NexHire — Bridge Talent, Campus & Hiring

NexHire is a campus-to-career platform built on the MERN stack. It connects three audiences in one place — students, colleges/universities, and recruiters — combining the job-search of Naukri/LinkedIn with the hackathons-and-events energy of Unstop.

Features

For Students

• Create a profile (degree, major, skills, resume) and apply to jobs in one click
• Track every application through a status pipeline (Applied → Reviewed → Shortlisted → Interviewed → Offered/Rejected)
• Save jobs to revisit later
• Register for hackathons, contests and workshops
• Personal dashboard with stats and recent activity

For Recruiters

• Post, edit and close job listings
• View applicants per job and move them through the hiring pipeline
• Host hackathons and events
• Recruiter dashboard with hiring metrics

For Universities / Colleges

• Maintain a roster of affiliated students
• Host workshops, fests and conferences
• University dashboard

Platform

• One unified auth surface — a single User model with a role field, one JWT auth middleware, role-based authorization
• Full-text job search with filters (type, location, experience, salary) and pagination
• Hardened API: Helmet, CORS, rate limiting, input sanitisation (mongo-sanitize + hpp), request size limits, file-upload caps
• httpOnly cookie auth with secure/sameSite in production

Tech Stack

• Frontend: React 18, Redux Toolkit, React Router 6, Tailwind CSS, react-hot-toast
• Backend: Node.js, Express, Mongoose
• Database: MongoDB
• Media: Cloudinary (uploads)

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• A running MongoDB instance

Setup

# 1. Backend env
cp backend/config/config.env.example backend/config/config.env
#    then fill in DB_URI, JWT_SECRET, and Cloudinary keys

# 2. Install dependencies
npm install                 # backend (run from repo root)
cd frontend && npm install  # frontend

# 3. Seed demo data (optional but recommended)
cd .. && npm run seed
#    Demo logins (password: Password123):
#      student:    aarav@nexhire.dev
#      recruiter:  hr@acme.dev
#      university: nitrkl@nexhire.dev

# 4. Run
npm run dev                 # backend on :4000  (repo root)
cd frontend && npm start    # frontend on :3000 (proxies /api to :4000)

Security notes

• backend/config/config.env is gitignored — never commit real secrets.
• If you cloned a version where secrets were previously committed, rotate the JWT secret and Cloudinary keys; old values remain in git history.

API overview

Base path: /api/v1

Area	Endpoints
Auth	POST /auth/register, POST /auth/login, GET /auth/logout
User	GET /me, PUT /me/update, PUT /me/password, DELETE /me, GET /dashboard, GET /users/:id
Jobs	GET /jobs, GET /jobs/:id, POST /jobs, PUT /jobs/:id, DELETE /jobs/:id, GET /recruiter/jobs, PUT /jobs/:id/save, GET /jobs/saved
Applications	POST /jobs/:jobId/apply, GET /applications/me, DELETE /applications/:id, GET /applications/received, GET /jobs/:jobId/applicants, PUT /applications/:id/status
Events	GET /events, GET /events/:id, POST /events, PUT /events/:id, DELETE /events/:id, GET /events/hosted, PUT /events/:id/register