Job XP

Job XP — Level up your career with quests and XP and turn job hunting into a winnable game.

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Inspiration

We were tired of “spray & pray” applications and ghosting. Gamification works in fitness and language learning—why not careers? We designed Job XP to give job seekers momentum, structure, and measurable progress.

What it does

JobXP is a web platform designed to help users find Canada-based tech jobs efficiently. With the post-pandemic job market tightening and the cost of living rising, finding stable and accessible employment is more important than ever.

The platform aggregates job postings from different sources and presents them in a clean, easy-to-navigate interface. Our goal was to build a simple, functional tool that empowers job seekers to explore opportunities without the usual stress and confusion of modern job searching.

How we built it

  • We built JobXP using Python, SQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • The backend includes a TCP server that handles HTTP requests and interacts with our database.
  • We initially experimented with web scraping using Selenium to gather job data, but faced challenges with CAPTCHAs and rate limits. To overcome this, we integrated Voyager endpoints from the unofficial LinkedIn API to fetch job postings and relevant metadata more efficiently.

Challenges we ran into

Our team’s front-end developer was unexpectedly unavailable, so we had to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from scratch during the hackathon to build the front end ourselves.

We also ran into technical obstacles when scraping job data—CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, and inconsistent responses. After experimenting with headless ChromeDriver, which didn’t solve the issue, we pivoted to using the Voyager API endpoints, which provided more stable access to job data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re especially proud of:

  • Building a working TCP server that processes HTTP requests reliably.
  • Designing and connecting our SQL database to store and retrieve job postings efficiently.
  • Learning and shipping a complete front-end interface in a very short time frame.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development fundamentals—from front-end design to backend communication—and how to manage our time effectively under pressure. This experience taught us not only new technical skills but also teamwork, adaptability, and prioritization.

What's next for Job XP: Level Up Your Career

We're planning on scraping posts from Indeed and other job posting platforms. We will potentially need proxies for this, as it appears that we are getting rate limited. We also plan on allowing companies to save jobs on our job board and adding new filters, such as only remote jobs. We also plan to add the ability to save jobs onto your dashboard to act as a to-do list and view how many other users have applied to jobs.

*[https://financialpost.com/fp-work/tech-job-postings-down-may-pre-pandemic-levels-indeed] *[https://github.com/tomquirk/linkedin-api]

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