JobLens

Inspiration

College students, especially UC students, or any job seekers have to keep track of their application for later update and contact. However, the process of inputting application information into Excel manually is really frustrating, our team has developed a web application to solve this problem.

What it does

The web application allows users to apply jobs on external board such as Handshake, LinkedIn, and our model will automatically update that application in Excel.

How we built it

Express.js for backend and HTML, Tailwind CSS, JavaScript (used to fetch API) MongoDB for user database Microsoft Azure AD for OAuth login using Microsoft account, Google's Gemini API and Nodemailer Power Automate for automatic update in Excel

Challenges we ran into

Most of our challenges came from working with and setting up APIs. The first challenge we faced was how to utilize OAuth to let users log in using Microsoft account. Secondly, we had to figure out how to extract key data from user-input links to job postings that they applied to by calling Gemini API. Besides, we needed to find out how do we send those data to user's Microsoft email (which could be extracted from the user information as they log in with Microsoft credentials). We also faced difficulties working with new tool (Power Automate). But eventually, we all learned a lot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that even though we did not have much experience at first, we tried our best to learn and finish the project together. And that we can contribute to make our life better.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to use OAuth to let users log in with a third-party account (like Microsoft). We also got to discover how to effectively extract important data from website links to get key information that we want to look for. It's also valuable for us to get a better sense of calling third-party APIs while developing this project. Besides, we learned how to use Power Automate, and how to integrate data in Excel.

What's next for JobLens

Keeping up with the purpose to make the campus life even more effective and easier. We are going to continue to develop this application to spread the convenience to more student so that they can save time in job searching and spend it to build up wonderful projects.