Inspiration
During a job search, the biggest waste of time feels like mindlessly typing and retyping the same answers to the same questions on the same forms. Greenhouse.io with its long, monotonous questions in particular screamed for automation. Google Chrome offers support for automatically filling addresses and credit card numbers, but not any of the general information used in a job application.
What it does
Dynamically stores personal information, qualifications, and answers to questions that are common to 90% of job application forms, and automatically fills those forms for you. HireHose scrapes the html of these forms to find common id's and tags for input fields (i.e the input field with the "id=applicant-name" would be filled with a user's first name) and automatically loads them with your information. Custom fields can be added to adapt to the trickier, less common questions that still tend to show up.
How we built it
We created a chrome extension that mainly uses javascript
Challenges we ran into
Communication between the popup html (what appears when the chrome extension logo is clicked), its corresponding javascript, and content scripts (which along with the webpage's native html controls the DOM) was a nuisance, and maintaining the best data structure protocol was difficult the whole way through.
What we learned
Just use a SQL Database.
What's next for HireHose
Creating a parser that uses natural language processing could help predict which data fields should be automatically filled with what information more successfully.
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