We built the NovaEdge Digital Labs app with four kinds of account in it: job seeker, employer, freelancer and admin. The question I get most from students who install it is some version of the same thing. I made an account, now what.
Fair question. The app carries a job board, a freelance marketplace, an academy, a digital store and ten small utilities, and the home screen does not tell you which of those pays you and in what order. So here is the sequence, written by the person who signed off on the screens. The app is linked from https://novaedgedigitallabs.tech/ and everything below is a feature that exists today rather than a plan.
Pick the role you are going to use, not the one that sounds better
Role is set at registration and it decides which screens you get. Job seeker gives you the job feed, the application form and the applications tracker. Freelancer gives you gig creation, the proposal flow and project milestones. Employer gives you job posting, the applicant list and project posting.
The mistake is picking employer because you intend to hire people one day. You then land on a dashboard built for someone with a vacancy open and none of the screens you needed are in front of you. Pick what describes this month.
One thing worth knowing early: a single login carries the whole account. Password reset runs over OTP and email, sessions persist, and you can see and end active sessions from the privacy settings. If you sign in on a friend's phone during a placement drive, that is where you go to kick it off.
The profile is the application
Almost every rejection I have watched happen on the employer side of this app happened before the pitch was read. An employer opens the applicant list, taps a name, and gets a profile with a blank bio, no skill tags and no portfolio link. There is nothing to evaluate, so they move to the next row.
Profiles hold a bio, skills and portfolio links. Freelancer profiles hold more: completed projects, an hourly rate and the gigs you have listed. Fill all of it before you apply to anything, because the profile is what your application actually is. The pitch box is a paragraph. The profile is the evidence.
Two specific fields do more work than the rest. Skill tags, because they are what a search matches against. And portfolio links, because they are the only part of a profile an employer can verify without asking you a question.
A pitch is a claim. A portfolio link is a claim someone can check in nine seconds. Ship the second one first.
How the job board works
The job feed filters on type, salary range, experience and keywords. Type covers full-time, part-time, remote and internship. Internship is the filter most students should be living in for the first few months, and it is the one they skip.
A job detail screen carries the company info and a requirement checklist. Read the checklist before the salary. Applying takes a resume attachment and a custom pitch, and both go to the employer as one submission.
Save Job is a one-tap bookmark and it exists for a reason. Batching is better than applying the moment you see something. Save six roles over an evening, write six different pitches in one sitting with the requirement checklists open, then send them.
After that, everything lives in My Applications. Five states, and they mean what they say.
# What the tracker shows, and what it means
# for you on that day.
#
# Pending submitted, nobody has opened it
# Under review an employer opened your profile
# Interview they want to talk, check your email
# Accepted offer stage
# Rejected closed, apply elsewhere
#
# Pending for two weeks is not a rejection.
# It usually means the posting is stale, so
# spend the effort on a fresh listing instead
# of following up on a dead one.The tracker is also where you learn something about your own funnel. If nothing ever leaves Pending, the problem is your profile or the roles you are picking. If plenty reach Under review and stop there, the problem is what the profile says once it is opened. Those are different fixes and the tracker tells you which one you need.
Freelance work is a separate door
The marketplace covers design, development, marketing and content writing, and it has two directions of travel. You can list a gig, which is a service with pricing tiers, a delivery timeline and media previews, and wait for someone to order it. Or you can find a posted project and submit a proposal with a bid amount and a delivery estimate.
Do both, in that order. A gig is a page that works while you sleep and it takes an hour to write. Proposals are how you get the first order, because nobody discovers a gig from a profile with no completed work on it.
On proposals, the bid is not the part that wins. Clients posting projects here set a budget cap, so undercutting inside a fixed cap mostly signals that you did not read the brief. What wins is a delivery estimate you can hold and one sentence proving you understood the actual problem. I have written about why the quote is the hard part of the job, and it is the same skill at a smaller scale.
Once a project starts, it runs on milestones and deliverable submissions. Use them. A project with three marked milestones ends in a handover. A project with none ends in a conversation about whether it is finished.
Courses matter for the certificate, not the video count
The academy has a categorized catalog with search and level filters, an in-app player with progress tracking, and a My Courses screen that resumes where you stopped. Finishing a course generates a PDF certificate.
The certificate is the point, and not because a certificate is impressive on its own. It is a dated artifact with a name on it that you can attach to an application in the same app, ten minutes after you earn it. An employer reading your profile sees a completed thing rather than a claim about a thing you are learning.
Pick courses that map onto the requirement checklists you keep failing. That is what the checklists are for.
Use the ten tools to produce artifacts
There are ten utilities built into the app, all running on the device: an invoice generator, a resume builder, a QR code generator, a JSON formatter, a JWT decoder, a Base64 converter, a regex tester, an image compressor, an EMI calculator and a GST calculator.
Three of them sit directly on the path this post is about. The resume builder produces the file you attach to applications, which removes the excuse that your resume is on a laptop you do not have with you. The invoice generator produces a PDF invoice for freelance work you have delivered, and sending an invoice that looks like an invoice changes how a client treats the payment. The GST calculator exists because Indian freelancers past a threshold have to quote a number that includes tax, and getting that wrong on the first invoice is a slow conversation to fix.
The rest are working tools rather than career tools. The JWT decoder and the regex tester are there because I wanted them on my phone while debugging, and it turned out other people did too.
What premium changes
Payments run through Razorpay, covering UPI, cards, netbanking and wallets, and subscriptions are tiered. Premium opens the paid courses, removes the cap on job applications and gives a priority badge on listings.
Here is the honest version. Premium raises a ceiling. It does not fix a profile. If your applications are stalling in Pending, more applications per month buys you more Pending rows. Spend the first month on the free tier, get your funnel moving, and upgrade when the limit is the thing in your way.
There are also credits. Daily login gives points, referrals give credits when the person you invited signs up or buys something, and both redeem against store items and premium features. Treat that as a discount mechanism, not an income stream.
If you are the one hiring
The employer side is the mirror image. Post a job, edit it, publish it, then manage active, closed and draft listings from My Posted Jobs. The applicant screen lets you review candidates, download resumes and move an application through the same five states the candidate sees.
Move them. A candidate sitting in Pending has no idea whether you looked. Flipping the state to Under review costs a tap and it is the difference between a hiring process and a form that swallowed somebody's evening.
If what you need is a build rather than a hire, that is the business inquiry form. It goes to us, an email lands with my team, and the lead moves through a status pipeline until somebody has replied to you.
The order I would do it in
If I were starting from a fresh install this week, with no work history and no portfolio to point at, this is the week I would run.
# Week one, in order. Nothing here is
# paid and nothing takes a full day.
#
# day 1 register, pick the honest role
# write the bio, add skill tags
# add one portfolio link that works
# day 2 resume builder, export the PDF
# save six roles, do not apply yet
# day 3 write six pitches against the six
# requirement checklists, send them
# day 4 list one gig with three price tiers
# day 5 submit two project proposals
# with dates you can actually hold
# day 6 start one course that maps to a
# checklist you failed on day 3
# day 7 read the tracker, fix the funnel
#
# Everything after day 7 is repetition, plus
# invoicing the first person who pays you.None of that requires a subscription and none of it requires anyone's permission. The app also has a developer social feed, an API key dashboard with usage logs, and a support screen with written guides behind it, and those are worth exploring later. They are not what gets you the first paid deliverable.
The thing that gets you that is a profile somebody can verify and a delivery date you can hold. Both are free, and both are done by Thursday.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the NovaEdge Digital Labs app free to use for job seekers?
- Yes. Registration, the job feed, saving jobs, applying with a resume and pitch, the applications tracker, the freelance marketplace and all ten built-in tools work on the free tier. The paid subscription raises limits rather than opening a different app: it removes the cap on monthly job applications, gives access to premium courses and adds a priority badge on listings.
- Should I register as a freelancer or a job seeker on the app?
- Pick the one that describes what you are doing this month, because the role decides which screens you see. Job seeker gives you the job feed, the application form and the five-state applications tracker. Freelancer gives you gig creation with pricing tiers, the proposal flow with bid amount and delivery estimate, and project milestones. If you want both kinds of work, start as a job seeker and build a freelancer profile once you have one completed project to show.
- What does Under review mean in the applications tracker?
- It means an employer has opened your application and is evaluating it. The five states are Pending, Under review, Interview, Accepted and Rejected, and the employer moves you between them from their applicant screen. Where an application stalls tells you what to fix. Nothing ever leaving Pending points at your profile or your choice of roles. Plenty reaching Under review and stopping there points at what the profile says once it is open.
- How do freelancers get paid for projects on the app?
- Payments run through Razorpay, covering UPI, cards, netbanking and wallets. Projects are tracked with milestones and deliverable submissions, so work is handed over in marked stages rather than one lump at the end. The app also has a built-in invoice generator that produces a PDF invoice on the device, which is what you send once a milestone is accepted.
- Does a course certificate from the app help with job applications?
- It helps because it is a dated artifact you can attach inside the same app minutes after finishing, not because a certificate carries weight on its own. Completing a course generates a PDF certificate automatically. The useful move is choosing courses that match the requirement checklists on the jobs you keep getting rejected from, so the certificate answers a specific gap an employer already told you about.
Written by Amit Kumar Raikwar, full-stack engineer & product designer in Indore, India. If you want something built, start here.
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