Meet Cute Recruit

Inspiration

We were inspired to create this project because of the biases that exist in the professional world that often negatively impact the opportunities those who hold certain identities face when applying for jobs within a company. We wanted to come up with a way for these individuals to feel more welcomed in the hiring process and for the companies to be able to provide those welcoming experiences. For the general theme, we were inspired by the popularity of dating apps/sites and the "gamification" of a similar stressful process and how that often provides for a more comfortable experience.

When individuals do not believe they are already represented within a team or workspace, they may feel more hesitant and even afraid to apply to certain roles or companies. This fear also negatively impacts recruiters who want to build a more diverse workplace but can't seem to find the best way to draw these individuals to their company. This is where Meet Cute Recruit comes in!

What it does

Meet Cute Recruit is the ultimate inclusive recruitment process provider. When an individual enters the site, they have the opportunity to chat without our lovable AI, Boo the bat, and list aspects of themselves, to their comfort level. This allows for a more comfortable experience as you're not directly sharing this often-sensitive information with someone who may hold biases against you. This data is then used to find interviewers within the company who share similar aspects of the individual's identity and provide "matches" of similar interviewers in the hope of creating a more bias free environment during the interview and beyond. We chose a bat for our AI mascot because while bats are somewhat blind, they are great listeners! We hope Boo is able to lead by example for the interviewers as once commonalities are established, the interview can be more focused on who the interviewee is on the inside through their words. In addition, we hope to raise some awareness for saving the bats as currently more than half of the bat species in the United States are in severe decline or listed as endangered. It is our hope that with every company that signs with Meet Cute Recruit, a portion of that commission would be donated to conservation efforts.

How we built it

We built our website using Glitch, GoDaddy, GitHub, and coded in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Wow chatbots are difficult to make! We are a group of somewhat beginner coders, with some members having more experience in one language or another, so there was a bit of a learning curve when it came to figuring out who was going to focus on each part and how to best support each other as a team. There were also the obligatory random error messages that bugged us for hours until we found one simple little mistake that solved every problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we really love the design of the website, the passionate message behind it, and the thought that went into it. The premise came to us rather quickly, likely from a place of connection to this topic because of the diverse identities our group holds, and we were determined to see it through to the end. We are also proud of how well the chatbot turned out, despite our lack of experience with the topic.

What we learned

We learned that there really is a substantial need in the industry, and even the corporate world in general, for ideas/products like this. Everyone deserves to have a fair, bias-free interview experience and workplace environment. We also had some really helpful hands-on experiences with new coding languages, software, and programs.

What's next for Meet Cute Recruit

We would like to be able to polish up our code a bit more and make for a more user-friendly interface, as we already included dyslexic friendly fonts, and would like to find more ways to make it as inclusive as possible. We also will work on improving our AI bot and optimizing its responses to promote an experience of comfort and helpfulness. In addition, implementing a way to make our product marketable to companies who may want to implement its services into their recruitment process.