Recruitment tool for scouts and social network for football enthusiasts

A social networking tool, that gives the opportunity for young unknown football players to be noticed, and for other football enthusiasts to communicate and share their football-related experience.

  • Duration

    2 years, 3300+ hours

  • Methodology

    Waterfall

  • Category

    Featured, Mobile, UI/UX Design, Web

  • Technologies

    • Databases: Postgres, JOOQ, HikariCP;
    • Backend: JVM (Java 8), PostgreSQL, Spring Boot, Gradle, Flyway, JOOQ;
    • Android: Google Support Library, Google Play Services, Retrofit2, OkHttp3, RxJava;
    • iOS: Swagger CodeGen, Alamofire, Kingfisher, OrderedSet, SwiftDate,

  • Project team

    • 1 PM,
    • 2 BA,
    • 1 Designer,
    • 2 Backend developers,
    • 2 Frontend developers,
    • 2 iOS developers,
    • 2 Android developers,
    • 2 QA
01 summary

interactive platform

This is an interactive platform for:

  • Footballers, who need to show their achievements and have better career opportunities—the mobile app allows them to show their talent and achievements to scouts of various clubs, provides a social network functionality.
  • Footballers’ parents, friends or coaches, who want to follow their favorite young footballers’ updates—the app offers only football-specific content;
  • Football scouts—both mobile and web apps provide the ability to search and filter footballers, follow their profiles and monitor progress.
02 objective

for the start

Develop a platform that connects football enthusiasts all over the world. The platform must give users the opportunity to follow the lives and accomplishments of their favorite team players, provide tools for football players to promote themselves as professional sportsmen and enable the scouts to find suitable members for their team.

Business Tasks

  • Create a social platform to enable footballers and recruiters to interact;
  • Create a football-specific space with social media tools for sharing accomplishments, following your friends’ progress;
  • Provide a recruitment space in the football sphere, that will enable players and amateurs all over the world promote themselves as professionals.

Technical Tasks

  • Choose the effective and cost-saving technology stack that will enable to achieve all the client’s requirements;
  • Provide integration with Facebook, Mandrill and Google Maps;
  • The system must be scalable;
  • Create several user classes, each with different permissions and functionality.
03 solution

we decided

We have provided a full-cycle development for an application that automizes the process of footballers’ recruiting. This is the first recruitment solution for the football sphere specifically, so we not only had to develop the application for mobile and Web but also conduct a marketing investigation together with the customers in order to find out the needs of football scouts and their managers and thus create a solution that will meet all their requirements.

The platform is intended for several user categories:

  • Followers — they can view posts, user profiles, use the integrated messenger;
  • Footballers — they can promote themselves using specific info in their accounts in addition to all the followers’ functionality;
  • Scouts — they can find footballers, assign statuses to them and manage them;
  • Scout managers — they can register football clubs via the admin interface, post club vacancies and track the scouts’ activity.
04 challenges

we faced this, we managed this

  • 01 Scope management

    There was a necessity to define the scope of the MVP version by prioritizing scope and postponing some features for later stages. Later stages where dedicated to enriching the basic functionality of the app.

  • 02 Multiple roles in the system

    5 different roles in the system, each with their own specific permissions and all the roles are layered.

  • 03 Code generation

    This was one of the first projects ever where code generation was used to work with API.

05 features

our features

Smartym Pro was chosen to assist in creating the first worldwide platform for footbal recruiters. We developed the following features:

  • 01 Authorization flow

    Integration with Facebook. Different flow for different user classes

  • 02 User profiles

    Profiles are different according to the user class. The ability to edit info, add photos/videos, edit the gallery

  • 03 Social feed

    The ability to create and share posts with media content, “follow” other users, create events (matches)

  • 04 Messenger

    The ability to chat and exchange messages

  • 05 Footballers management

    Search engine for scouts. The ability to set statuses for each candidate

  • 06 Moderation functionality

    Tools for moderating the published content

06 result

Recruitment tool

Once we have delivered the MVP of the application, it took time for the client to gather the focus-group feedback. Since our application received good feedback, we continued to develop the application and finished the second stage.

The application is already actively being used across some particular countries. In the nearest future, it is planned to launch the third stage, that will include:

  • More complex players’ recruitment model;
  • Introducing gamification elements;
  • Group chats;
  • Interface localization in order to enter new markets.

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