Large volume recruitment processed online is relatively unknown term in Ireland lately. With the web traffic falling constantly in the last two years, and numbers of jobs advertised significantly reduced, we lately stopped using the phrases like the ‘Recruitment Drive’ and similar. We kind of just do ‘Recruitment’ now. :)
This makes the new jobs advertised http://terminal2jobs.jobsmarket.ie/ by the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) stand out. Hundreds of jobs in a fancy new airport terminal, of course Ireland went crazy. When you get the Minister to announce it all on TV, and literally all important national media covers it – in the resection times like this – the superb results are imminent.
With the marketing side all organised you get to the other end of the problem – the organisational part. When all the visitors come on the site to go through the pre screening process online, will the servers be able to hold on under the heavy traffic? How do you plan ahead for the volume of traffic you cannot predict? When the minister goes on, the national TV – how many people will come to the web site to apply immediately literally? It doesn’t matter how many applications you can process a month, or a week, or even a day. What matters is how many your server can process when they are there – and they will all go there a minute after the first short TV announcement is made. You are talking about the thousands of visitors within a minute!!!
Becoming the victim of your own success is very likely in such situation. It is quite similar to what become known as a ‘Digg Effect’. Digg is a social bookmarking site, where everyone ccan submit a link, and by crowdsourcing method and a voting system, some 10 links would end up on a home page of Digg.com. Those sites would usually get that much traffic that would in most cases end up overloading he servers, and eventually become inaccessible. Basically you cannot plan, or you do not plan to host thousands of time increased traffic all of the sudden. It was OK with you private blog, but having the eyes of the nation looking at you like the DAA’s Terminal 2 Jobs Site has – you CAN NOT let it become inaccessible. Not for the minute. Not for that first minute after the announcement of new jobs.
Weeks of planning, weeks of testing, and unknown ‘Released Date’,... creates a lot of tension.
Are my servers good enough, fast enough, capable enough (and you do not have a ‘Specifications’ – you have to imagine the numbers!!!???)?
Are the questioners of the filtering process self explanatory?
Are we asking too much? Will people just leave half way through the job application process?
Do we support all the possible browsers?
Legal – can we ask all this at this stage of the recruitment process?
Can the users bypass it all?
What do we tell them if they are NOT eligible?
What support channels to provide?
What if,... one of the servers fail... what if,... electricity, network,...
Yes it was not really that easy.... to put it nicely!
I would like to take this chance to thank everyone involved. The guys in DAA that worked patiently with us in getting it all set up. To Flexsource staff who ran the show, the CPL staff who provided all their expertise and to JobsMarket team who made it all happen. All should be proud since we delivered it all well, while under the microscope of a nation.