Building a custom job marketplace to empower recruitment
Silver Swan Recruitmenet is a London based luxury staffing agency that connects thousands of workers from around the world with premium staff seekers. We developed for them a custom made job marketplace that allowed to connect candidates with house managers. Our objective was to translate a relatively complex business logic into a comprehensive web application that could :
- Improve their reach with luxury workers around the globe
- Provide an efficient and engaging online experience that caters to staff seekers needs
- Facilitate sourcing and placement of candidates for SilverSwan's team
- Make job applications a breeze
- Speed up the process of posting and updating job listings
- Automate as many hiring tasks as possible
- Provide insightful KPIs for SilverSwan's operations team
- Build brand awareness and corporate identity through their existing Wordpress site
Streamlining operations: the dual functionality of Silver Swan's application
This is a lot to achieve with a single product, so to simplify things we thought of the platform as a project with two major parts (although it's developped in a single fullstack web application) :
On the candidate side, the app behaves as a search engine with an advanced profile management system, where workers can provide professional information and then browse or apply to thousands of job listings, filtered by country, job type, etc.
On the recruiter side, which is managed internally by SilverSwan's team, the app works as a CRM, where applications can be reviewed and processed, job listings can be managed and workers can be contacted. We also added a few dashboards with KPIs to measure performance and activity, and a CMS extension based on Wordpress.
Refactoring and enhancing the platform
When we started the project, we inherited from an outdated and unfinished codebase with malfunctioning features, performance problems, conflictive libraries and processes, UX mistakes and missing parts. A complete overhaul on every aspect of the application was necessary, but it would bring significant improvements to the company's operations.
Our work was carried out with the Ruby on Rails 7 framework, on top of which we used a classic but powerful set of tools :
- Tailwind as the main front-end library, which allowed us to integrate a comprehensive Design System, precise wireframes and build reusable web components
- PGSearch to make our search engine with advanced capabilities and filtering
- Sidekiq to manage hundreds of background jobs, to automate a good chunk of SilverSwan's online operations
- Wicked, to build advanced multistep forms that were crucial to onboard candidates in the platform
- StimulusJS to handle front-end animations and reactivity
- VanillaLazyLoad to improve the application's performance with lazy-loading
- Chartkick to display performance and activity KPIs
Pundit and Devise to allow for authentication, user based roles and permissions
Wordpress as an integrated CMS in the Rails app, by applying a reverse proxy technique to suit the clients SEO needs
It took us about 4 months to complete this project, from mapping every user journey, to designing high fidelity prototypes and then finally improving and building all of the missing parts of the application. All in all, this was a very challenging project, that required enormous efforts of refactoring, a deep understanding of the underlaying business operations, lots of coordinated background jobs to automate procesess and many UX/UI iterations to keep the end users and Silver Swan's team happy.
