Language learning is one of the things that you do as you grow in your environment. But if you’re trying to learn an unknown foreign language, chances are you’ll have a hard time.

Fortunately, there are many apps that are great for learning languages. Here are 10 of them:

1. Duolingo
2. Babbel
3. Memrise
4. Rosetta Stone
5. Mondly
6. Busuu
7. Lirica
8. Pimsleur
9. Drops
10. Beelinguapp

1. Duolingo

Duolingo is a free mobile language learning app. It offers an astonishing number of 35 languages that you can learn.

It is perhaps the most well-known language learning app on the web.

Duolingo offers languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and many more.

You can do one or several exercises every day using the courses available. These courses take about four minutes on average.

After you’ve finished one course, you can go to the next level or even skip some challenges if you’re up for the challenge.

There are in-app purchases if you want to proceed faster, but you definitely can go around without having to pay or access the full version, Duolingo Plus.

Duolingo offers many lessons that cover writing, reading, listening, and speaking. It primarily uses English as the main language and the language you’re learning as the second language.

2. Babbel

Babbel is a monthly-subscription based language learning app available on mobile.

It offers 14 languages that you can learn organized in several curriculums. There are Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, and other languages.

You can try one free lesson on each course for the first time as a trial before deciding to purchase it.

Babbel is intended for beginners to intermediate learners and offers easy lessons that can be accessed whenever. You can start from learning and memorizing vocabulary and can gradually move up to more challenging lessons.

Babbel offers a combination of audio-visual quizzes with interactive dialogues that makes the lesson more interesting.

For a reasonable price of around 13$ for a one-month subscription, you can learn writing, reading, listening, and speaking skills on the go on your phone.

3. Memrise

Memrise is a free language learning app that offers 22 languages to learn. Their languages include French, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, English, and many more.

Memrise is qualified to be one of the best language learning apps as it has won Google Play Awards in 2017.

Memrise is great for visual learners because the method it’s using is connecting matching pictures associated with the words so new learners can easily remember the words and expressions.

This is especially useful for beginners who are learning the language for the first time.

Because it focuses on memorizing words by picture, it essentially is a vocabulary learning app.

There are plenty of levels for every language. And also, it has a recording voice from native speakers so it makes the language easier to memorize and pronounce.

There is the full version called Memrise Plus and it starts at $8.99 for monthly subscription. But if you’d like, the free version already offers everything you need for your learning.

4. Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone is a subscription-based language learning app available on mobile and online. It offers 13 languages ranging from Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Mandarin, and many more.

If many language apps uses English as the primary language, Rosetta Stone is unique and starts from the target language (language you’re learning).

Its method is trying to emulate the realistic experience of going into a new country and learning the language first-hand without translation.

But don’t worry, as Rosetta Stone is still easy on beginner because lessons that can be taken slowly and easily.

One example of its features is learning vocabulary with flashcards containing images. This method has always been the classic way to easily memorize vocabulary.

Rosetta Stone starts at $35.97 per three-month subscription for one language and while there are critics of its price, it’s still a great and extended app to learn a language.

5. Mondly

Mondly is a free language learning app that also offers a paid subscription to unlock more content.

It has a great variety (40 languages) to learn language from. Their languages include Vietnamese, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Slovak, and Croatian for example.

Similar to many language apps, Mondly offers short lessons that you can take daily. It also translates the target language with your native language first.

Mondly has several features such as daily lessons with game-like quizzes, the chatbot that you can type your conversations, and augmented reality.

This augmented reality can generate a CGI teacher in your room while you’re learning the language. It is perhaps its most unique feature and learners can emulate the feeling of being in a class while staying at home.

The free plan consists of 6 free lessons and a few vocabularies and Chatbot conversations.

The features on the free plan are quite limited compared to other apps. If you’d like, you can get the premium plan that is reasonably priced at $9.99.

6. Busuu

Busuu is a free language learning app available on mobile that also offers a paid version.

It has 12 languages to learn and while the numbers might not look much, the lessons are extensive and complete.

When you start using Busuu, you can place yourself at a level that is suitable for you.

Busuu offers a wide selection of topics such as travel or culture, so you can choose what interests you.

It also offers lessons like flashcards (matching the pictures with the dialogues) and matching sound clips with the associated picture.

The premium service can be used for more upper-intermediate or advanced learners as it has more complex tailored lessons.

There are 2 premium plans for Busuu: Busuu Premium and Busuu Premium Plan.

Busuu Premium starts at around $11.69 per month and Busuu Premium Plus starts at around $12.85 per month.

7. Lirica

Lirica is a free mobile language learning app that offers in-app purchases for full access.

It mainly focuses on learning 1 language which is Spanish. While it might not have any other language, Lirica offers a fun way to learn a new language.

Lirica lets you learn Spanish through music.

With this approach, you can use two modes in the app.

Play mode lets you play the music video while learning the lyrics and the vocabulary. Meanwhile, lesson mode is more of classic text-based learning with the song’s lyrics.

There are several levels you can choose based on your capability in this app. Lirica offers features such as matching the words in the lyrics for their meaning, arranging lyrics, and others. It is suitable for anyone ranging from kids to adults.

If you want full access to the app, Lirica offers a paid subscription of $8/month and it includes a one-month free trial.

8. Pimsleur

Pimsleur is a paid language learning app on mobile. It has a selection of fifty-nine languages and even covers regional dialects.

What’s unique about Pimsleur is that the method of teaching is through listening with minimal to no visual.

The exercises in the app include filling in vocabulary and responding correctly to the conversation.

It also teaches vocabulary by pronouncing it per syllable instead of just putting the word on the screen, which helps the learners memorize through sounds.

Pimsleur lets you replay the audio and the lesson often, so you can try to break down the lesson little by little if you’re still a beginner.

Pimsleur offers a 7-day free trial and a monthly subscription plan that costs $14.95 per month. Pimsleur also sells its lesson through digital MP3 and CDs because they’re audio lessons.

9. Drops

Drops is a mobile language learning app with in-app purchases.

It offers 30 languages to learn like Thai, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and many more.

Drops is said to be focusing on learning to be a fun experience. Thus, it uses games to let you learn the language.

You can do a daily exercise that is around 5 minutes. By using Drops, you can expand your vocabulary while playing games essentially.

Using simple icons or graphics, Drops also offers a visual dictionary that has a nice interface that’s easy to look at.

If you want to access the full version, Drops offers a premium plan for 10$/month or $3/year, or $160 for a lifetime. This premium plan erases all the ads in the app and lets you access the whole features.

10. Beelinguapp

Beelinguapp is a free mobile language learning app that offers 14 languages to learn like Spanish, German, English, Korean, and many more.

This app focuses more on reading and reading comprehension.

Beelinguapp offers you to read stories in 2 languages at once, making you remember the vocabularies through written texts.

You can improve your reading skills, listening comprehension, and build your vocabulary through Beelinguapp.

Its selection includes stories like Snow White or Sherlock Holmes, kids’ books, news articles, or even culture guides.

If you would like no ads when using Beelinguapp, you can purchase the in-app offers that act as subscriptions. But it’s not necessary as you’ve been given many features with just the free version.

And that’s all the 10 apps you can use to learn new languages.

You can add the languages you’ve mastered to your skills list. It might come to use later for you in the future when you’re hunting for jobs.

In case you need more tips about your career and job, you can also try reading our blogs, 9cv9 Blog.

And if you’ve added new languages to your skills and want to apply for jobs, you can go to our job platform: 9cv9.

The post 10 Best Language Learning Apps for 2021 appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

Brief Summary

The Economy of the Philippines

Regulations to Hire Employees in the Philippines

Job Boards in the Philippines

1. 9cv9
2. Job Pinoy
3. OnlineJobs PH
4. Jora
5. Google For Jobs
6. Indeed

Brief Summary

Country: Philippines

Currency: Philippine Peso

Capital: Manila

Official languages: Filipino and English

The Economy of the Philippines

The Philippines is the second most populous country in Southeast Asia and seventh in Asia. Having over 110 million citizens, like its neighbouring countries, the Philippines rely on its services sector for its economy. 

The country has one of the most dynamic economies in the East Asia Pacific region. Philippines facing an increasing urbanization, a growing middle class, and having considerably young population. As a result, Philippines’ economic is rooted in strong consumer demand supported by a labour market and robust remittances. The remittances from overseas workers are equivalent up to 10.5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

In addition, its unmatched geographic location has made the Philippines the commercial, cultural and intellectual hub of Asia over the course of time backed by the development of trade and commerce. Which is why you probably want to expand your businesses to the Philippines. 

Services has been the Philippine’s fast-growing sector for its economy. Above all, tourism, agriculture, outsourcing, construction, and healthcare industries has the highest contribution to the economy. Amounting up to 57 per cent of the country’s economy in 2014.

The Philippines is still consider as a new industrialized country. Which means the country is in transition from agriculture based to a more services and manufacturing based. The primary exports are electronic products, coconut oil, transport equipment, and fruits

Regulations to Hire Employees in the Philippines

The main sources of Philippine law are the Constitution, statutes, treaties and conventions, and judicial decisions. While the Constitution is the highest law, the Labour Code (“the Code”) is the law that regulates employment relationships. The Code also applies to foreign nationals working in the Philippines. The Philippine employment landscape is generally pro-labour rather than pro- management, meaning the law tends to be more employee-friendly.

We have summarized the Philippine’s labour laws for you. So, you know at least the basic regulations on their employment laws. Or you can read it more about it in here. 

• Terminating employment is relatively restrictive from an employer’s perspective and must be carried out in compliance with statutory requirements. It’s only legal if there is an authorised or justified cause because they can’t dismiss an employee at any time without a warning or notice. If in another case, an employee wants to terminate employment for any reason by serving notice to the employer at least 30 days in advance. If the employee fails to give notice, the employer may hold the employee liable for damages. 
• The Code has its own special laws on discrimination and harassment for specific case. As you can’t discriminate against employees who have filed any complaint concerning wages, joined or encourage membership of labour organisations, or testified under the Code.

Working Hours

• The maximum working hours is at 8 hours a day, or 48 hours a week in total for 5 days a week. However, it could change depending on the contract between you and your employee.
• The minimum wage varies on each regions. It is currently P 537.00 per day.
• If the work of a health personnel exceeds the maximum number of hours fixed either by regulation or by specific agreement, they are entitled to at least 30 per cent of their regular wage for work on the sixth day. 

*P.S. “health personnel” covers resident physicians, nurses, nutritionists, dietitians, pharmacists, social workers, laboratory technicians, paramedical technicians, psychologists, midwives, attendants and all other hospital or clinic personnel.

• Since the maximum work hours allow in the Philippines are 8 hours, employees who works longer must be paid extra. With a compensation up to 25% of the employees’ regular work wage.

Paid Leave

• There are 12 paid regular holidays each year. Employees could work on these days but should be paid double their usual rate of pay for doing so.
• Employees are entitled to five days of paid vacation leave after 12 months of service. 
• Female employees are entitled to maternity leave of up to 105 days, all of which is paid. Male employees are entitled to seven paid paternity leave days.

Job Boards in the Philippines

1. 9cv9

9cv9 a fast growing established human resource technology company from Singapore. Since incorporation in 2016, the company has grown to establish its presence all over the world. The company’s aim is to empower and enhance their users’ employability for future career development by connecting applicants to companies using advanced technologies. The focus of their applicants are mostly on fresh graduates, tech developers, engineers and programmers, internship and externship for students. The company provide a collaborative work environment in which employers strive to provide the best possible experience for job searchers.

Above all, the platform is user-friendly and grants access to many job board partners like Neuvoo, Facebook for Jobs, Google for Jobs, etc. It also makes the interviewing process easy by integrating with Zoom and Google Meet. Upon registering, you can discover a wide range of integrations that will help enhance and make the hiring more efficient. If you are thinking to hire in Indonesia, then starting your employee search with 9cv9 may not be a bad idea.

2. JobPinoy

JobPinoy is a new innovative job search platform, aiming to provide employment solutions. They have a simple yet effective technological approach called cover video technology will serve as an advanced solution to increasing the hiring rate of both job seekers and employers. The said approach will enable employers to promote your companies, your core values, and your workplaces as easy as uploading a video for job seekers to see.

The company aims to remove the employment gap and provide recruiters a chance at leaving an impression of your company or business to job seekers. As well as being a bridge on how the recruiter and candidates communicate and present themselves.

3. OnlineJobs PH

Onlinejobs.ph is the largest online database of Filipino online workers and professionals. Helps entrepreneurs and small businesses save up on labour costs by helping them outsource jobs to Filipino workers like virtual assistants, programmers, designers, copywriters, etc. The applicants are all full-time workers, instead of freelancers. They helps finding the best specialized workers for your business. All while providing a stable and long-term employment to Filipinos everywhere by giving them decent jobs that help support their families without having to leave the country or their home. 

4. Jora

Jora is an Australian company and part of the SEEK Group. It’s a search engine platform for jobs in the Philippines. Making users able to search through thousands of potential candidates, all sourced from many job sites from around the Philippines. The platform aims to make the website as simple and as intuitive as possible, while ensuring that you can find the best applicants for your company. 

5. Google For Jobs

Google for Jobs is a new search feature that gathers listings from job boards and career sites into one place. It is a Google tool that gathers and shows job listings from all over the internet. It aims for job seekers in locating relevant listings directly from Google search results. Whether it’s on a website owned by a small business or a job site with thousands of postings, they’re everywhere. This makes it simple for job seekers to locate their next job in Search.

6. Indeed

Indeed is a job posting website that receives over 250 million unique visits per month. The company is dedicate to put job searchers first, then providing them with free access to job postings, CV creation, and company research. 

It manages to link millions of people with new prospects every day. Indeed’s purpose is to assist people in finding work. They have over 10,200 dedicated global employees working to achieve this aim and improve the entire recruitment process using real-life examples and data. The platform claims to have 250 million unique visitors per month. They provide a collaborative work environment in which employees strive to offer the best possible experience for job searchers.

Indeed is completely free for job seekers, and there is no need to create an account. Signing up for an account, on the other hand, will enable you to receive email notifications when new applicants are applied, upload their resume to simplify the recruitment process, and receive communications from recruiters and potential employers. 

It has a wage comparison tool and a section dedicated to your applicant’s consideration. So, the applicants had know first-hand of your companies proflie before applying for a job or accepting an offer. Indeed’s user experience is simple and straightforward, with the goal of quickening their job search.

Check also our other recommendation for:

• How to Find and Hire Talents in Indonesia in 2021?

The post How to Find and Hire Talents in the Philippines in 2021? appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

We are happy to share that 9cv9 Jobs and Career Platform has partnered with Jora. Jora is part of SEEK group and based out of Australia. Jora aggregates jobs from other job sites and accumulates them on its global job board. It also allows hiring companies to post job directly onto the site.

Jora has presence in over 36 countries: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Laos, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuala, and Vietnam.

They have partnered with other major job boards such as Jobstreet, and JobDB, making Jora one of the biggest job aggregating asset that you need on your hiring journey.

The good news is, 9cv9 is now partnered with Jora to enable our 9cv9 users to post to Jora seamlessly, efficiently and affordably.

The traffic to Jora is huge, amounting to around six million visits on average per month, according to Similarweb Analytics.

Looking at the latest traffic report for April 2021, traffic to Jora’s website spent an average visit duration of around 3 minutes and forty-three seconds, with an average-pages-per-visit metric of 3.80 and a bounce rate of around 40%.

The top 3 countries where Jora receives most of its traffic are from the Australia, Malaysia and Philippines.

By posting at Jora, your company can access to the traffic on Jobstreet and JobsDB as well with traffic footprints in Cambodia and Laos, countries that don’t usually have many job boards serving their populace.

How to get started on receiving high quantity of traffic from Jora?

One way is to register for a Recruiter account directly at Jora here and thereafter, to start posting jobs.

Or you can register at 9cv9 Job and Career Platform, whereby all your job postings are seamlessly posted on Jora (along with other free job board postings as well).

This makes your hiring journey more efficiently as your one account on 9cv9.com enables you to post to multiple job boards for high quality traffic.

Plus, 9cv9 tracks all incoming traffic from Jora when the latter send over potential jobseekers. The data is available from your “Dashboard” tab in your Employer Account.

All jobseekers’ movements along the hiring pipeline from their viewing of your job postings, to their hiring activities are tracked automatically in real-time using our technology (This is only for our Plus and Premium plan users only)

Do try it today by posting a job at 9cv9 Jobs and Career Platform.

If you have any questions, feel free to email to hello@9cv9.com for our world-class customer support.

FAQ

1. Is it free to get traffic from Jora?

Yes. Jora offers free job postings. All your job postings are by default posted on Jora’s free job feed from 9cv9.

The post 9cv9 has partnered with Jora appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

Finding a job is tough.

Getting hired is tougher.

Getting hired during Covid19 period is arguably the toughest in modern time.

That’s why 9cv9 has created several features that help you get a job quickly, one of which is a “Getting Headhunted Feature”.

Instead of reaching out to job portals and hiring companies, which can be pretty tedious, 9cv9 allows companies and hiring managers to headhunt you instead and invite you to apply for their jobs.

How to turn on this feature?

1) Login to 9cv9 Candidate Portal.

At your top right, you should be able to see the job switcher very clearly.

You need to click on it to make it “Yes”.

However, before you are allowed to click to “Yes”, there are some basic information that you need to fill in.

Basic Required Information

• Avatar
• Your Name
• Expected Salary in USD
• Address
• Notice Period (days)
• Years of working experience
• Looking for (This is located at the Basic Tab)
• At least one skill
• Date of birth
• CV in PDF or Docx Format

The reason why all these information are needed is because upon switching on the switcher, we allow companies and hiring managers to directly headhunt you for their job.

To enable a productive and high-quality candidate list for them, these are the bare minimum information needed.

After all, we are helping you to present your profile in a much better light so as to enhance your suitability and ultimately to be hired.

To kickstart being headhunted by companies, register for an account or login at 9cv9 or 9cv9 Indonesia (Indonesian version) or 9cv9 Vietnam (Vietnamese version).

The post How to get headhunted? Switching “Yes” to the Job Searching Switcher in 9cv9 Job Portal appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

We are happy to share that 9cv9 Jobs and Career Platform has partnered with Careerjet, particularly with Careerjet Malaysia. Founded in 2000, the company is privately held by co-founders and executive managers Thomas Busch and Jean-Benoit Andrieu.

From Crunchbase, Careerjet was launched in France in August 2000 under the brand name Optioncarriere. This was followed by Belgium and Switzerland, both of which were launched in 2001 along with the Spanish version Optionempleo. The UK version, Careerjet UK was opened to much fanfare in April 2002.

The most recent launches in 2012 have added Arabic versions under the new brand Almehan, for Morocco, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar, to Careerjet’s international network.

So what is Careerjet?

It is said from Crunchbase, that Careerjet’s semantic analysis technology makes it possible to index job offers from a theoretically unlimited number of websites independent of their underlying structure, design or language. The result of this advanced technology is a daily updated index of more than ten million jobs.

Careerjet’s international network of job search engines index employment opportunities in over 90 countries and in 28 languages. The interface and job listings are localized to each country’s site. Careerjet receives over three million unique users per day from all of its affiliate websites.

Careerjet is especially strong in Malaysia, whereby most of our clients are keen to post jobs and get great talents from.

With 9cv9 partnership, we are sure Careerjet will help us get alot more candidates from the Southeast Asian job markets in the coming years.

The traffic to Careerjet Malaysia is huge and growing, amounting to more than sixty-six thousands on average per month, according to SimilarWeb Analytics.

Looking at the latest traffic report for October 2020, Careerjet Malaysia’s average visit duration is around 3 minutes and forty-six seconds, with an average-pages-per-visit metric of 3.41 and a bounce rate of around 45%.

The top 3 countries where Careerjet Malaysia receives most of its traffic are from the Malaysia, India and the United States of America.

For clients keen to expand into Malaysia to get good talents or Malaysian clients keen to enlarge their domestic workforce, our partnership will enable and add more candidate traffic to your platform.

Not too shabby considering it’s Free to get that traffic by posting your jobs on Careerjet, through our job posting system at 9cv9.

How to get started on receiving high quantity of traffic from Careerjet?

One way is to register for a Recruiter account directly at Careerjet here and thereafter, to start posting jobs.

Or you can register at 9cv9 Job and Career Platform, whereby all your job postings are seamlessly posted on Careerjet (along with other free job board postings as well such as Recruit.net).

Read this for our partnership news with Recruit.net.

Read this for our partnership news with Neuvoo

This makes your hiring journey more efficiently as your one account on 9cv9.com enables you to post to multiple job boards for high quality traffic.

Plus, 9cv9 tracks all incoming traffic from Careerjet when the latter send over potential jobseekers. The data is available from your “Dashboard” tab in your Employer Account.

All jobseekers’ movements along the hiring pipeline from their viewing of your job postings, to their hiring activities are tracked automatically in real-time using our technology.

Do try it today by posting a job at 9cv9 Jobs and Career Platform.

If you have any questions, feel free to email to hello@9cv9.com for our world-class customer support.

FAQ

1. Is it free to get traffic from Careerjet?

Yes. Careerjet offers free and paid plans. All your job postings are by default posted on Careerjet’s free job feed.

2. Can we pay to get more high quality traffic from Careerjet?

Sure. We will be offering their paid plans soon, seamlessly from our portal. Watch this space for updates on it.

For more info. on this press release, please email to hello@9cv9.com

The post 9cv9 has partnered with Careerjet appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

Candidates and jobseekers often lament on how hard it is to find jobs, especially during in the Covid19 pandemic period. Instead of looking for jobs at job boards or on Linkedin, why not harass the power of social media to post your personal profile, and thereafter, get your friends and ex-colleagues to share and support your job finding journey?

In this article, we will talk about 9cv9 latest new feature: Profile Sharing.

How it works?

1) Login to your Candidate Account here.

2) Next click to your Profile.

3) At the top right hand corner, there is a button “Share Profile”. Click on it and you will see these options:

There are 4 different ways you can share your profile:

Shortlink: Click on the Shortlink field, and it will be copied to your clipboard for pasting usage anywhere and everywhere. Some use cases can be pasting directly on any social media platforms such as “Facebook” or “Linkedin” whereby their social graphs can extract your meta picture, meta title and meta description (we will explain on each of them below).

Facebook: Directly connecting to Facebook and posting your profile there

Linkedin: Directly connecting to Facebook and posting your profile there

Twitter: Directly connecting to Twitter and posting your profile there

An example post will look like this on Facebook:

In the post above, there are several elements that are extracted from your meta tags.

Picture: This is taken from your Profile Picture meta tag.

Title: It is structured as “Hi, i’m <Your Full Name> | 9cv9 Candidate Hiring”.

Description: It is structured as “<Country you are from> – <Your Role>. Actively looking for <What you are looking for>. <Summary>.

By editing on the <> fields, you are able to change the meta tags and the post elements.

That’s it.

Kickstart your job searching journey here at 9cv9 Job and Career Platform.

FAQs

What are Meta Tags?

To read more on meta tags, you can check out this article here.

The post Latest Feature: How to use 9cv9 sharing feature to get your dream job faster? appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

For a short work life of 7 years I think I have at least combed through 10,000+ job listings. I notice jobs follow a ridiculously mundane template:

1. Something about the company (optional. This is like the youtube advert you must wait through)
2. Job description (this is as relevant as my degree and how I’ve used it for my job)
3. Requirements (long list of skills or qualifications. Essentially have you spent enough time to training yourself on someone else’s dime to be relevant for the company you want to join)
4. What’s in it for you (optional. Ending in video youtube sponsorship. As relevant as something about the company)
5. And then there are small nuggets of meta data that are snuck in like seniority, type of employment, industry and job functions

The following are some suggestions I have:

Instead of a job description, start with a conversation

Jobs are starting to feel super transactional. I exchange time and skills, you give me money. (Kinda feels like the world’s second oldest profession but with a white collar for kink)

It won’t cost a dime to help people feel like people. Start with a conversation (the following is a suggestion):

Rejection sucks! You are a talented individual. That is why we want to help you get this job. Now grab a cup of your preferred choice of stimulant and let’s proceed. We want to ensure we accept every application, so help us keep up the success rate by thoroughly going through the questions

Replace the requirements with a questionnaire (a well thought out one):

Outdated requirements like has a degree is irrelevant for most jobs these days (unless there’s a degree that focuses on powerpoint slides and helping you choose pretty color palettes)

Personally I’ve found questions (when asked in the right way) to feel more personal (and it helps to filter out non serious applicants reducing the workload of the HR Recruiter)

• Can you see yourself spending 40 hours a week on this role in this company. If not no hard feelings
• How do you approach meetings?
  (this may seem like a joke but it’s an important question to determine how people manage their time in one of the biggest time sinks of any role)
• How would you start building {Insert product here}
  (the thought process of market validation through interviews with customers would be most relevant to me. Followed by finding the right team/ resources to build the product based on what paying customers want)

Rejection (if you must)

Hopefully after you have implemented the above, the number of spam applications would go down and there would only be quality picks. But even then sadly, there can only be one

I think something that is sorely lacking (but not difficult to accomplish) is to publish the statistics of the people that applied, received interviews (1st, 2nd, 3rd round) and the profile of the final applicant (to protect their privacy)

This is not a huge endeavour but once again, it humanizes and helps the individual who were rejected to go through their grieving process and become a better person (it’s like breaking up, I too want an after relationship report to improve my game)

This Guest Post first appeared here.

Image credit: http://www.picturequotes.com/there-can-be-only-one-quote-1830

The post Guest Post: Are Job Postings now a Bait for Talents? appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

Pre-requisite:

• Set up Django and linked database of choice

After having installed Django, there are various folders that have been automatically created for you. At this point, your web application has no look yet. This article will show you the simple process of how to set up your homepage on your local system.

Navigate to the directory containing the file manage.py, and run on your terminal:

python manage.py runserver

Your web application is running on http://127.0.0.1:8000/ but there is nothing there to display yet as we have not configured it. By the end of this article, you should be able to set up the endpoint ‘/homepage’ to display your application’s homepage. This means the website will be hosted on http://127.0.0.1:8000/homepage.

Set up project root folder’s urls.py

Your current project directory should look like this:

+ — -project
|  | manage.py
| |
| + — -project-root
| | | settings.py
| | | urls.py
| | | wsgi.py
| | | __init__.py
| | |
| | \ — -__pycache__
| |
| \ — -app
| | admin.py
| | apps.py
| | models.py
| | tests.py
| | __init__.py
| |
| + — -migrations
| \ — -__pycache__

In the project’s root folder, you will find a file named urls.py as highlighted above. Go to this file and paste the following code into the file:

“””project URL Configuration
The `urlpatterns` list routes URLs to views. For more information please see:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/topics/http/urls/
Examples:
Function views
1. Add an import: from my_app import views
2. Add a URL to urlpatterns: path(‘’, views.home, name=’home’)
Class-based views
1. Add an import: from other_app.views import Home
2. Add a URL to urlpatterns: path(‘’, Home.as_view(), name=’home’)
Including another URLconf
1. Import the include() function: from django.urls import include, path
2. Add a URL to urlpatterns: path(‘blog/’, include(‘blog.urls’))
“””
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import include, path
urlpatterns = [
path(‘homepage/’, include(‘app.urls’)),
path(‘admin/’, admin.site.urls),
]

From pasting this text, the new line of code we are adding is the one in red. Adding a new url pattern with path ‘homepage/’ means that we are creating something at http://127.0.0.1:8000/homepage. We are also including a URLconf from our app folder. If your folder is named differently, then change the code accordingly.

Set up app folder’s urls.py and html files

Navigate to your app folder directory and create a new file called urls.py as shown below.

+ — -project
| | manage.py
| |
| + — -project-root
| | | settings.py
| | | urls.py
| | | wsgi.py
| | | __init__.py
| | |
| | \ — -__pycache__
| |
| \ — -app
| | admin.py
| | apps.py
| | models.py
| | tests.py
| | urls.py
| | views.py
| | __init__.py
| |
| + — -migrations
| \ — -__pycache__

Paste the following code into this file:

from django.urls import path
from . import views
urlpatterns = [
path(‘’, views.index, name=’index’),
]

In the same directory, you should have a file named views.py. We will create a function called index which is what makes the http request for our website to be loaded.

Your views.py file needs to have the following code:

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse
# Create your views here.
def index(request):
# Render the HTML template index.html
return render(request, ‘index.html’, context=context)

Now, we’ve set it up such that http://127.0.0.1:8000/homepage will render the HTML template index.html, so we need to create the index.html file.

Create a new folder templates in the same directory as the urls.py file, like so:

+ — -project
| | manage.py
| |
| + — -project-root
| | | settings.py
| | | urls.py
| | | wsgi.py
| | | __init__.py
| | |
| | \ — -__pycache__
| |
| \ — -app
| | admin.py
| | apps.py
| | models.py
| | tests.py
| | urls.py
| | views.py
| | __init__.py
| |
| + — -migrations
| |
| + — -templates
| | index.html
| |
| \ — -__pycache__

Register your templates settings.py file

Add this line to your settings.py file, under the TEMPLATES section:

TEMPLATES = [
‘BACKEND’: ‘django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates’,
‘DIRS’: [
os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ‘templates’),
],
‘APP_DIRS’: True,
‘OPTIONS’: {
‘context_processors’: [
‘django.template.context_processors.debug’,
‘django.template.context_processors.request’,
‘django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth’,
‘django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages’,
],
},
},
]

Start decorating your website!

Now, everything is set up! What determines how your website looks like depends on the contents of the index.html file. You can begin to set up your homepage now.

The post How to Set Up Your Homepage with Django appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

In this article, we will explore Logistic Regression as the starting step towards learning about Neural Network and Machine Learning.

Logistics Regression is mainly used for supervised problems that have binary outputs, either 0 or 1. For example, whether it will rain tomorrow (with 0=not going to rain, and 1=going to rain), or whether your crush will fall in love with you on your first date together (with 0=not going to fall in love and 1=going to fall in love). For the latter example, the output will be tied to a training set of example inputs:

• Whether you bought a gift for the girl? (Yes/No)
• How nicely dressed up you were for the date? (A rating from 0–10)
• Did you pay for the meal? (Yes/No/Partially)
• How nervous you were during the meal? (A rating from 0–10)
• and many other inputs…

Let’s first see how to construct the logistic regression equation mathematically.

Starting point: Linear Regression

We could start from the linear regression equation:

                           ŷ = (w.T)x + b          ------------- (1)

where :

ŷ is your predicted value of the model
w.T is the transposed vector of your parameters w
x are the input features in vector form and colloquially, things that explain y, the dependent variables (for the dating example, whether you are going to buy a gift for the girl, how nicely dressed up you will be, etc.)
b is the bias or error term

Equation (1) would be the archetypal equation for linear regression, but for logistics regression, we cannot use it because from our aforementioned discussion, the output value of a logistics regression equation cannot be less than 0 or more than 1. Using (1) for logistics regression means the output value of ŷ can be unbounded and sometimes falling in the region, <0 or >1, which doesn’t make sense (akin to saying that your crush will fall in love with you 1000x)

We would like an equation that can provide us with values not less than 0 and not more than 1.

Sigmoid Function

Introducing the Sigmoid Function. Let me first show its equation:

and now, equation (1) simply becomes:

                              ŷ = σ(z)             ------------- (2)where z = (w.T)x + b 
      σ is the sigmoid function applied to z

To better illustrate the function:

What are some advantages of using a Sigmoid Function?

1. The upper bound of ŷ is 1 and the lower bound of ŷ is 0.
2. It is differentiable easily.
3. It is monotonic

Let’s see if it makes sense using the Sigmoid Function for logistics regression. If we were to take z=(w.T)x + b being very large (maybe 100,000), in the linear regression equation (1), ŷ would be very large. However, in the logistic regression equation (2), e^[-(large number)] would be small and close to 0 so 1/1+e^[-(large number)] ≈ 1.

In the case for z values being large, ŷ will be close to 1 and ŷ will never be more than 1.

Conversely, if z=(w.T)x + b is very small (or very negative), e^ -[very negative number] would be very large so 1/(1+e^ -[very negative number]) ≈ 0, so ŷ will never be less than 0.

In the case for z values being small, ŷ will be close to 0 and ŷ will never be less than 0.

As you can see, the bounded property of the Sigmoid function proves to be useful and relevant for logistics regression purposes.

In Numpy, you can easily create a sigmoid function using:

import numpy as np
  def sigmoid(z):   
     s = 1/(1+np.exp(-z))    
     return s
print (str(sigmoid(np.array([0,2]))))
output: [0.5, 0.88079708]

As you can see, the output values will never be more than 1 or less than 0, with your first date predictions either going to be good or bad.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
• https://towardsdatascience.com/activation-functions-neural-networks-1cbd9f8d91d6

The post Logistic Regression: A Primer appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.

Background

Python is fast becoming a popular coding language in the world, and there are many popular frameworks that build on Python. One of them is Django and it has many functionalities and supporting libraries. For this article, we like to explore one interesting method that builds on Django to handle not only HTTP but also long running connections such as WebSockets, MQTT, chatbots, etc.

To be specific, we want to utilise Django Channels to build a real-time chat application. That sounds pretty cool, isn’t it? It’s always a great experience to learn something new, so let’s begin!

First up: What is Django?

For newbies (and some oldbies), Django is a web building framework based on the Python programming language. It uses a Model-View-Template(“MVT”) architecture. Django is being popular because it is fast, secure, and a scalable high-level Python programming for web building. Learning Django is not that easy, but when you get used to it, it has many great functionalities. You could read more about Django here.

What is Django Channels?

From the Channels webpage, “Channels is a project that takes Django and extends its abilities beyond HTTP — to handle WebSockets, chat protocols, IoT protocols, and more.” Channels makes an asynchronous layer in Django so that although Django runs synchronously, Channels could handle its socket asynchronously.

Real-Time Chat Application

What is the difference between real-time chat application with the traditional chat app? Unlike most traditional chat apps, the real-time chat application does not save your chat messages in the database before passing it to other client.

That is because it uses sockets to send and receive messages between machines. The messages are exchanged through a network, either using a Transmission Control Protocol (“TCP”) or a User Datagram Protocol (“UDP”). You could save the messages if you want, but it would be separated from the socket send-receive process.

Why does the real-time chat method become popular? Firstly, it saves storage. Real-time messaging doesn’t save your messages, as the latter are just passing through the network, making your whole chat architecture storage friendly. Secondly, as its name shows, it is “real-time” and we can see that this type of messaging is faster than the normal one. The traditional messaging system saves your messages in the database, so every time you need your messages, you have to query to the database to get them. The real-time messaging only passes messages every time we want to send and receive them when they arrive on the socket, so it should be faster and more efficient.

Setting Up

Before we start to build the chat application, we need to set our environment, just like building a standard Django application. First, make a virtual environment using Python’s virtualenv and activate it. After that, you need to install some libraries (We areusing Django Rest Framework also in this example): Django 2.0, djangorestframework 3.8.2, asgi-redis==1.4.3, and channels==1.1.5 using pip install.

After installing, create a new django project,

django-admin startproject chat-project

Change directory to your project directory,

cd chat-project

Make a new app

python manage.py startapp chat-app

After that, open settings.py and add ‘rest_framework’, ‘channels’, and ‘chat-app’ to INSTALLED_APPS. You also have to add this code to settings.py in order to set up your asgi redis.

CHANNEL_LAYERS = {      
“default”: {      
“BACKEND”: “asgi_redis.RedisChannelLayer”,      
“CONFIG”: {         
“hosts”: [(redis_host, 6379)],    
},    
“ROUTING”: “routing.application”,   
},
}

Why do we need Redis? When real-time chat does not need databases like mySQL, postgreSQL, it does not mean it never save the message. It uses message broker database like Redis to save the messages in a First-in-First-Out (“FIFO”) queue before sending them.

Make It Happen

Now, it’s time for us to make the real application. To keep it simple, the example here is written without a model, so you would need to include the room name/room id on the messages. For example, we use integer as our room id, so we need to add “room_id”: <<integer>> to our JSON message. That’s how we know where we should send the message.

Move to your application chat directory, and create consumers.py. In this file, we need 6 functions:

• def websocket_connect (message) to handle if a client socket is connecting to the server. You have to create a list of rooms here: message.channel_session[‘rooms’] = []
• def websocket_disconnect (message) to handle if a client socket is disconnecting to the server.
• def websocket_receive (message) to handle when the server receive messages from client socket. This function redirects the message to receive.chat using:

Channel(“receive”).send(<<message>>)

Don’t forget to add: from channels import Channel at the top of the file.

• def join_chat(message) to handle when a new user joins a chat room. Here, you could notify to everybody in the room that a new user has joined the room. You could save the user information, for example “username”: “user-1”, in the message and send a message to the room with that information using send_chat function.
• def leave_chat(message) to handle when a user leaves a chat room. Here, you could notify everybody that someone has left by calling send_chat function.
• def send_chat(message) to handle when a user sends a message to a chat room. Here, you must get the Group where you would send the message. You could get it by using this code:

group = Group(“room-“ + str(message[“room_id”))

Don’t forget to add:

from channels import Group 

at the beginning of the file. After getting the group, you could send a message using that variable and send function:

group.send(<<json>>)

After finishing the consumers.py, we should make two more files called routing.py, one inside the chat-app folder and one in the project root. Here is the code for the one in the project root:

from channels import include
application = [    
# To set up the websocket routing   
include(“chat-app.routing.routing_websocket”, path=r”^/socket/”),    
# For chat join, leave, and send    
include(“chat-app.routing.routing_chat”),
]

And here is the one for inside the chat-app folder:

from channels import route

from .consumers import websocket_connect, websocket_receive, websocket _disconnect, join_chat, leave_chat, send_chat

routing_websocket = [    
  route(“websocket.connect”, websocket_connect),    
  route(“websocket.receive”, websocket_receive),    
  route(“websocket.disconnect”, websocket_disconnect),
]

routing_chat = [    
  route(“chat.receive”, join_chat, command=”^join$”),    
  route(“chat.receive”, leave_chat, command=”^leave$”),    
  route(“chat.receive”, send_chat, command=”^send$”),
]

And that’s it! You could go try making a simple HTML Javascript web application that call to the backend you have made. You could make a socket that connect to your backend like this:

var socket = new ReconnectingWebSocket(<<ws or
wss>>://<<yourhost>>/socket/);

And then you could use these function for handlers:

• socket.onopen to handle when the socket open.
• socket.onclose to handle when the socket is closed
• socket.onmessage to handle when the socket receive a message
• socket.send to send a message. It’s usually on JSON Format

This is the message example you could use:

{
“command” : <<join or leave or send>>
“room_id” : 1,
“message” : “Hi there!”
}

References

If you want to learn about making the one with a model, you could go here.

This article is written by Ranindya, developer at 9cv9 Innovation Lab. We are hiring. See more: www.9cv9.com/jobs

The post Simple Chat App using Django Channel appeared first on 9cv9 Career Blog.