Type: Personal Project — Product Design & PM Timeline: May – July 2026 My role: Product Manager & Product Designer Prototype: https://favourmark-applytogether.lovable.app/
Last recruiting season, I missed an internship application deadline. Not because I wasn’t trying, but because I genuinely lost track of it in an iMessage thread with a friend. They had sent me the opportunity weeks earlier. I saw it. I just never acted on it in time.
When I told them, their response stuck with me: "I wish there was a more organized way of keeping track of what I send you."
That was the moment. We were both recruiting at the same time, for similar roles, in the same industry, and we were managing the entire process through a mix of iMessage, a manually updated spreadsheet, and collective memory. All of it failed us regularly.
The deeper frustration wasn’t just disorganization. It was that we were going through one of the most stressful experiences of our academic lives in parallel, and somehow still doing it alone. The tools around us were built for individual job seekers. Nobody had built anything for the way students actually recruit: together.
The problem in one sentence: Students navigate recruiting season alongside their friends but without any shared infrastructure, which leads to missed opportunities, duplicated effort, and an experience that is more isolating than it needs to be.
Before building, I looked at what already existed.
iMessage / WhatsApp Where most opportunity sharing actually happens. The problem is that messages get buried, context gets lost, and there’s no way to track what you’ve done with something someone sent you.
Notion job tracker templates I tried several of these. Copying an opportunity someone sent me and manually entering it into Notion was tedious enough that I regularly skipped it, which defeated the purpose. There was also no shared view. My tracker was mine. My friend’s was theirs. We were still operating in silos.
LinkedIn No collaborative features. No shared tracking. No infrastructure for co-recruiting. If a mutual friend found a great role, the only way to share it was to send a link and hope it didn’t get lost.
Handshake Great for discovering opportunities on campus. Not built for sharing or tracking alongside a group.
Across all of them, the gap was consistent: the collaboration component was completely missing. Every tool assumed the job search was a solo activity. None acknowledged that most students recruit alongside people they know, and that the social layer, if designed well, could make the experience both more effective and less lonely.
Before building, I spoke with five students across different years and majors who had been through at least one recruiting season. I wanted to understand how they currently managed the job search, whether they shared opportunities with friends, and what made the process feel hard.
What I found — before the prototype