Job Board Contact Feature - Job Board Extension

[ethan-t-hansen]

Feature: Company Alumni Contacts for Referrals

Goal

Enable students viewing a job posting to discover MA alumni who currently work at the same company and have opted in to be contacted for referrals or informal questions.

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Background & Context

Student job boards often lack a warm-intro pathway, despite alumni being one of the strongest predictors of interview success.

This feature connects those two datasets with minimal new infrastructure, leveraging:

• Existing Postgres CRUD patterns
• Read-heavy queries
• Simple relational joins

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High-Level User Flow

Student

1. Browses job board
2. Opens job details
3. Sees a “People at {Company}” section
4. Clicks a linkedin profile to request a referral or reach out externally

Alumni

1. Opts into being listed as a referral contact
2. Selects company affiliation(s)
3. Optionally sets preferences (roles, frequency, contact method)

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Data Model Extensions (Postgres)

New Table: alumni_profiles

id (uuid, pk)
user_id (uuid, fk -> users.id)
current_company (text)
current_title (text)
linkedin_url (text)
contact_email (text)
referral_opt_in (boolean)
created_at (timestamp)
updated_at (timestamp)

Optional Join Table (Future-Proofing): alumni_companies

Use if alumni may want to list multiple companies (past or present).

id (uuid, pk)
alumni_profile_id (uuid, fk)
company_name (text)
is_current (boolean)
referral_opt_in (boolean)

Job Table (Existing)

No schema change required if company is a normalized string.
Long-term improvement: introduce a companies table for canonicalization.

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API Changes (CRUD-Compatible)

New Endpoints

• GET /alumni?company=Stripe
  • Returns opted-in alumni at a given company
  • Filters:
    • referral_opt_in = true
    • is_current = true
• POST /alumni/profile
  • Create or update alumni profile
  • Auth required

Existing Endpoint Augmentation

• GET /jobs/:id
  • Server-side join or follow-up query to fetch alumni by company

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Frontend (Next.js)

Job Detail Page

Add a new section below job description:

People at {Company}

• Alumni name
• Title
• Graduation year (if available)
• “Open to referrals” badge
• External links:
  • LinkedIn
  • Email (optional)

Alumni Settings Page

Simple form:

• Current company
• Title
• Contact method
• Referral opt-in toggle
• Visibility preview

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Privacy & Consent

Default State

• Alumni are not visible unless explicitly opted in

Visibility Rules

• Only visible to members
• Contact details limited to what alumni provide
• No scraping or bulk export

Abuse Prevention (Phase 2)

• Rate-limit profile views
• Optional “Request intro” instead of direct email

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Matching Logic

Initial Version

• Exact string match on job.company == alumni.current_company

Known Issues

• “Google” vs “Google LLC”
• “Meta” vs “Facebook”

Mitigation

• Admin-managed company aliases
• Future companies normalization table

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Additional Considerations

The first year reps will likely be doing outreach for this so we need an effective system for data ingestion from contacts they get approval from.

@Kevinxygu up to you to decide how this looks, could ingest from google forms with a script that pushes to an endpoint and inserts into the alumni table.