RealiseMe
Foreword
It is going to be about a perfect match. No, we do not develop another Tinder, we believe in love in the real world.
Scroll down to know how we met teachers and schools of the Foggy Albion to save over £50 000 per year on adverts with a niche job board.
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Project team
2 Frontend Developers, 2 Full Stack Developers, 1 Manual QA Engineer, 1 Project Manager
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In progress since
February 2018
Story
Story
Education forms our future
In Great Britain, supply teaching is widespread. But there are some challenges with hiring. To perform a perfect talent acquisition on occasion for a part-time position is complicated. Job websites are usually aimed to offer all for all, while schools often need a perfect teacher for now.
Typical situation. At 9 am, students of the 7th grade expect to have a Math lesson this morning. А permanent teacher of the school, Mr. Thatcher, twisted his ankle crossing the street and sent a message from an ambulance informing about the incident. He won’t be able to teach a class for this reason. A supply teacher is urgently needed in an hour. What should the school do?
RealiseMe saw three main difficulties:
- It is too expensive for schools to invest in advertising for vacant positions.
- Complicated and hackneyed search algorithms of generic employment-related platforms do not lead to the hoped-for results.
- There is no opportunity to make a perfect school-teacher match for the supply job.
While schools have to use several generic online and offline job boards to increase their recruitment reach, the client saw the business opportunity in the emerging market demand. What if to make a platform tailored for schools and supply job seekers?
Aimprosoft was asked to join the project and develop the platform devoted to making a perfect match.
Challenges
Challenges
We’ve been working on a web-based community and recruiting platform for RealiseMe with a supply search in its core since 2018.
Development
RealiseMe addressed us to help them redesign a platform for supply job vacancies. A PHP-based website became out of date and required major changes. As the project is about a perfect match, technologies are expected to marry up as well. Thus, progressive Vue.js turned out to be the face of the website with Node.js at its heart.
Target audience
RealiseMe was designed to support three user categories: schools of London and Great Britain, teachers and recruitment agencies that supply sufficient staff to cover part-time positions.
Teachers’ challenges. In the GB, teachers had to register with lots of recruitment agencies based on a generic search, including parameters job, salary, type of employment, industry, location, and others. From the schools’ perspective, it’s not enough for employers who need to fill the opening in the schedule urgently.
Schools’ challenges. Schools suffer from a diversity of full-time candidates and unjustified advertising expenses of over £50 000 per year. They were in high need of a platform tailored for education-only employment.
Agencies’ challenges. In fact, at first glance, there is no need for an agency profile. But the founders of RealiseMe wanted to accommodate all categories of users. And one of them is dedicated teachers and schools devoted to knowledge who don’t want to waste time seeking each other. Those who prefer science to search can delegate a matching process to recruitment agencies that use our platform to do it for the shortest period of time.
Trying to cover the supply needs of schools and teachers, we left agencies’ involvement at last. Their role is secondary when some piece of delegation is needed. We empowered agencies to help teachers find supply jobs when teachers are hard at teaching.
Developing one platform for three different roles, we had to avoid useless features and, at the same time to provide ideal search possibilities for everybody.
As an early stage start up, Aimprosoft has been able to accommodate us throughout the evolution of our product development process, making it easy for us to make swift changes while delivering a high level of software development, UX/UI, QA and overall project management
Features
Features
We added specially developed algorithms to show how schools and teachers can match in a few steps.
In contrast to competitors, RealiseMe combines permanent vacant positions and supply bookings
School account
Schools often have to find a teacher to invite them one hour before the class starts. On the strength of it, we designed the shortest user flow to reach the goal.
Need for school
Supply - Teacher - Math - East London - 7th grade - 9am - Tuesday - 10th Oct
User flow for schools
- Open a vacancy
- Name a type of vacancy
- Set a schedule
- Set a subject
- Set a grade of student
- Select a teatcher
Discover in the carousel school account features (profile, homepage) and teacher account features (profile, homepage, job search, timesheets, clearance).
School account: Profile
One of the schools’ main requests was multiple admin roles headed by the main admin. Thus, we added several admin profiles where talent acquisition managers can register to manage recruiting.
Adding a section with a short survey for schools about profiling details will help match schools with appropriate opportunities. Turning on an anonymization mode schools can hide personal data of applicants except for working experience; therefore, removing gender and race bias from staffing decisions.
School account: Home page
To better highlight the essence of RealiseMe we made quick access to job posting and supply staff search on the home page. Here schools can manage bookings and jobs posted recently.
A board with new teachers registered in a country recently is available on the school account's home page. Schools can post their job adverts with employment details, both part-time and full-time, attach files, and request a video interview of the applicant. Schools can reach a teacher hired previously faster in Saved and Past hires.
Supply search is for flexible teachers
Teacher account: Profile
To be considered for the position, teachers fill the profile information including personal data, teacher details (type, supply, current school, etc.), education background, pass profiling questionnaire, cite supply details (subject, rates according to terms, payment details, etc.). They can set availability for full or half-day and select from the drop-down list names of the mapped locations so that schools would find them as a perfect match.
Teacher account: Home page
To hit the ground running, we put quick links right on the home page. Teachers can set about searching for a job, look through saved jobs, check updates on the blog, or chat with colleagues on the forum.
In the foreground of the job board, teachers can check recent invites and active bookings with priority information about an inviting school, the date of the lesson, the entire period of supply, and rates for each. Past and expired bookings help save the history of working experience.
Teacher account: Job Search
Job Search allows search for a suitable position specifying the area, desired distance to the schools, contract type, and term. Applying teachers can upload their documents once to reuse in future applications.
Supply search was invented specifically in order to fill the position in an hour
Teacher account: Timesheets
We added timesheets at every screen of booking details with school names, rates, dates so that teachers can submit working days directly on the RealiseMe website. Bookings have their unique IDs to enable teachers to track and manage the working schedules
Teacher account: Clearance
To be recognized as a qualified specialist and verified to work with children, teachers have to be cleared to get a positive status. Any teacher can upload verification documents to prove their ability and claim for a vacant position.
Solutions
Mobile app
In a world where smartphones are the way forward, expanding a web presence with a mobile app is a race against time and money. The best solution there could be the right technology choice. Therefore, React Native turned out to be the one to satisfy both.
Initially, it was thought to develop a mobile app for teachers who are in an active seek-and-apply mode. Founders of the platform saw that it wasn’t enough for teachers to use only a web version. We wanted to make the app easier with a significant amount of on-the-go usage.
React Native bonuses
- Time: only 5 months of development for 2 platforms, iOS and Android, instead of 10-12 months for each separately
- Money: saved half of investments on the development getting two apps finally
- Code: 90% of the code and pre-built components reused between mobile platforms
Features
To make a fully serviceable mobile app for teachers, we duplicated key features such as Job Search, Bookings, Invites, Push notifications and added some extra.
Video interview
It’s the right step towards the company’s growth to make an app work for a user. We allowed teachers to present themselves via live stream from their smartphones because all of us spend most of our time on the move. The recorded video message will be available to the web account of the teacher as well.
Learning
Caring about the right job fit, RealiseMe included a section Learning into the mobile app where teachers can consume training content with tips regarding job seeking, self-presentation, expectations of employers, etc.
Geolocation
Ordering a taxi, we used to track vehicles moving to know how far a car is. This feature helps us take the edge off waiting. Why don't we let schools know where the teacher is? We made it possible for the schools' reps to track a teacher's movement to understand how far he is from the workplace. For schools, it is available from their web account if teachers allow being tracked on their mobile apps.
3rd Party Integrations
Doing Front and Back Development, we tried to follow the latest trends along with proven technologies. To deliver key features, we integrated 3rd parties.
Logic Melon API: Faster talent reach
For niche job boards, it is crucial to make a direct hit. Thus, RealiseMe provides an API for schools to post jobs. We connected to Logic Melon to allow schools with frequently arose needs in supply teaching to distribute their job adverts for faster
OAuth: Secure access
Focusing on building an engaged community besides secure access to the platform, OAuth suited us perfectly for secure authentication and user authorization. Logged once, teachers can seek jobs and chat on the forum with like-minded people.
Odro: Video Interview
We can’t ignore that interactive hiring changes the game of recruiting. For RealiseMe, it was important to allow schools to improve their recruiting results. With Odro, we delivered a Video Interview feature when teachers can record a short self-presentation for pre-employment assessments by schools.
Twilio: Feedback system
While signing up in RealiseMe, both teachers and schools should verify their phone numbers. We used Twilio as the most appropriate feedback system for commercial and service websites. It has a simple and scalable API to be run from deployment.
SendGrid: Emailing
Recruiting is based on clear communication. A proven email service is therefore essential. SendGrid satisfied us with such options as information, communication, verification, and notification emails. Striving to be in line with Uber, Spotify, Airbnb among niche recruiting platforms, RealiseMe opted for the omnichannel API-centric email platform.
PubNub: Notifications
We wanted something reliable that will support the growth of the platform. To perform the sharing of new jobs, submitted bookings, or any other important reminders, we connected PubNub for users not to miss a thing.
GetAddress.io: Postal addresses
As RealiseMe is about fast matching, we extended it to filing the address in the profile and getting the coordinates for distance calculation. We used getAddress.io, a UK JSON API-based postcode tool, to save time when entering the address and avoid typical mistakes here. Now creating a profile, a user can enter a postcode and get an exact address.
Stack
- — Frontend
- — Backend
- React
- React Native
- Vue.js
- Logic Melon API
- OAuth
- Odro
- Twilio
- PubNub
- GetAddress.io
- Node.js
- GraphQL
- AWS
- AWS Lambdas
- S3
- MariaDB
- Elasticsearch
- Grafana
- Cloud Watch
- CloudFront
- CloudFormation
- CloudFlare
- Segment
Results
Results
It’s not the end
We used to put likes leaving our reaction to the content in social networks. The explosive market of assessment-based platforms widespread to hiring as well. RealiseMe took a feedback option at the core, allowing schools and teachers to assess each other.
Stand out in the market among niche job boards; we helped a lot of schools in London to post jobs for free saving money on advertising costs.
Let’s talk
Recruitment broke new ground today. Looks like the same goes for you. Reach us to know how to build a hiring platform.
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