MONTEREY BAY, CA — As part of its ongoing collaboration with the California State University, Monterey Bay computer science capstone program, dKomplex has launched a new tool, dHUNTR, the Data-driven High-Performance Unified Network for Talent Research. Developed for Get Hunted, a Swedish headhunting firm, dHUNTR leverages multiple technologies to streamline the company research process, resulting in massive reductions in research time and effort.
When asked how dHUNTR could help her firm, Ida Brynildsen, the founder and managing director of Get Hunted, said that the tool automates an entire part of their workflow and allows them to work with more data, not only saving time, but also improving the quality of their research.
“It’s just changed everything,” she said. “We’ve taken a big step forward that we didn’t expect to take, or even that we could take.”
The tool was built as the capstone project of CSUMB students Ryan Parker, Nathaniel Um, Justin Johnson, Anthony Doolan, and Pedro Ramos, working alongside dKomplex employees. This is the third project that dKomplex has built as part of the capstone program, starting with dART in the fall of 2022, and dAVE in the spring of 2023. While dART and dAVE are primarily internal tools for dKomplex, dHUNTR allowed students to get the additional experience of working for a real-world client.
“I got a good look at how you should manage clients, what they expect, how to talk and present yourself to them,” said Doolan. “I gained a lot of trust in my teammates; it was great having teammates who are able to hold-up their ends of [a project].”
Justin Johnson, another student collaborator on the project, said that the project enriched his learning in numerous ways, including learning to work with new tools and technologies, and having the opportunity to work with—and get feedback from—a client across the globe.
Brynildsen gave an example of how the tool is able to help Get Hunted, saying that if there were 200 companies they needed to research, and only 10 of them would wind up being relevant to their search, finding all the information needed could take hours of work for an employee, while dHUNTR would do so automatically.
Moreover, interacting with young students provided Brynildsen with a fresh outlook on her own workflow. Seeing how dKomplex's usage of the agile methodology helped students tackle challenges made Brynildsen reflect on her own methods. She now intends to recruit a recent college graduate to maintain this new perspective within her company.
dKomplex similarly benefits from the experience of working with students, said dKomplex founder and CEO Justin Loza.
“I want to be in every capstone program going forward,” he said. “I want to continue to provide these great experiences for both students and clients.”
Loza said that dKomplex learns from—and builds upon—the lessons learned from every capstone experience.
“Over the course of this project, I saw [the students] cross over into being software development professionals,” he said. “Now they’re so high performing that I believe that anything Ida [Brynildsen] asked us to do, we could have built it as a team.”
The students involved in the project were also enthusiastic about their participation and the results they achieved.
“I’m really proud of what we built,” said student Ryan Parker. “I think it went really well.”
Parker emphasized the importance of team roles, collaboration, and support in the team’s success.
“We had a really good client; Ida was very supportive,” he said. "She had very low expectations going into the project and by the end we just blew them out of the park.”
Nathaniel Um agreed with his fellow student, saying that teamwork was essential, and credited Loza with supporting the team throughout the process.
“Justin did a great job of being a leader and making us feel comfortable, he clearly knows what he’s doing when he signs up for [the Capstone program],” he said.