Following on from our launch post about Matador Jobs, this post from our Matador Jobs site sets out our development roadmap for the months ahead.
Matador’s developer Jeremy discusses the short-term development goals for Matador Jobs and its extensions now that we’re officially launched.
Matador Job’s launch this month is the result 7 months of concentrated work by the Matador team as well as the culmination of nearly three and a half year of custom development on the Bullhorn platform by both developers. We feel we put important features into Matador at launch and are proud of our initial release, but we are enthusiastic about continuing development on the project and bringing even more features to Matador in the future. As we continue to nurture Matador post-launch, we have many goals for the future of the project, and we’d love to share our thoughts with you all.
Please note, projecting timelines for software development is an imperfect art. This is a statement of goals, not a promise of delivery. Timelines will shift forward or backward, and features may or may not make it into a specific release. Until we formally announce a release, the following are just goals, not promises.
Everyday: Bug Fixes and Documentation
While we’ve launched what we believe is the best, most stable, most fully-featured WordPress and Bullhorn integration, it will only take a handful of you getting it out in the real world to exceed the sum of all our tests over the last seven months. An always-present goal of ours will be to ensure Matador works the best it can, so if you find a big, we are committed to fixing them as fast as possible. If you find something not working right, file a support request as soon as you can.
Also, Matador is built to be customizable and extensible, but right now, our documentation is sparse on those details. A goal of ours now and moving forward is to always be improving our documentation. You can help us do this by asking lots of questions and even submitted Github gists to our team for examples. Got a question? File a support request.
Near Future: Easier Extensions
Matador Jobs Pro plans include access to our Pro Extensions, but its not exactly easy to get them and install them right now. Our biggest development goal beyond bug fixes at this time is making finding and installing extensions easier for our Matador Jobs Pro clients.
2-4 Months from Now: GDPR Compliance and GDPR Extension
The European Union’s upcoming implementation of GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) will put important rules in place on site operators that store customer information. We want to make sure that your use of Matador in the EU is compliant.
As it stands now, Matador Jobs Lite (free on the WordPress.org plugin repo) does not store information about site visitors, and therefore will already be GDPR compliant.
When you upgrade to Matador Jobs Premium or Pro, an option can be set to store applicant data locally, which is recommended to enable for faster application processing and data duplication, but thus qualifies as stored data covered by the GDPR. In order for our Premium and Pro users to be compliant with GDPR while using that setting, we add some features that will need to be enabled in the settings screen. This will be completed ahead of the May 25th deadline and provided in a regular update to all active subscriptions.
Further, we are developing a new Pro Extension that will use the Bullhorn API to help your company become GDRP-compliant when it comes to data it is storing on Bullhorn about clients. We are working with our European users to develop this tool and don’t have a lot of details to share at this time. Our goal is to also have this available by the May 25th deadline and downloadable by all Matador Jobs Pro subscribers.
3-6 Months from Now: WordPress “Gutenberg” Editor Support and Job/Applicant User Interface
WordPress is working on a major update that will include the code-named “project Gutenberg” changes to the post editor. It is a pretty awesome project that will make writing and editing content on your WordPress site more streamlined and intuitive. If you’re a current user of Matador, you’ll note that our Job Listing and Applicant admin areas are somewhat boring, and we agree, but we purposely decided to wait to flesh it out until we have more clarity on the “Gutenberg” project. As WordPress gets closer to its next major release that will include “Gutenberg”, our admin user interface for Job Listings and Applicants will improve to not only be easier to use and more intuitive, but also support the new “Gutenberg” features. These changes will be for all Matador Jobs users, including Lite users.
4-8 Months from Now: Recruiter Support (Pro Extension)
A common feature request from past clients of our custom Bullhorn integrations is recruiter support. We understand that some candidates develop rapport with specific recruiters (especially in higher-turnover industries) and like to follow their recruiter’s offering, while some Bullhorn companies are heavily segmented by recruiter and want their site to sort and display jobs with more emphasis on the recruiter. The need to have recruiter-related features in a Matador-powered site is something some of our users really want or need. Those users, provided they are Matador Jobs Pro subscribers, can look forward to a new Recruiter-related Pro Extension sometime later this year. If you’re one of those firms that need these futures and are already a Pro Subscriber, file a support request asking to be added to the Recruiter Support beta test when we open it up.
To Infinity and Beyond
Beyond those four goals, we have a long list of more things we plan to add to Matador either as a Pro Add-ons or included in the core packages, including easier to customize forms, integrations with other job-seeking tools like LinkedIn and Indeed, and more. We will do our best to keep the pace of Matador moving at breakneck speed, but you can help speed up that pace in several ways:
- Talk to us. We value your input. Whether coming to us as user feedback or as a feature request, we listen, and will ultimately shape our development goals around our users’ needs; after all, that is why we made Matador in the first place.
- Subscribe to Matador Jobs Premium, especially if you’re a user of Matador Jobs Lite. Matador Jobs is a project of two full-time WordPress developers, but until we have many subscribing users, it won’t fully replace our regular work. In the meanwhile, we’ll divide our time between Matador and other client work. The more people who sign up for Premium and Pro, the more time we’ll be able to focus on Matador, speeding up its development for all.
- Sponsor Development of a feature or add-on. If your company needs something that isn’t included yet in Matador or something we plan to do but not right away, file a support ticket and explain that you can’t wait. If we feel your requested feature is something that belongs in Matador or available as an extension, we may make arrangements for you to “sponsor” the development at a reduced custom-development cost and move it to front of the line. Requests that don’t fit the long-term development goals of Matador will be subject to the full custom development and integration service.
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