Lavoro

Inspiration

Having all of our team coming from different countries and backgrounds, we realized that there’s one problem that is shared across most countries. - The inefficiency of the work market in terms of supply/demand of specific jobs. In other words, there are jobs that often locals wouldn’t take no matter how high the compensation is. However, for refugees, migrants, and those in need, the situation might be different. A job that one might not want, can be a gold mine for another. Lavoro (Stands for ‘work’ in Italian) comes to solve this exact problem by providing a simple-to-use platform for businesses to find potential employees, and for migrants, refugees, and those in need to find a decent job, possibly, without having any experience or language skills.

How we built it

Web interface and signup form (HTML/CSS) - hosted on trylavoro.com
AWS for hosting the website, our ubuntu virtual machine, database and the flask engine for the FB bot.
flask to run a local server, receive the data from the website, feed the DB, and the FB bot.
A python program to enable full communication through a Facebook book, in ANY LANGUAGE, without having to access any setting, account, or nothing more than passively accepting job offers and accept or decline them.
A python program to interact with the Google-Cloud API to translate text in real time.
A python program to translate a job description into an image
A facebook bot built with python and flask to interact with our backend and work as a feeder to the front-end and the users

Challenges we ran into

Integrating between many different API’s and creating custom functions to make the different platforms “talk” to each other.
Coming up with an efficient algorithm to offer no more than few persons the same job at a time
Coming up with an algorithm and rating system so that both employers and employees could build trust in a community
Building 4 efficient databases to have all of the data stored securely
Come up with a method to match an employer with an employee (3-way handshake) --> 1) Job is being posted. If skills are matched than potential employee gets a message 2) if they accept, then job poster get a message with their skills and details 3) The job poster can either approve or decline. If they approve, then a connection is made.

What we learned

Before learning any technical skills we had to try and think from the point of view of a migrant or refugee. We had to also drop some of our assumptions. - For instance, that migrants and refugee often don’t have smartphones.
After researching and understanding our ‘target’ consumers, we had to bundle together a bunch of technologies that some were new to us. - Including heavy reliance on AWS and integration of Flask with Django, or the programming of complicated chatbots. We also didn’t have much experience working on the API’s we used, but still, we were able to learn how to integrate all the different interfaces.

What’s next for Lavoro

We truly believe that Lavoro will be helpful for a lot of people around the world. Not only for migrants and refugees, but also to business owners, people in true need of a job, and economic markets. We don’t offer another job posting website. - We offer a service which doesn’t require any active interaction. - Just sign up once using your FB account - That’s only one press of a button. - And start getting job suggestions sent out to you, in your language.

The inefficiency of the work market in terms of supply/demand of specific jobs. In other words, there are jobs that often locals wouldn’t take no matter how high the compensation is. However, for refugees, migrants, and those in need, the situation might be different. A job that one might not want, can be a gold mine for another. Lavoro (Stands for ‘work’ in Italian) comes to solve this exact problem by providing a simple-to-use platform for businesses to find potential employees, and for migrants, refugees, and those in need to find a decent job, possibly, without having any experience or language skills.