Build Type: Solution

This is one of California’s largest agricultural job board websites, and was funded through a grant from UC Davis. The site allows agricultural employers to post jobs that candidates can apply for using a variety of specialized capabilities. Monetization occurs through the online sale of job packages and paid membership access to their rapidly growing resume database.

• The site contains many discreet workflows across multiple use case scenarios, including workflows specific to different user roles.
• Content protection down to the search level was a paramount consideration in designing the user experience. The resulting search facility is able to show only role appropriate content, including content inside of stored media that the search is also capable of indexing.
• This site was constructed in two phases, with aggressive beta testing performed at each release point.
• This site contains our DeepCMS approach.
• Employers and Candidates each have an entire suite of capabilities available to their specific user roles from a centralized dashboard upon login.
• Employers can pay for access to the resume database, and Candidates can choose to hide their resumes from that database but still use them if they like for job applications.

Project Overview

Calagjobs.com is the largest, most involved website we’ve built to date. Phase II launched over the summer of 2017, and the Integration Map that describes how everything is put together was finished several weeks later. The features and capabilities we furnished come primarily through the integration and modification of third party open source, professionally licensed code. However, the specialized requirements contained in the contract meant that we had to build many custom modules ourselves.

User experience design decisions were primarily influenced by security and content protection requirements, rather than high-end graphic animations or artwork. This begins with a secure sign-up process that includes e-mail and ReCaptcha validation, and a means by which those who get stuck in the process can continue with account creation.

The administrative workflows required to run the website e-commerce aspect are simple and repeatable. The benefit of this simplicity is how easy it is to spot system bugs. Unfortunately, the complexity of the code base that furnishes the front-end simplicity does not make for an easy situation when it comes to hunting down bugs. This is where our root cause analysis methodology has helped tremendously, allowing the site to exceed its original mandate without a commensurate increase in cost.

Work performed as MJ Penner Consulting