HospoHirer

Inspiration

We see lots of young people in our community who want to work in hospitality but struggle to get that first opportunity. At the same time, local venues say they can’t find reliable staff, even though the talent is there. We were inspired by hipages‑style marketplaces and wanted to build a simple, youth‑focused platform that makes it easier for both sides to find each other.

What it does

HospoHirer is a web platform that connects young job‑seekers with local hospitality employers. Young people create profiles that show their skills, availability and interests in a friendly, low‑pressure way. Employers can browse nearby profiles, filter by what they need, and then reach out to candidates they’d like to hire or interview.

How we built it

We built HospoHirer as a full‑stack web app using Next.js on the frontend and Supabase on the backend. Next.js powers our UI and API routes for actions like creating profiles and listing candidates, while Supabase provides authentication and a Postgres database for securely storing users and profiles. We implemented role‑based views so that young people see a profile‑creation flow and employers see a search and shortlist dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was scoping the idea so we could deliver a full end‑to‑end flow in a weekend, not just mockups. We had to balance making profiles rich enough for employers with being simple enough for first‑time job‑seekers. On the technical side, wiring up authentication and database relationships in Next.js and Supabase took some debugging and iteration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that HospoHirer is a working prototype: a young person can sign up, create a profile and appear instantly in an employer’s search. We also managed to stand up a real database, authentication and role‑based dashboards within the hackathon time. Most of all, we turned a real community problem (youth unemployment in hospitality) into something concrete that people could actually try.

What we learned

We learned how to quickly build a production‑style app using Next.js and Supabase, including authentication, APIs and data modelling. Designing for both young job‑seekers and busy employers reminded us that language and UX need to be tailored to each audience.

What's next for HospoHirer

Next, we want to test HospoHirer with real young people and a few local venues to see what works and what needs to change. We’d also like to add features like skill badges or intro videos to help candidates stand out. Longer term, we’d aim to expand from our suburb to other neighbourhoods and potentially other entry‑level industries, to further reduce youth unemployment in our community.