Talently - collaborative recruiting in Jira

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Inspiration

Building a successful company is about people; the right people, at the right time, for the right positions. Now most certainly, building a successful company also involves a product and a refined business idea. And finding those right people to develop, produce and support that idea is hard. Very hard. It is time consuming and at times, it is uncomfortable.

As users ourselves, we know many companies use Jira as a recruiting tool. Different projects for job postings and applications. Tickets for each candidate, jobs are created and then linked manually. It's a lot of effort consisting of many manual steps. In the end however, there is no overview of all your open positions, the applicants, and most importantly, all of the qualifications required for each respectively.

What it does

Enter Talently. Talently is the first collaborative recruiting app built exclusively for Jira Cloud. It does all the busywork acting as your tireless, administrative recruiting assistant that is both super easy to use, and does a great job managing each and every step of the process flawlessly. Talently steps in ensuring your recruiting efforts are about people, not a complicated activity that requires a lot of manual administration.

Talently pulls all the pieces together, every step of the way. Easily draft open job positions, set up skill requirements for them, and get everything published in a flash. Have applicants submit self-assessments on the configured skill profiles. Their applications are then automatically linked back to the job offer and arranged for you to see them all in one view. Applicants are ranked based on their skill score and the combined ratings of your colleagues. Compare candidates and their credentials against others. And have your colleagues vote, comment, participate, and keep track of the status of applicants in the recruiting process.

Why collaborative?

We believe that teams in a company know best what needs, requirements, and talents they are looking for. That's why Talently is designed to be collaborative. It enables the right people to help find the right candidates and turn them into colleagues. Talently consolidates all the information and calculates an easy-to-understand and comparable evaluations for each applicant based on the various factors involved. This way, everyone has a say in who ultimately gets the job. This is what we call Collaborative Recruiting! 🤝

Talently is here for you. No matter where you are. Talently shines both in Jira issues and as full page view. This way, we ensure that Jira power users who know and love their familiar views can find all the information there, but we can also reach users who may not work much with Jira as much in their daily work and for whom a simpler, more focused interface is therefore helpful. It also allows us to create custom views based on permissions and roles in the future and have full control over them.

What we’ve been able to implement during the hackathon:

• Skill configuration per job position 🤹🏻
• Application form based on published jobs and their skill requirements 📝
• Linking applications to their respective job vacancy 🔗
• Visually mapping linked applications against the job configuration and each other 📊
• Different views for displaying applications in the job position issue 👀
• Skill score per applicant based on the match with the job configuration 💯
• Ability for users to rate applicants 👍
• Applicant ranking based on their skill score and the combined user votes 🥇
• Full page view of our app, including
• Overview of all job positions, with option for different views 👔
• Overview of all applicants per job position, again with visualized comparability 👥
• Individual detail view per applicant 🔎

How we built it

Talently is a Forge-only app for Jira Software and Jira Service Management, built on React & TypeScript. We used Recharts for our visualization of skill configurations and Atlaskit for the Atlassian-like user experience. A neat Turborepo setup for Forge (open source on GitHub) served as starting grounds for the development of our app.

Challenges we ran into

• We were unable to link the form input from our JSM portal Forge module to the form controls of the actual request. This link would enable us to require certain input to prevent incomplete submission of certain app features - in our case the self assessment on a jobs skill configuration. To compensate, we accounted for empty or incomplete submissions, and placed an additional checkbox below the self assessment. The checkbox looks required, though it’s not actually, and has the user confirm the completed self assessment form.
• Forge apps currently cannot be viewed by anonymous users. In our case that means potential job candidates would be required to have an Atlassian account in order to be able to apply via Talently. Since that’s an unreasonable requirement, we’re very much looking forward to the implementation of that Forge feature hopefully by the end of the year. In the meantime, we have set up supposed applicants with the required accounts to test the functionality of the app, and have focused on development of the internal side of the app, which is already fully functional with the current scope of the Forge platform.
• The custom UI view context doesn’t provide information about the render position of custom fields in the issue layout. That limits the option to add conditional behaviour based on the position of the field (eg layout changes for Description fields vs. Context fields)

Accomplishments that we're proud of & What we learned

We are proud to address two user groups with the Talently user interface. Experienced Jira users can control all functions fully integrated directly from Jira, while users in the company, who might have less contact with Jira, can control Talently via a simple, user-friendly and intuitive custom page UI.

With Talently, we want to make company recruiting processes more transparent and collaborative. We strongly believe that only teams themselves can hire the best person for the job, because they know exactly which skills and cultural fit are needed to strengthen the team in a meaningful way.

With Talently, we map the entire application process, from requirement assessment and job postings to the collaborative decision process.

However, what we had to learn during the development is that Jira Service Management does not yet meet our requirements for a fully functional career portal. We’re hoping for more advanced integration of Forge apps into their respective entrypoints, and we’d love to see more flexibility (images, columns, file uploads, slider, positioning etc.) in JSM field configuration in order to create a suitable and visually contemporary applicant questionnaire.

What's next for Talently - collaborative recruiting in Jira

We focused on building a working proof of concept for our idea within the bounds of the Forges currently available scopes. That mainly includes the flow of configurations and applications between Jira issues, JSM requests and our full page view.

Going forward, we have two main projects we want to focus on.

For one, we need to get the app ready for production. That includes:

• Implementing an out-of-the-box setup as well as setup customization - adding or editing associated projects, issue types, links and fields, configuring permission schemes and different views.
• Accounting for anonymous users (as soon as the functionality is released for Forge) and permission schemes within the apps current functionality.

On top of that, there are plenty of features that we want to implement to be able to account for the complexity of recruiting and all it’s facets. These features are:

• Deeper job configuration / hiring assessment - salary ranges, experience level and the option to add additional test exercises
• Full job vacancy management via our app - creating new vacancies and their related configurations, proceeding the workflow and communicating with applicants
• SLAs & related automations - defining actions based on the evaluation / ranking of candidates
• Improved collaboration features for rating applicants internally - including additional criteria, like cultural fit, and different types of voting
• A skill finder to filter previously submitted applications based on certain skill criteria
• JQL support for skill profiles
• Handling of submitted attachments
• The option to re-send the self-assessment, either via the skill finder or for speculative (or incomplete) applications
• Basic reports with key recruiting KPIs, a custom dashboard & dashboard gadgets
• Integration with job portals like LinkedIn or Indeed to publish jobs there directly

Thanks for reading, have an awesome day ☀️

Built With

• forge
• react
• typescript