Robota

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Inspiration

Our team's purpose was to work on a project that will make a tangible, long-term positive impact on Ukrainians while being feasible, and ready to deploy.

Since the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, more than 7 million Ukrainians have fled their country, although an estimated 2 million have returned home. They have the right to live and work in the EU for up to three years but face several difficulties finding employment. Of this, approximately 10 million are of working age, highlighting the centrality of employment and employability to successful integration. However, successful economic adjustment remains one of the most pressing challenges, with legal barriers to accessing the labour market, language and recertification requirements challenges matching talent to appropriate vacancies, and discrimination commonly cited as key constraints (UNCR, 2020; OECD and UNHCR, 2018).

Ukraine's Skilled Talent

With nearly 5.7 million students in a country the size of Texas, Ukraine is among the largest and most talented international student markets in Europe. In addition, The country ranks fourth in the world in the number of people with a higher education, and the literacy rate is 100 percent among its youngest generations. In 2017/18 the number of students in primary and secondary school reached 3,922,000, in vocational school 269,400 and in higher education 1,538,600 students.

Unemployment Rates

The first full month of the war (March 2022), the overall unemployment rate in the US was 3.6%. For IT professionals, the unemployment rate was 2% – almost 50% less. This means the available IT workforce is less than represented 2% – making the talent supply more scarce than it already appears.

Impact of War on offshore IT ressources

For companies hiring IT professionals, it’s never been harder to find and obtain top talent than today’s landscape domestically. Also, with the United States’ reliance on offshore talent – because domestic is so difficult to find due to supply and demand – to have Ukraine, the number one technology offshore supplier, completely shut down due to the war further depletes the global supply that US companies rely on. It truly becomes a needle in a haystack to find the right candidate in IT who’s willing to choose you over all of your competitors nationwide.

Now think about the overall landscape – how it’s difficult to hire and what the numbers are that kind of show that. Recently, technology job postings went up 7.5%, from February to March – from 383,000 open technology jobs to 412,000, which is an increase of 29,000 or 7.5%.

The supply is dwindling, the demand is going up, and it was already a difficult industry to fill roles in. These are realities that hiring managers and companies with software technology openings do not want to hear, however, they have to face the facts.

The motivation for Robota was to solve these issues by connecting employers with potential Ukrainians looking for work to help Ukrainians access opportunities to build their financial security, and employers find the right talent for their organization. The unique value that Robota offers is in our Ontology and rule-based matching algorithm, which can leverage machine / deep learning to provide better matches for jobs. We completed a working prototype which is currently deployed on https://robotahq.netlify.app/

The important of Financial Security for improved longterm quality of life (Social Determinant of Health)

Exposure to prolonged economic hardship has detrimental impacts on individual health and well-being. Comprehensive solutions, such as efforts to improve financial capability and reduce income volatility are important, especially to support Ukraine. However, current interventions tend to be “siloed.” That is, they address access to safe and affordable housing, medical care, and food in distinct interventions without addressing financial health, or the longer-term and underlying issues of having enough money, income, or financial capability. Financial health is a comprehensive assessment of finances that includes the ability to support meeting basic needs, which also encompasses opportunities to save and build wealth. Building on research on associations between income and physical health, this work demonstrates that financial health is an important, independent social determinant of health that can be defined, measured, and influenced to improve health and wellbeing. (Weida et al, 2020) Robota empowers Ukranians to build their financial wealth by finding employment.

Why we focused on improving Employment

Experiences of economic hardship such as housing and food insecurity are symptoms of a deeper hardship in financial health. Financial health is related to other forms of economic insecurity (housing insecurity, food insecurity, energy insecurity) such that it is a root cause of these other insecurities. Efforts to create meaningful opportunities to increase wealth in order to improve food security, housing security, and other economic hardships have been limited by the lack of consistent, validated measures and definitions of individual financial health. Robota aims to target the root of the problem, by giving more Ukranians a source of stable income, and enabling them to develop independence and leverage their skills to contribute to the global economy.

What it does

Robota supports Ukrainians in finding their next opportunity in their career journey and connects prospective employers with Ukrainian talent.

🇺🇦 Why Robota?

1) Removing obstacles in the entire recruitment process from pre-interview, and application to the first day of the job.

2) Supporting Ukrainians in career development by connecting them with roles and employers that would make a great match with their skill sets. Through specialized training, and on-the-job learning, Robota users will gain financial security, have / be able to secure VISA's

Our market is large because we are targeting any companies that are looking to hire talent overseas / from Ukraine, but can expand so that anyone who is overseas and looking for a job can utilize our platform to be matched. What we offer is a screening process which ensures that both companies and users are vetted, and valid, and our customers will be the employers who look for the right candidate. The Global Online Recruitment Market was valued at USD 27681.11 Million in the year 2020. The demand for Employers and Employees is expected to increase in the region, owing to the rapid development of the online recruitment market by the U.S., Chinese, Russian and Japanese companies. Increasing focus on automation in demand for online recruitment, increasing social media and growing smartphone penetration efficiently with no delay rising the job seekers in this market and online recruitment companies are investing more in R&D activities and technological betterment that propel the growth of the global online recruitment market. (Global Newswire) Our current competitors do not have a secure, vetting strategy in place or quality assurance checks in the employer or employee registration process. Our competitors cannot match our platform due to issues like security concerns and lack of verification. For example, employukraine posts jobs with unethical wages like 5$ an hour, jobaidukraine crashes on some job applications, and jobs4ukr attempts to sell items to users which is unethical. Our algorithm is better then competitors, by utilizing ontology and rule based recommendations.

How we built it

Figma Frontend + Backend

Challenges we ran into

• not too many difficulties since we are all familiar with our tech stack
• we had to rebuild the Figma mockups towards the end but that was done within hours
• time constraint issues with each member since we're all in the workforce/out of the country

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Integrating backend with frontend and deployment
• Coming up with a feasible and helpful idea
• Working as a team despite our differences

What we learned

• We learned how to Google better!

What's next for Robota

• We start selling this to sponsors!

Built With

• bootstrap
• django
• gcp
• netlify
• python
• react
• typescript