Meritemploy Build

Meritemploy was a newly formed company based in London, United Kingdom. It's core values were centered around the concept of Blind Recruitment which involved the removal of all personal information during the early assessment phase of the recruitment process.

The idea is that this would lead to an unbiased approach to jobseekers and would allow for an even playing field for candidates to get into job interviews.

We were put in touch through a mutual contact to discuss the possibility of building a job board for the client. The client had already made use of development studios in Australia and Mexico but they were not able to deliver the desired product.

The client wanted a job board similar to that of Indeed.com or Reed.co.uk that would include the following features:

• Would allow for very high user traffic,
• Could filter jobs by proximity to a location,
• Had management dashboards for recruiters and jobseekers,
• Dashboards to allow for filtering of jobs and applicants and also to facilitate the various stages of the recruitment process,
• Allow for two-way communication without revealing the true identity of a jobseeker,
• Each job posted by a recruiter should have a rich set of data,
• Both jobs and job applications were exportable as PDF's,
• The platform would be able to send a high number of transactional emails,
• The job board required enterprise-grade security to bring it in line with European privacy laws.

• The project was to be completed on an extremely limited budget,
• It was a very large and complicated project with a lot of moving parts,
• The dashboards, proximity search, filtering and transactional emailing would require a lot of custom development,
• This would be our first attempt at building a job site, so we had limited insight into their inner workings,
• Large datasets and folders full of documents with information required on the platform needed to be uploaded,
• Suppressing all identifying information of jobseekers was counter-intuitive and proved challenging in some areas.

• Pantheon was used to host the job board which allowed for higher performance, caching, New Relic monitoring, multi-dev environments, git workflow and Apache Solr,
• We leveraged the Drupal CMS to take care of the user management, job and application creation and security requirements of the project,
• Apache Solr was utilised to introduce full-text search and faceted filtering when browsing jobs,
• Google Maps API was utilised to allow for the proximity search functionality,
• We integrated the platform with Sendgrid in order to to send and receive large amounts of transacional emails without being blacklisted,
• Large datasets such as job types and educational institutions were imported to the site via CSV.

• The job board was launched and was highly performant and functioned surprisingly well despite being propped onto a CMS,
• The faceted filtering provided by Apache Solr worked exceptionally well,
• The process of registering an account, searching, and applying for jobs was seamless and smooth,
• Conversely, creating jobs and managing applicants via the employers dashboard was just as seamless.