Big NDA

Bad tech is the enemy of good flow. Sometimes we encounter bad technology when building a new product for a client. And sometimes that technology is managed by a vendor who is supposed to be an ally but turns out to be an unintentional obstacle.

That’s the situation we found ourselves in when developing a new web presence for a client. And this client is big. Multinational enterprise big. They employ nearly 100k people and have more than a thousand job openings at any one time. Because of this they use a third-party job listing platform to help them manage that process. Our goal was to incorporate the job listings into the content of their new Craft website to provide a better user experience. Previously, the user was bumped out of the client’s site to the third-party website. The job listing vendor assured us we could simply connect to their pre-built API for that data. It was the positive, “No problem, right this way” response we were hoping for.

But unfortunately the “right this way” sign turned into a “dead end” sign. We were blocked.

Without getting mired in the details, Ivars was able to create a new API that performed each of those tasks and got the job listing content into the new Craft website as smoothly and predictably as possible. It recreated the complex sorting and filtering processes, adjusted for the multiple time zones involved with posting in different countries, checked for the creation and deletion of posts each hour and imported job posting data accurate to the previous 48 hours, just to be safe.

What we were able to deliver was an API-driven process that is invisible to the user and even to the client who manages the content through their Craft CMS. In addition to creating original code, Ivars also had to become an expert frontier guide leading the way into uncharted territory, as well as a logistics manager making sure the data got delivered reliably and smoothly.