1 Overview
For Hack@Brown 2021, we built a Chrome extension for managing applications. We were awarded the Wolfram Award as one of the top hackathon projects.
2 Motivation
Applying for jobs is often a tedious and extremely repetitive process - there are just so many applications, and each requires you to fill in the same few fields: name, education, experience, etc.
As such, we hoped to create an easily accessible yet simple to use browser extension that can alleviate these pain-points.
3 Design
3.1 Play/Pause
We conceive applying to jobs as “sessions” - you sit down and grind through a bunch of application in one session. To facilitate such a workflow, we have a play/pause button that triggers the start and end of a session. When you start a session, the extension first saves the current webpage you are on, then loads the first application URL on your list. When you end a session, the extension loads the saved webpage you were on before you started the session. This allows for quick context-switching where you can easily switch between other work and applying for jobs.
3.2 Saving Applications
Application URLs are saved as a list. Using Chrome’s special purpose APIs like chrome.storage, application URLs are stored in your browser’s local storage and will persist across sessions.
3.3 Autofill
Most applications have the same few fields: First Name, Last Name, Email, etc. We allow users to autofill these fields with a click of a button:
4 Future Work
Additional features we can implement:
- Ability to save application form progress
- Support autofilling file fields (eg. upload resume)
- Incentivising users for completing applications