Introducing Ives - Your Project Manager for Your Job Search

Looking for a job as a software engineer in today's job market is a daunting task. With so many engineers looking for work as a result of the mass layoffs the industry has seen over the last few years, the competition for a limited number of roles has become fierce. To stand out, job seekers need to both be able to target jobs they are well-suited for and be able to demonstrate to their potential employers that they have the technical capabilities to excel on the job.

However, this is a really tough task even for developers with tons of experience. It can take hours to go through job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn looking for jobs that fit your resume. Even more time is spent planning and building projects which demonstrate one's technical chops. As software engineers we might be adept at building servers and wrangling CSS, but many of us struggle with the project management side of the job search. Whole weeks can go by without committing any code to GitHub or submitting any job applications, leaving you feeling more demoralized as the job search continues.

That's why along with my brother, Thierry Damiba, we have created Ives, an AI-powered project manager that helps software engineers structure their efforts while you search for work. All you need to do is to upload your resume, and Ives takes care of everything else, creating a personalized calendar of daily activities for you to perform, which culminate in you deploying projects that demonstrate your skillset to hiring managers and recruiters.

Ives has two main features. The first feature is job matching, where we use vector search to find roles which match the user's skillset. This alone can save hours every week, giving job seekers direction in terms of which jobs to apply for. Instead of performing basic keyword search to identify jobs that users are good matches for, we create vector embeddings of job postings and use cosine similarity to find jobs that are close to our user's profile. This allows us to use the semantic information in a post to match with a user, rather than relying on a recruiter to write the perfect job description.

The second feature that Ives is bringing to job seekers is an adaptive calendar, where the app will build a custom week-long plan for you that helps you actually ship projects. Just like a project manager at a startup, Ives can break down projects into manageable chunks and help you organize your time to be able to build and ship more projects.

If you are on the job hunt, try out Ives today. We would love to hear your experience with the product and get your feedback!