HireVerse

Unlock your dream job with personalized prep and real alumni insights — all in one place, for free.

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About the Project

Inspiration

As UNSW students ourselves, we know how challenging it can be to prepare for technical interviews. Platforms like LeetCode and LinkedIn provide helpful resources, but they’re often missing crucial elements:

  • Company-tagged LeetCode problems are locked behind a paywall or simply unavailable.
  • Connecting with alumni for personalized advice through LinkedIn can be hit-or-miss.
  • Finding reliable and comprehensive company insights, such as recruiter contacts or in-depth reviews, often means digging through multiple, unreliable sources like Reddit and Glassdoor.

We wanted to build something that addressed all these problems in one place. The idea of HireVerse was born from our desire to help UNSW students with their interview preparation by providing personalized problem lists, easy access to alumni, and in-depth company insights — and to do it all for free.

What We Learned

During the development of HireVerse, we learned a lot in several key areas:

  1. Personalization of Problem Sets: We dove deep into algorithms for calculating weighted scores and rankings for problem sets based on user preferences, target companies, and interview dates. This taught us how to dynamically provide personalized content in a user-friendly way.

  2. Building Scalable Backend Solutions: Implementing Firebase Firestore taught us how to build a backend that is not only scalable but also secure. We learned how to structure our database and integrate it seamlessly with the frontend.

  3. Creating an Accessible and Responsive UI: Ensuring that our platform is fully accessible, responsive, and dark-mode friendly was a challenge that pushed us to understand the importance of UI/UX design beyond aesthetics. We wanted HireVerse to be usable for everyone.

  4. Managing User Data Securely: Working with Firebase Authentication, we ensured that user data is protected and handled with care.

How We Built It

We built HireVerse using modern web technologies and services:

  • Frontend:
    We used React along with Material UI to build a clean, responsive, and accessible interface. Special care was taken to ensure that all users, including those using keyboard navigation, could easily access all features.

  • Backend:
    The backend is powered by Firebase, which handles user authentication, database management (Firestore), and file storage. This allowed us to focus on implementing core features without having to manage infrastructure.

  • Problem Ranking Algorithm:
    Our core feature, the personalized LeetCode problem list, uses a weighted scoring system to rank problems based on criteria like company relevance, difficulty, and user-specified timelines.

Challenges We Faced

Building HireVerse wasn’t without its challenges:

  1. Problem Ranking Algorithm Complexity:
    Creating an algorithm that accurately ranks and personalizes LeetCode problems was a significant challenge. We had to fine-tune the weighting system to ensure that the most relevant problems would surface for each user’s specific goals and preparation time.

  2. Alumni Connect Feature:
    We wanted to provide seamless alumni-student connections. Integrating Calendly and making the signup process simple yet secure, while providing enough control over data visibility (e.g., email and Calendly link display options), was a key challenge we faced.

  3. Maintaining a Free Platform:
    One of our goals was to ensure that HireVerse is entirely free for students. We had to find the right balance between offering high-value features while keeping costs manageable. Using Firebase allowed us to build a scalable and cost-effective solution.

  4. UI/UX for Accessibility:
    Building an accessible platform required us to pay extra attention to things like keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and ensuring color contrast met accessibility standards. This added time and complexity to the project but was crucial for inclusivity.

The Road Ahead

While we’ve built a strong MVP for HireVerse, we see a lot of potential to grow. Our next steps would include:

  • Expanding the problem tagging and verification system to cover more companies and regions.
  • Developing a more advanced alumni recommendation system based on user profile matching.
  • Enhancing company insights with more crowdsourced and verified data.

We believe HireVerse has the potential to become a go-to resource for UNSW students and beyond, providing real value to those preparing for technical interviews and job searches.

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