IST-Africa 2017 Conference Proceedings

Paul Cunningham and Miriam Cunningham (Eds)

IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-905824-57-1

‘Jobs256’ Mobile App Linking

Job Seekers to Job Opportunities
Emily BAGARUKAYO1, Ezra MWESIGWA2
Makerere University, P.O. Box 7062, Kampala, 00256, Uganda
1
Tel: +25670211076, Fax: + 256414540620, Email: ebagarukayo@cis.mak.ac.ug
2
Tel: +256702606140, Fax: + + 256414540620, Email: mezra@cit.ac.ug
Abstract: There is a challenge of unemployment among the youth in Uganda today.
Many University graduates fail to get jobs because the job market seems saturated
since the available jobs cannot be found. The study therefore aimed at linking the job
seekers and available jobs. To achieve this aim we developed a mobile app that
aggregates existing job postings from web portals to improve accessibility,
timeliness and efficiency. Agile methodologies particularly Scrum and eXtreme
Programming were used to develop the mobile application (app). Results showed the
app is not only saving employers monetary resources but provides a sustainable and
practical way to link Job seekers and to available job vacancies.
Keywords: Mobile Applications, Jobs, Jobseekers, Employers, Agile Development,
Case Study

1. Introduction
1.1 Background to Job Environment
The adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is believed to make
life easy by solving society problems using technology. ICT facilitates social change and
development in the areas of education, health, governance, youth and community
development. ICT offers a channel for information distribution in real time depending on
the media used. Technology has provided effective means of communication, collaboration
and interaction regardless of location. The use of mobile phones has increased over the
years with youth being the majority of users, since they are an integral part in their lives.
There is an increase in the production and use of smartphones which afford downloading
applications (apps) to accomplish several tasks.
1.2 Problem Definition
According to a national statistical abstract by [7], youth between the ages of 18 and 30
constituted the majority of unemployed population by early 2011/12. National youth
unemployment stood at 19.7% with a total of 6.3 million youths in Uganda, out of whom
females constituted 51% of the youth labour force. The capital city Kampala where this
study’s case was carried out had a youth unemployment rate that was 3 times the national
youth unemployment rate [7].
A review of literature revealed that there is paucity of research on linking job seekers
and employers. There are formal and non-formal methods of searching for jobs. Informal
methods include contacts from friends and family, whereas the formal methods include
responding to newspaper ads and web portals. The latter were the prime means of accessing
job openings in Uganda. The job market seems saturated due to inaccessible information on
available jobs which makes life hard for graduates. Getting a job today has become an
uphill task; not to mention the low wages in most of the places of employment. This means

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that the employed are also constantly looking for greener pastures; new employment, which
makes finding jobs even more difficult. On top of this, some prospective employers rarely
advertise in newspapers due to the cost of publishing an advert. The newspaper coverage is
limited to urban areas therefore the 80% statistic of unemployed youth requires us to
develop new ways of dissemination of information about available jobs. ICT provides a
good platform to solve this dilemma. Therefore, this study sought to address the existing
gap between the available employment vacancies and a cosmic number of job seekers. The
objective, methodology, technology description, results, business benefits and conclusion
are discussed in the next sections.

2. Objectives
The study was guided by a major objective of harnessing the information gap between job
seekers and available job opportunities. We aimed at bridging an information gap
specifically focusing on fostering jobseekers’ ability to make informed decisions and
comparisons by linking job seekers and available jobs. Significant focus was on
incorporating innovative technologies like real time push notifications and locating jobs
using geolocation coordinates. These two technologies leverage timing and job suitability
respectively, two factors that prominently influence people’s decisions when seeking for
employment. The end result was an android mobile app on the google play store to achieve
the objective. This research is intended to help future and current practitioners in the same
or related field of using ICT by pinpointing out strategic interventions that are crucial to
understanding varying contexts of end users of such technologies.

3. Methodology
A Single-Case design was carried out using a case study methodology and Agile
Development was employed as a domain specific method to realize the mobile app. The
choice for the methodology was primarily based on the need to emphasize a detailed
contextual analysis of different factors and how they relate to job seeking and the need to
identify a causal link between the use of mobile phones and access to job advertisements to
a largely unemployed Ugandan youth population. Once the mobile app was ready for
deployment, the researchers carried a more passive role predominantly through observation
due to the realistic nature of the problem under investigation and therefore qualitative data
like users’ opinions, Google Play store ratings, reviews and comments were prioritized over
statistical data. Complimentary data was collected through observations and heuristic
evaluations.
Figure 1 presents a pictorial representation of the research design. The study kicked
off with a planning Phase where the objectives and aims of the study were stipulated. This
was followed by a design phase where significant variables like Timeliness and
Accessibility to the study were scrutinized. The Preparation stage involved building and
testing data collection instruments and checking them for validity. Statistical data was
collected over a period of 12 months and learning outcomes communicated in the next
section. We collected data relating to Daily Installs by device, Daily uninstalls by device,
Cumulative average ratings over a period of 1 year which were subjected to linear
regression analysis using Tableau with variables of time and job suitability as predictors
which were readily available from the developers’ console and dashboard of the Google
play store.

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 Figure 1: Phases that guided the Case Study as adopted from Yin (2014)

4. Technology Description

Figure 2: A graph showing user acquisition as of February 2016

Deeper Benchmarking of existing related systems specifically those of leading job brokers
i.e. Brighter Monday and NFT Consults showed that Jobs information is designed in a “one
size fit for all”. Given that Job seekers vary in qualification and capability, there was need
to pay extra attention to innovative technologies that would influence user contextualisation
while providing functional concurrency to all users at the same time. System review of
currently used systems does not provide strategic interventions to timeliness, user
contextualisation and availability. Google Cloud Messaging was best suited to provide
timeliness, Geolocation and bookmarking features to enable user contextualisation and
offline functionality to ensure availability of information across regions with poor network
connectivity. Application development started in February 2015 and development was in 5
Monthly iterations making the app ready for end users by June 2 2015 on the Google Play
Store which is available to date.
The mobile app was realised using Ionic Framework. Ionic is a new Standard
Development Kit (SDK) [9] technology in mobile app development industry predominately
made of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 and Angular JavaScript (JS) [6]. The
combination of these is complimented by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that help to deliver

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lightweight and very powerful mobile apps with native features [8]. A couple of Apache
Cordova Phone Gap plugins were married into the application to enable the development of
crucial functional requirements of the applications. The use of such programming
technologies makes the possibility of having a cross platform application possible with
minimal variations.
The app was designed to crawl preprogramed online job boards and top employers’
websites in Uganda. The crawl engine reads the content of each site’s Really Simple
Syndication (RSS) file and then synthesizes them to get related information which is
aggregated, categorised and delivered to the application users. Through Google Cloud
Messaging Service [4], users who subscribe to particular job categories are notified at a
desired time through push notifications. Angular JS helps to deliver the framework for the
application to deliver dynamic content in real-time using declaration braces. The
development process was guided by agile development principles particularly those of
scrum and XP [3] which informed the development team of necessary changes through user
feedback [5].

Figure 3: Screenshot showing the backstage of

the Application with categorised and aggregated Figure 4: Screenshot showing a looped HTML5 list
job listings element to display available jobs

The methodology principles dictated that monthly iterations of the application had to be
developed to address user comments and reviews that were left at the play store and
through the support email address. A daily burn down chart guided the achievement of
different tasks and milestones. The chart was used to balance the workload with time left
during the development period. The app User Interface (UI) is rendered by Angular JS after
it has been initialized. Each element on the initialized screen with ng-app directive is
compiled.
Using an online API builder (swagger.io), an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
driven Application Programmer Interface (API) [2] service was built to fetch and sync Jobs
information from the different Job Portals and top employers. This information was later
converted to JSON and populated in hard coded Angular scope modals. Using angular
directives which are present day HTML 5 attributes, data is bound onto a HTML list
element which is given a looping feature to produce as many job listings as those passed on
by the API service. It is equally crucial to understand that the mobile application has

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integrated 3rd party plugins from Apache Cordova formally known as Phone Gap.
Specifically, cordova-plugin-network-information helps to switch the application between
offline and online modes, cordova-plugin-file-transfer helps to pull attachments like photos
and other rich media that might be attached to certain vacancy publications.

5. Results
The Jobs256 Mobile app was submitted to the Google play Store and got a total of 719
unique installations with no crashes and bugs reported during the test period over a period
of 378 days which yielded an average rating of 4.4. It was noted that the number of unique
users who installed the app on one or more of their devices for the first time shot rocket
high in November period when most leading employers like Uganda Revenue Authority,
Barclays Bank, Ernest & Young conduct fresh graduate recruitment.

Figure 5: Average Store Ratings by users out of 5.

Figure 6: A graph from the Google

Play Store showing total Application
Installations.
With a user acquisition rate of 14.3%, the application made tremendous growth through
the ranks to earn a spot in regionally recommended apps to new play store users. Deeper
analysis of user reviews and feedback on the play store led to iterations which delivered
more functionality as requested by the users. Three versions were built i.e. 1.0, 1.1 and
currently 1.2 based on the users’ feedback and reviews.

Figure 7: Android version of phones with the application installed after on day two of deploying the very first
version 1.0
Results from the study showed that the use of mobile technologies to share job related
information does not only help to reduce costs but quickens information flow and
eventually leads to faster business processes. Results showed that majority Android phones
that installed the application were running android 4.4 which is code named Kitkat. Never
the less, necessary SDK adjustments had to be made to support the application on earlier
and newer versions of Android. The application required 24-hour support which was
unavailable due to resource constraints but a Facebook page was opened and linked to the

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“Help” module of the application in a bid to gain crowd and social support. The purpose of
the page was to provide a forum like platform where users could ask questions about the
app and have them answered by fellow users. The move attracted a community of more that
2,000 people under the page name “Jobs 256”.

6. Business Benefits
6.1 Cost
Employers are charged a high cost to advertise in the local newspapers. Jobseekers can only
access newspapers at a fee because online newspapers have limited information. Moreover,
accessing an advert from a portal requires that the whole webpage is downloaded which is
costly. Therefore, it is expensive for both employers to advertise and jobseekers to access
job adverts. Hence employers and jobseekers will benefit from the Jobs256 app where
adverts are posted and information is accessed at a less cost of internet data. The app uses
XML to pick relevant content from the website so that the job seekers do not have to
download the entire content from the website and hence use less data. The app minimises
discrimination of gender, sex, age, fastens the process of finding qualified applicants and
employers and helps reduce the number of unemployed youth.
6.2 Usability and Process Automation
When using traditional approaches like websites, applicants need to have prior knowledge
about the existing web portals that advertise job openings. Accessing these portals is costly
in terms of data and time because the entire webpage has to be downloaded for information
to be accessed. It should be noted that access to computers is more limited that newspapers
and the not all applicants have knowledge of operating the computer. Another challenge is
that Web portals lose information when the applicant logs off. Therefore, the use of the
mobile app was unprecedented in this context since mobile phones are accessible, easy to
use and learn and owned by youth looking for jobs. The app offers an offline cache that can
be accessed without data connectivity and in areas with limited connectivity. The app is
linked to a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/256jobs/ that promotes social
learning for novice users and those with problems using it. The App was released under an
open source licence agreement.

7. Conclusions
The main findings indicated that incorporating technologies (Push notifications, Bookmarks
and Offline functionality) enhanced affordability and accessibility to information. The
Jobs256 mobile app is of importance to places with limited network connectivity due to its
offline sync feature that enables users to access job opportunities offline at a later time. The
app is not only saving employers monetary resources but provides a sustainable and
practical way to link Job seekers to available job vacancies.
Based on the results, the researchers recommend the use of the 256 mobile app due to
its wide availability, sustainability and ease of use when sharing information linked to job
opportunities and related information.
In future the app will be updated to address concerns raised by users, however, it will
not be commercialized since it is a community development project. The development costs
and implementation is a possible pitfall. Progress is yet to be made with user sensitization
through “How to” webinars and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for the app. The
dynamic mobile operating system versions will require regular updates to ensure
compatibility. In the next 2 years we expect the user base to grow by 20,000 by improving
the functionality to share to major social media channels and rigorous advertisement. Future
studies in this field should look at making the application available for other mobile phone

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platforms like IOS, Windows and Blackberry OS. There is need for a location based
service that can recommend users for jobs within their location. The opportunities for
greater research cooperation between Europe and Africa are Europe tapping into the
growing market of the middleclass in Africa and Africa learning from Europe’s best
practices as a bench mark for ICT innovations.

References
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(ERIC Document Reproduction Service)
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