Door of Clubs — Professional Portal Development for Students and Employers
Door of Clubs allows student clubs to promote themselves, get financial aid from corporate sponsors, and help their members discover job opportunities from partner employers.
Challenge
The Door of Clubs began as a US-based startup with the main idea of allowing employers from different industries to find the right candidates for specific jobs or internships among student clubs’ members, contact them, and make offers using the service.
Their project was focused on three job portal software development stages:
- To design forms for registration and filling-in of student profiles.
- To build a marketing tool for employers with the ability to filter data from all the clubs and send job or internship offers to club participants.
- To set up the Club Directory — a tool for processing the databases of clubs and their representatives from different colleges and universities throughout the United States.
The Mbicycle team joined the project when such well-known companies as Activision, Bank Of America, and Spectrum had already shown interest in and became partners of the startup. With more corporate sponsors, the task scope grew too, so the client reached out to our team to augment the technical side of the project. The client chose our software development services for startups due to the positive feedback from other companies that had previously cooperated with us on similar projects, particularly around PHP development.
Job Portal Web Application Development as the Solution
In line with the Door of Clubs project vision, our team broke down the development workflows into three main stages.
User accounts. We created an interface where students could register their accounts and fill in their personal details. In their user accounts, students could:
- Specify personal information in their profiles
- Take part in surveys
- Upload CVs
- Indicate their skills, preferences, interests, etc.
- Choose a student club to join, or register their student club if it’s not yet on the platform
All this information was necessary to let employers find the right candidates easier and offer them a specific job or internship through the Door of Clubs service.
The client also established a prize of $25,000 to award the most enterprising students. For various parameters, students received special points, and a leaderboard was compiled based on the scores.
The Club Directory. Door of Clubs hosted a large database of contacts and other information about student clubs and their representatives from various colleges and universities throughout the USA.
Companies that registered on the platform gained access to these contacts and could search and filter the clubs and students who matched their specific requirements for recruitment purposes.
The companies could also add clubs and student profiles to their My Clubs list and then export all the necessary information to an Excel file.
The marketing tool. Employers registered on the platform could get access to the student club members to send them job or internship offers by email. Once students confirmed their interest in the offer, they got on the company’s list and could start a direct communication.
The employers could see their recruiting performance analytics as well as the user profiles of students who checked out their opportunities. This analytics module also visualized the data in graphs and charts.
When developing this set of solutions for the Door of Clubs project, the Mbicycle team completed the following tasks:
- We created a complex, extensive database structure, with data storage distributed across several servers.
- We enabled the storage of images on AWS servers to assure faster server response.
- We used additional libraries, such as Algolia Search, to speed up data retrieval.
- We implemented the ongoing collection of statistics as a background process.
Professional Portal Development: The Process
On our side, the project team included:
- Team lead
- 6 full-stack developers
- 2 QA engineers
- Project manager
The project manager was responsible for putting together the project documentation and identifying tasks for the developers and QA engineers. The team lead then assigned these tasks, put their deadlines, and verified the code quality after the task completion. This was followed by the QA engineers who would test the deliverable extensively before releasing it to the client.
To ensure the quality of job portal app development, the Mbicycle team employed three server types on the project: development, release, and production.
Technologies & Tools
Programming languages
PHP 7.2+
Frontend
Laravel Framework 5.6+, VueJs, D3Js
Database
AWS S3, Algolia Search
Third-party libraries & frameworks
Redis, Google Auth, Facebook Auth, LinkedIn Auth, Sendgrid
Results
It took Mbicycle six months to deliver the suite of robust solutions for the Door of Clubs project. The client was very satisfied with the final result, including the website performance, the speed and efficiency of data processing, and our strict adherence to the deadlines.
