Inspiration
The Employee Side We aim to help job seekers make an informed decision on which companies they should spend their time and energy applying for. We're not connecting them with jobs. There's many tools for that already. In a highly saturated job market, job seekers are writing hundreds of cover letters and too many hours conducting company research. Salary is only one aspect of a compensation package. BenefitMe serves as a database and education for what types of benefits different companies offer, so that the user can choose companies that match their mental, physical, and medical needs. Or, in general, to find a company that offers benefits that the user finds important to them. This improves job security in the form of job satisfaction. Happy employees stay at a company longer.
The Employer Side Employee turnover is a huge problem for employers. The worst is when job candidates go through the entire recruitment process only to accept another job offer or -- when new employees leave after just a few years in favour of another company. It is incredibly expensive and difficult to hire and retain top talent. A generation or two ago, the salary of a job offer was the main make-or-break on a job contract. These days, benefits make up a large portion of a compensation package and employers spend a lot of money on them to attract and retain top talent. Oftentimes, when employers make changes to their benefits offerings, it is based off surveys conducted on their existing employees. However, to attract new talent, they will need data from credible outside sources.
What it does
BenefitMe connects to our database holding information provided by employers about their benefits offered to permanent employees. We collect information including, but not limited to, whether or not an employer offers:
- health, dental, and life insurance
- parental leave, and how much is paid
- mental health care
- vacation time, and how many weeks
- employee discounts and perks
BenefitMe is a free app for registered users to see, compare, and filter the benefit packages offered by employers in various industries. Simply log in, search for or select a company that interests you, and check out how their benefits packages compare to other companies! We collect user data upon registration to learn more about the demographic of our users as well as what benefits are most and least important to them. Without making an account, a user can still access the public portion of our app that shares government resources and articles to learn more about types of benefits and what they mean. It's important to know what the legal minimum requirements are for benefits offered, as a baseline to compare company offerings to. Many job seekers, especially when looking for their first job, may not even know what questions to ask when it comes to benefits! Our app is here to help them make informed decisions along their job search journey.
BenefitMe is going to be an essential tool for employees and employers alike. The new generation is having higher expectations from employers, especially on the topic of gender pay equality, mental health services, more paid time off, and work-life balance. More transparency between companies may make the offerings more competitive to a degree, and also allows companies to stand out from their competition. Benefits transparency allows companies to attract and retain quality candidates who are in it for the long term.
How we built it
Interactive mobile application: mongoDB + expressjs for backend, react app using the Expo framework for frontend Interface design & interactive application prototype: Figma Database: SQL Server Management Studio
Our small team consists of a data analyst (Carrie Lai), a UI/UX designer (Jessica Woo), and a full stack developer (Anson Yam). Each of us played to our strengths and also tried something new. It was both Jessica's and Anson's first hackathon. Anson had never made an app using before, and rose to the challenge. He had to look up how to do everything. Figma is Jessica's bread and butter, and she too was challenged by the functionality we wanted to see implemented. Carrie played the role of project manager and assisted everyone in their tasks while manually collecting credible data for our database (this isn't something easily web-scrapable without building an AI; some companies tend to be very vague about their benefits and perks).
Challenges we ran into
All 3 of our team members are in part-time computing studies at BCIT, and we have class on Saturdays from 9AM-12PM. This meant our time was severely cut short, and I am writing this story at a very dark hour. It was our first time making an app with the Expo framework, so even implementing simple things like navigation between screens was difficult. Anson felt over-ambitious with an unfamiliar tech stack, and he learned it was a lot more work than he realized to translate even part of a Figma design into code.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have such an innovative idea that we truly believe will change the world. It is difficult to admit we couldn't finish building the app in record time, but there is literally no end to our potential. We could add functionality for months and still have more to build. We plan to pitch our idea to investors, and our startup journey starts today.
What we learned
Jessica learned so much about the potential in Figma to create a truly interactive prototype of a mobile application. She is especially proud of making clickable checkboxes. Anson made (or at least started on) a mobile app with Expo! This will come in handy for his portfolio. Carrie learned how to write JSON syntax and also collaborated on building out the Figma prototype.
What's next for BenefitMe
BenefitMe needs to add a lot more data to our database from publicly available company information before rolling out to users. Since many companies do not share much information about their benefits and rewards, we expect to see increased preference towards companies that do, as they will certainly stand out in our app. This will challenge the bashful companies to make their benefits information publicly available to keep attracting quality candidates.
In the future, we plan to monetize our app by charging companies a fee to access our non-personally identifiable user data that will give them insight into what kinds of benefits are most and least important to the modern job seeker. We will also be able to run job ads on our app. Would you like invest in us?
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