Swiping to Find the Ideal Employer
The innovative app Swipe4Work solves two problems. It maximizes the chance of an ideal match between employers and job seekers, making the application process more fun and easier. Plus, the anonymous profiles eliminate biases. Pinch has developed this successful Tinder-like recruitment app efficiently and cost-effectively using the Flutter framework.
The Innovation: Recruitment for a Win-Win
Swipe4Work, thanks to the ‘Tinder-like’ principle, completely overturns the recruitment and application process. And it’s a win-win. For job seekers, it saves the hassle with CVs and cover letters and offers fairer opportunities. At the same time, employers benefit as they have significantly lower costs in the recruitment process: instead of the usual 10 percent of an annual salary, they now only pay a relatively low amount per match.
The App: Swiping to a Job Without Bias
The Swipe4Work app is an initiative by HR and accounting service provider Tribus. The concept works like this. Job seekers can view job listings and swipe left or right. If a user likes a vacancy, the employer then sees a profile with all relevant education, experience, and skills, but without details that could lead to bias. The idea behind it: virtually all studies show that companies are significantly biased based on personal characteristics such as name, age, gender, and photo.
If an employer is excited about a candidate, they can immediately make an appointment for an interview via a date picker.
The Approach: Validation and Timely Detection
Before we actually started developing the app, we first thoroughly validated the design. We crystallized the design first with click models and then validated it with end users. This not only saves efficiency in the development process but also ultimately results in a higher quality app. When you have end users test a prototype, you always discover things that seem logical to app builders but turn out not to be for end users.
The Collaboration: Short Lines and Pragmatic
Tribus and Pinch worked closely with daily stand-ups and short lines of communication. The backend side – including the machine learning system that makes the matches – was entirely handled by Tribus. As for mobile app development and design, Pinch took the lead. The app is made with the Flutter framework, allowing us to develop apps for both Android and iOS simultaneously (and from a single codebase).
Flutter has become quite mature as a development framework, and our Flutter team has extensive experience developing hybrid apps. Therefore, choosing Flutter did not pose any significant challenges. What it did provide, however, were numerous benefits for the client. For instance, the app could be developed relatively quickly and cost-effectively. Moreover, since the backend developer at Tribus has a keen interest in Flutter, the company can now easily make small adjustments to the app themselves.
Above all, the collaboration was very pragmatic. Swipe4Work is, of course, a startup with a limited budget. For example, if we found that a particular choice would lead to a lot of complexity, Tribus would quickly discard the idea, and together we would look for a simpler, faster, and (in most cases) equally effective workaround.
The Challenge: A Boost for the Business
Thanks to our extensive Flutter experience and expertise in both design and concept & strategy, we did not face any significant challenges in terms of app development.
The app is solid and functions fully as intended. The biggest challenge now lies with Tribus. They need to consider important business questions. What will the precise business model be? How can they get as many vacancies and users on the platform as possible? Where this intersects with the app, we continue to provide input to Tribus.
The Result: Rapidly Growing Success
Thanks to the innovative concept, Swipe4Work quickly made a significant impact. For example, the app was in the top 5 of the best Android apps in the Netherlands within a week. Not much later, a significant milestone was reached: the first thousand applications had been made through the app.
The beauty of the app? As more data is collected based on successful matches, the machine learning mechanism can make increasingly better matches. And that leads – hopefully – to even more vacancies, applicants, and matches.
