’t run the user’s submitted code. After that, it was awarding experience and leveling up the user even when they submitted nothing, and often served the same problems repeatedly.

Originally, we planned to build a mobile app, but ran into native module compatibility problems that forced us to pivot. We shifted to the CareerQuest concept pretty late into the day, which meant we had to rethink the entire flow and rebuild fast.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we were able to get a fully functional website up and running with the limited time we had after pivoting our idea. One of our key accomplishments was getting the AI integrated in a way that genuinely helps users improve their resumes with smart, actionable feedback. We also built a coding challenge interface inspired by platforms like LeetCode, allowing users to practice technical questions in a familiar environment. On top of that, we learned and adapted to new tools on the fly—everything from AWS services to new front-end libraries—and used them effectively to bring CareerQuest to life.

What we learned

• AWS: bedrock and pushing to the cloud
• Building a website start to finish
• Integrating document submission
• Integrating a code editor and compiler
• Adding in an AI assistant

Built With

• next.js
• react
• typescript