Tether

Inspiration

We are ULM students. We have watched friends graduate and immediately pack up for Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. Not because Monroe has nothing to offer, but because nobody ever showed them what was available here for them specifically. That feeling of having to leave your hometown to build a real career is something every person in Northeast Louisiana knows. We built Tether to change that.

What it does

Tether is an AI-powered career platform built specifically for ULM and BPCC students. You upload your resume and Tether goes to work. AI agents scrape real Monroe job listings from local employers, match them to your exact skills, and generate a personalized Stay Rooted report with a Tether Score, your top 3 local employer matches, skill gap analysis, and a 90-day action plan. It also drafts a personalized outreach email to your top matched employer so you can reach out immediately.

How we built it

We built Tether using React and TailwindCSS on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, and Supabase for our database. The AI layer uses Google Gemini to power four separate agents: a resume parsing agent, a job matching agent, a report generation agent, and an outreach drafting agent. Web scraping is handled with httpx and BeautifulSoup pulling live job listings from Monroe employer sites. The whole pipeline was built and connected in under 48 hours using Cursor as our development environment.

Challenges we ran into

Building a multi-agent pipeline where each agent passes structured data to the next reliably was the hardest part. If the resume parser returned unexpected JSON the whole chain would break. We solved this by adding validation and retry logic at every step. Web scraping also required careful handling since local employer sites have inconsistent structure and some go down randomly. We built fallback logic so the app keeps working even when a source is unavailable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that Tether actually works on real Monroe Louisiana employers. This is not fake demo data. We are proud that we shipped responsible AI features from day one including prompt injection defense, a data transparency page, and a user data deletion route. Most of all we are proud that we built something that genuinely matters to the city we live in.

What we learned

The best hackathon ideas are not the most technically complex ones. They are the ones that solve a problem everyone in the room already feels. Every judge in Monroe knows brain drain is real. We did not have to convince anyone the problem exists. We just had to show them the solution.

What's next for Tether

Partnership with ULM and BPCC career centers to integrate Tether officially into student onboarding. An employer-side dashboard so Monroe companies can post directly to Tether. An alumni network feature connecting current students with graduates already working locally. And expansion to other mid-sized Louisiana cities facing the same brain drain problem.