Democratizing the ATS with WordPress –

Before I go into the heart of this story, it’s important to make a distinction here.  The outline of what I am about to discuss kind of goes against the grain of the web site development community and for good reason, you generally don’t want to talk about technologies and widgets used to get a job done. Most customers generally don’t really care so much about the how and why anyways. They are more concerned about, does it work and what’s it going cost me to set-up, use and maintain…..right?

Many a young developer or technologist has lost a client or two for being over enthusiastic about the technology they use, versus the problem they are attempting to solve.

Let me rephrase this in a non-technical way. Let’s say you’re an art enthusiast and you like a certain style of painting. It catches your eye in the right light, you know you appreciate the subtleties of the brush strokes and the colors used by the painter to convey their artistry.  So who cares about the materials they used?

Well actually many do care. You see it’s not just the artistic skills at play here. Good artists know that the raw materials are every bit as important in allowing them to project their visions onto a medium that others can enjoy. So, they take careful attention on the tools they select to create that perfect painting that catches your attention. Everything from the canvas they use, the types of brushes, type and quality of paint used to convey their artistry. It’s all exactingly chosen for its benefits.

As the admirer of the finished artistry what you see amounts to the classic case of, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”!   Now, you decide to commission a painting from this artist you would expect the same type of quality and attention to detail that you had previously observed , would you not?

In that example, wouldn’t it be important for you to know what the components of that art work were? They might be hard to acquire items, or they might require special handling that makes the creation process all that more important!

As I explained in this story about art, there are exceptions that apply with technology tools and methods too.

In this case, I am going to delve into some of the underlying technology we utilize at SMBsocial . If you’re not sure what WordPress is just click on the embedded hyperlink, or check out some of the other details listed below:

 So what’s this all about really?

A few years ago I started working with a friend in Oregon, on developing his business website. At the time, I had been creating side projects on web development for a couple of years and was fairly adept at setting up a basic site.  This was one of my first customers and that lead to an increased network of clients and relationships that improved my skills and ultimately, led to the development path I have been on for the better part of 2014.

Along with the learning curve of WordPress and its myriad plugins, I was tasked with creating a site for an executive recruiter just striking out on his own. This led to my discovery of the Job Manger plugin.  It was the only plugin capable of handling the hiring process natively, within a WordPress website.

Over the years I stuck with it, tweaking the code for clients and keeping it working when the original developer moved on to other projects.  It has developed a huge user base of just over 117K –that’s ( One Hundred and Seventeen Thousand) downloads and it’s supported in 10 different languages. That was the end of this past Summer 2014.  At that point the project was pretty near abandoned and had not been updated since WordPress 2.9 was released (sometime around late 2009 early 2010) about 3 to 4 years in total. It was at this point that I made contact with the original developer and made arrangements to take over the project.

I have worked with recruiters in many capacities for a career span of more than 30 years. I understand their frustrations with current Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) , as I have used many myself and negotiated with vendors on their service offerings for many hiring managers throughout my career.  While many of these systems are a good fit for large companies the offerings today for the Small and Medium Business (SMB) owner (including start-ups), is pretty much cost prohibitive. If you’re lucky to find one that fits your budget you’re still looking at software as a service (SaaS).  Quite often meaning, you don’t own the application and taking your data when you leave can prove to be problematic and costly.

This is where Open Source and WordPress excel.  Were helping Small Business tackle the hiring process by democratizing the ATS (applicant tracking system) with Job Manager.

I am proud to announce that effective Jan 29th, 2015, Job Manager 7.21 was released.  The code was cleaned up to support WordPress 4.1 with a few enhancements including  a new site to support the growth and nurturing of the community that uses Job Manger. The overall goal is to make hiring for small business an easier more cost effective process.

If your a small business owner and your website is on a self-hosted WordPress installation and you need to hire for your business. Give Job Manager a try.  After all its FREE.

[su_panel background=”#e4e4e4″ color=”#000″ border=”3px none #fff” shadow=”1px 2px 3px #000″ radius=”2″]Update: Feb 2. 2015: Since the New Release, the downloads have increased by over 1300 and counting. We have also opened up the Job Manager to additional language support from translations in 10 languages to over 35. Anyone can contribute Translations through our Open Source project on Transifex. [/su_panel]