Building GradGlance (1/4): Introduction & Motivation

Introduction

Put simply, graduate job hunting in the UK is an extreme sport. Around September every year, companies in the UK open their portals to new talent, flooding the market with job opportunities for recent graduates. The driven student understands that job applications are squarely a numbers game. And so they take as many shots as they possibly can.

But taking many shots involves a lot of things. First, the student must subscribe to several job boards to discover opportunities the moment they drop as delay can be dangerous. Companies have been known to close their portals, long before the official closing date, once they fill their quota of applicants. Second, the student must then go through the actual application which kickstarts a multi-stage process that, depending on the company, can involve situational judgement tests, numerical tests, on-demand video interviews, rounds of technical interviews and assessment centers.

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

– Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

Having experienced this phase first-hand, I think the most frustrating part of the recruitment process is the waiting between one phase of the application and the next. Waiting for the outcome of an assessment; to hear back from the recruiter, to know whether to cut your losses or prepare for the next stage. After taking so many shots, not hearing back in time from recruiters can be understandably discouraging.

Online forums such as The Student Room (TSR) provide a great platform for students to discuss graduate applications. This is incredibly useful as it provides a vital sense of community during what can be a challenging time. The job threads posted on the forum serve multiple purposes.

For starters, it serves as a means to discover job opportunities from job boards to which an applicant may not be subscribed. There are several players in the job-discovery industry, each with a slightly different value proposition. Some players cater only to STEM jobs, others to specific industries. Even with the bigger players in the industry, the fragmentation of the market makes it quite difficult for one job board to cover the entirety of job opportunities available to the applicant. Hence, the career forum may be where many applicants hear about a job for the first time. Second, the community encourages conversations about what to expect in the interviews by members generous enough to share their experiences. Most importantly, perhaps, comments by fellow applicants on these job threads keep everyone in the community aware of the status of their applications. By leveraging this network of anonymous comrades, applicants can know through their peers when Company X sends out technical interviews to successful applicants or if Company Z has closed the pool after filling the roles for the year.

It goes without saying that information from this forum is not always positive. Applicants may find from random comments that a company has moved on with other candidates weeks before the official rejection comes in. But I believe the clarity gained from this early knowledge is beneficial to most because it helps applicants make peace with their loss and dispense with their grief. More cogently, it encourages applicants to redirect their energy towards other active applications and promptly move on with life.

As a platform, TSR provides extensive value by leveraging the community of applicants to solve the “waiting” problem. However, accessing the platform was inefficient for the serious user. So I built a service to make it better.

Enter GradGlance

GradGlance was developed in response to my frustrations with TSR forums. While I was job hunting, I would have to log in several times a day to specific job threads to see if a fellow applicant had heard back from a particular stage of the application process. Needless to say, this was time and effort that could have been put to more productive use elsewhere.

Fast forward to this year, two of my favourite people are in the job-hunting phase and I figured to create something that could help simplify their interactions with the forum; while helping me to stay on top of the jobs they have applied to and be there for them in my own way. At this point, I feel the need to state that while GradGlance is accessible at no cost to anyone anywhere in the world ¹, my initial ambitions for the service were far less global.

At its core, GradGlance is a service that tracks job threads in the TSR career forum and sends users a daily email of changes in the last 24 hours, helping users see what’s new, what’s changed and what’s trending at a glance.

Setting the Scene

I am pleased to report that GradGlance has been chugging along for a few weeks, delivering value to subscribers within the UK and beyond. Building this service has helped me to demonstrate my abilities via a side project; increased my confidence as a well-rounded engineer; allowed me to meet my favourite people at their point of need; and has brought me a lot of meaning in the process. This was, for all intent and purposes, a labour of love.

My final act, before moving on to the next thing, is to write about how I engineered GradGlance, detailing the decisions, the engineering challenges and how I built it up from a blank page.

I intend this to be a 4 part series that touches on:

• Introduction & Motivation (this post)

• Application Design & Development

• Application Deployment & Hosting

• Application Logging & Analytics

I believe writing will help put my learning into perspective for the benefit of posterity. Or could inspire someone to build something even better.

Let’s do this!