Undergraduates are dissatisfied with HireaHawk because of overwhelming job requirements that are incompatible with their skills, experience, availability, wants, and needs.
Nichole Shaw
While HireaHawk is a great resource for upperclassmen or graduate students as a starting point for jobs that pertain to their career goals, it is a failure for underclassmen because it is not user friendly and has incompatible requirements.
This is an issue because the impending threat of rising tuition — budget cuts to the university passed the Iowa Senate and headed to the House — has established an apparent need for student jobs that are flexible on workers’ availability. According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 66 percent of American students work part- or full-time while enrolled in college as of September 2017. College students work to manage debt, build job experience, increase time-management skills and receive employee benefits. A job is crucial to their self-sustainability in college while they’re away from their families. HireaHawk eliminates the opportunity for undergraduates to sustain themselves and develop their character because of the inflexible schedules and unreachable locations the job listings on the site require.
“I feel like the positions are not relevant to what I’m looking for,” freshman Emily Weigand said. “I’m not looking for anything full-time. It’s not useful for first-year students who are looking for a part-time job to make money to pay for college-related expenses.”
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Most of the underclassmen at the UI are full-time students and don’t have the availability to fulfill the requirements for the countless job listings posted on the network. While students are here to further their education and gain knowledge about particular fields of study, they also require means to pay for that education. If the majority of jobs that are being offered are full-time, they aren’t very helpful to undergraduate students who have a full schedule and aren’t ready to immerse themselves entirely in a career.
Transfer sophomore Jaylon Cotton says HireaHawk is hard to navigate. He suggests there should be different pages for graduate students, upperclassmen, and underclassmen. “Currently, HireaHawk is really overwhelming because when you pull up the site, it endlessly lists positions that don’t necessarily pertain to your wants and needs as an underclassman.”
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The consensus among students is that HireaHawk is not user-friendly and while it may be a great resource and tool for students who will graduate or are looking to find a demanding job in their career field, most are left frustrated with what is offered onsite. Either make the website more available and accessible to underclassmen — by splitting the site into different sections for part-time and full-time jobs or jobs on-campus and jobs off-campus — or students will have to resort to other websites and apps such as Craigslist to get the listings and opportunities they need. With the imminent tuition hike, the very least HireaHawk can do is provide some relief to students by offering jobs that complement their commitment to their studies.