CareerCtrl!

Application tracker
Resume Rate
Application tracker
Resume Rate
Job Search
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Inspiration

Have you ever found yourself doomscrolling through job boards for hours, endlessly refreshing listings and submitting applications, only to hear nothing back? This vicious cycle can feel exhausting: scrolling, applying, waiting, and hoping for a response that may never come. Carefully tailoring each point in your resume to best match the job description, putting all of your effort into cover letters, only to do it all over again for the next job listing. Hours pass before you realise you’ve spent half your day searching, with little or nothing to show for it.

For many young people around Australia, this experience is becoming all too common. Australia’s overall unemployment rate sits around 4.1%, while youth unemployment is closer to 9-9.5%, more than double the national average! At the same time, the number of entry-level opportunities is dwindling. Graduate job postings fell by 24% in 2024 and dropped another 1*6% in early 2025*, making entry-level roles significantly more competitive. An ever-increasing number of candidates are chasing a shrinking pool of positions.

This leads to a job search process that feels overwhelming and demoralising. Students and graduates apply to dozens, oftentimes hundreds, of jobs, more often than not across multiple job boards and company portals. Every platform is a completely new experience, asking for different variations of the same information, taking in your resume, and sending it into something akin to a black hole. Tracking progress becomes impossible. Did that company respond? Did you already apply there? When did you send that resume, and was it even a good match?

Existing applications do very little to address this issue. Job boards such as Seek and Indeed are intended to maximise the number of listings and engagement with them rather than help applicants better manage and keep track of their applications. While there are some tools that allow users to track applications, they are often not the main focus of the company and therefore lack creativity and ingenuity.

The challenge facing today's youth is not simply finding jobs; it’s facing the job application process in an organised and sustainable way. Because when the odds already feel stacked against you, the last thing the job search should do is make you feel lost inside it.

What it does

Introducing CareerCtrl! The interactive job search assistant that keeps you motivated and ensures that your applications have the highest chance of getting a call back. With the help of Mousey and Key, our favourite AI companions, the goal of CareerCtrl is to make an often arduous process as easy as possible, allowing the younger generation to fight against the rising tide of unemployment. Our solution takes a three-pronged approach, helping users search for jobs, keep track of their applications, and tailor their resume to match the job description, all in one place.

Job search: Sick of having to scour through millions of websites? Well, look no further than the job search feature in CareerCtrl. This search feature uses Adzuna API, which aggregates job listings from across the web, including Seek, LinkedIn, and many other popular job boards, ensuring users of CareerCtrl have the broadest range of jobs to select from. Additionally, the search feature allows you to sort jobs by relevance, salary, and date posted. These filters help make the large variety of jobs less overwhelming.

Application tracker: Remembering every job you have applied to can be difficult, especially when you also have to keep track of every job that has responded to you. Using CareerCtrl’s application tracker, both of these tasks become a lot easier. CareerCtrl allows you to keep track of jobs you have already applied for and move them to the relevant columns based on what kind of response you get from the company, be that an interview, rejection, or being ghosted. No more sorting through a sea of emails, one quick look at our tracker will tell you everything you need to know about your applications. You can also manually add jobs that you have found externally, and CareerCtrl will find the role title and job description for you with just the URL.

Resume Tailoring: Tedious resume tailoring is a thing of the past. With CareerCtrl’s resume rating feature, all you need to do is upload your resume and click to apply the suggested improvements. Using AI, our feature compares the resume and the listing to see how well the uploaded resume addresses the key qualities and skills listed in the job application, giving you a percentage score and suggesting changes that could help improve this score. This streamlines the resume editing stage of the job application process, creating a huge relief in what can often be the biggest hurdle for people to overcome.

How we built it

We first put a large emphasis on the design and user experience of the platform, working through the flow of the site to determine the most significant features. This also involved thoughtfully planning our integration of AI and APIs, in order to properly maximise the utility of our platform. Accordingly, we each branched off into our areas of expertise, with members primarily focussed on backend, frontend, and design as relevant.

We built our app with a React and Vite frontend, a Python FastAPI backend deployed as a Docker container on AWS Lambda, and AWS CDK for infrastructure, integrating OpenAI GPT-4o for resume analysis and improvements, Adzuna for live job listings, and Firecrawl for scraping job postings, all tied together with AWS Cognito for authentication and DynamoDB for data persistence.

Challenges we ran into

The toughest challenge we faced was balancing innovation and uniqueness with utility. We wanted to develop a platform that was actually meaningful and applicable to something we each face. However, we also wanted to create something unique, which is unlike existing applications. This was particularly difficult when factoring in the AI aspect, as we wanted to ensure that it was used in a way that actually enhanced the program. As such, we faced this challenge by truly imbuing the characters and spirit of the application with personality and purpose. The character designs were 100% human-made and animated, and the atmosphere of our application was discussed at length by our team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the cohesive design and personality of our site. The animated dashboard, wooden desk resume page, bookshelf kanban board, and score-based character animations all feel like a cosy world, taking away from the stress of job applications. As part of this, we are so happy that we challenged ourselves in many areas of design, including handling 3D assets, 2D animation, and precise frontend edits.

Furthermore, the functionality of the site supports this, with AI deeply woven into the experience rather than sitting on top of it. Users can go from uploading a resume to understanding exactly what needs fixing, applying those fixes with their companion's guidance, and finding relevant jobs to apply to, all within a single, cohesive platform that is actually enjoyable to navigate.

We are also extremely proud of the attitudes we developed towards learning and facing challenges throughout this process. Each of us came out of this experience developing technical skills with stacks we’ve never engaged with before, on top of growing our collaboration and creativity.

What we learned

We learned that the most impactful products aren't only technically impressive, rather, they are ones where design and functionality reinforce each other. Building CareerCtrl pushed us to think carefully about how every feature felt to use, not just whether it worked. We also grew a lot technically, navigating complex AWS infrastructure, prompt engineering for reliable AI outputs, and coordinating a codebase across multiple branches and team members under time pressure. Most significantly, we learned how difficult it was to be innovative with fewer design constraints, but more practical ones. The hackathon format forced us to make decisive calls quickly, which ultimately led to a more focused and cohesive product than we might have built with unlimited time.

What's next for CareerCtrl!

We would love to fully deploy CareerCtrl, as although we have initiated deployment, certain features aren’t fully integrated. Beyond that, we see a lot of potential in expanding the platform. We came up with the idea of rewarding users for high-quality job applications by unlocking new pets. Some of these are already in the design phase! By adding more characters, rooms, and interactions, the journey of job hunting would feel much more worthwhile and less demoralising.