CodePath : Applicant Intake System on Hubspot

Overview

CodePath is a nonprofit that brings together employers, students, and colleges to eliminate inequities in tech education, diversify the field, and provide underrepresented students with a path toward economic mobility. The organization offers free development courses to computer science students, creates equitable access to high-skill, high-trajectory technology jobs for marginalized communities, and helps employers diversify their workforces.

Following recent improvements to its branding, communications, and curriculum strategies, CodePath was struggling with a surplus of applications—10,000 for 2,500 available spots.

FreeRange and Friday came together to help the CodePath operations team solve this problem.

CodePath ran all its operations on HubSpot as its CRM and its main app (built-in Python-Django) which was used as a course delivery platform.  After numerous conversations with CodePath’s marketing team, operations team, and in-house tech team, we understood the current applicant intake process. Because HubSpot and CodePath’s course delivery platform were not talking to each other, the application process had limitations, including:

1. Redundant application forms
2. Lack of personalized assessment experience based on applicant’s educational qualifications
3. Manual eligibility checks in the application process added delays in qualifying students for the appropriate course
4. Limited analytics led to limited information for the marketing team
5. No centralized student profile to track old applications and check for their eligibility in future seasons
6. Old user experience which did not match their improved communications and branding

These resulted in numerous dropouts and barriers to inviting old users for second applications.

 

Working closely with the leadership team and the Friday team, we put together a new implementation roadmap for the application intake system (called “ONE APP”). The new system included 

1. Unified intake forms that helped students create their application profile and use the same information for all future applications.
2. Automated recommendation system—based on the applicant's educational qualifications, the new system recommended courses to each applicant.
3. Automated level recommendation system—based on the applicant’s past courses, the new system categorized students into levels such as beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

With the Explore phase complete, we will soon begin development on One App. Working in tandem with the CodePath marketing operations and the teaching team, we have identified and scheduled our first rounds of sprints and will be diving in midway through Q3 2023. The finished product will talk to multiple systems, HubSpot, and the main app. Free Range will coordinate the entire project across multiple teams, including marketing, operations, and product delivery.

The new system will significantly improve the user experience, reduce dependency on manual operations, reduce the time required for applications, promote multiple applications, and centralize all analytics.

We are excited to continue our work on this project and assist CodePath in its vision to change the tech sector for the better.