Version 2.2.0

Check out the newest features and enhancements.

New Features

Employers can now directly access the Talent Catalog. Any employer can request a login to the Talent Catalog, where they can create and submit their own jobs, do their own searches for candidates, and manage their own recruitment process.

Job Chats

Job Chats introduce a unified way for Talent Catalog users to communicate. Employers, destinations, source partners and candidates can all communicate regarding job opportunities and candidate relocation directly from the Talent Catalog.

Weekly & On-Demand Candidate Data Sync

Candidate profiles will now sync from the Talent Catalog to Salesforce, automatically once a week and by request at any interval. This opens new capabilities for reporting and analysis, and potential to connect third party tools for candidate communication, data visualisation and more.

Improved Candidate Registration And Consents

Candidate Accounts And Consents

Candidates registering with the Talent Catalog must now explicitly create a user account and explicitly give their consent to being contacted regarding their registration and employment opportunities.

General Improvements

Interview guidance from employers can now be maintained directly in the Talent Catalog, giving administrators quick and convenient access without the need to sift through emails, Slack threads, or Trengo conversations.
Administrators can upload written job offers from recruiters and employers directly to the Talent Catalog, allowing candidates to easily view and consider their offers within the platform.
Jobs related tabs now support filtering of jobs based on destination country, so users can quickly narrow down listings according to preferred employment locations.
Candidate intake will now support the collection of consents from candidates interested in participating in World Bank surveys.

Data Improvements

Reports for viewing candidate registration data based on source locations are now available in TC stats.
Salesforce opportunity records have been tidied up so that occupation categories adhere with the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO).
Full candidate searches are now optimised giving up to 15x faster database search performance.
Candidates relocating through Canada’s no job offer pathway may now be tagged, so they can be reported on with the appropriate status.
Obsolete TC data fields that were replaced with new fields in previous releases have been cleaned from the database.

UI / UX Enhancements

Employer-Ready Navigation

We've reorganised the TC main menu and sub-menus to make it easier for new and existing users to navigate. The main menu is now simply: Jobs, Searches, Lists, and Stats. Clicking on Jobs navigates to all things jobs related, Searches for all things search related, and so on. Login to our staging environment to take a look.

Widened Colour Palette

With this release we bid farewell to the old bright blue and teal colour scheme, which did not contrast terribly well against the white background. In some cases leading to eye strain over prolonged periods of use. We hope the new muted yet strongly contrasted colours will be significantly more accessible for all. Here's John with a quick video introduction.

Other UI / UX Enhancements

For convenience, source partners may now view and update the progress of a selected case directly from the right-hand case detail panel.
Candidate work experience input fields accept rich-text formatting, which contributes to the generation of more visually appealing and well-formatted Talent Catalog CVs downstream.
The user role previously known as “Source Partner Admin” has been updated to “Partner Admin”, to avoid any naming confusion for destination partner users.

Security Fixes

Updated Cross-Origin Request Sharing (CORS) URL handling: CORS, a security feature governing web page interactions across different domains, has been updated in this release. The update tightens the permitted CORS URLs.
TC login security has been standardised on Multi-factor authentication (MFA). As a result, the need for Recaptcha has been eliminated and retired from the web portals.

Bug Fixes

Shareable attachments were intermittently not displaying as expected, now resolved.
Watched searches built on other watched searches were not functioning as expected. We anticipate that employers partners will benefit from using these kinds of searches for daily email alerts on potential candidates - now resolved.
An issue where opportunities in Salesforce were incorrectly updating the country to “USA” instead of our standard country name, “United States,” is resolved.
“Description,” a required field when creating a job experience, is now consistently validated to ensure it is populated.
Scheduled tasks were firing multiple times in the AWS cloud services, whereas only one instance of a task should fire regardless of how many services are deployed. This is now resolved with the introduction of Shedlock.
An issue where published fields could not be removed by dragging them away from the “select fields to publish” modal, is resolved.
“Unreachable” candidate statuses were incorrectly reporting as “incomplete” registrations in the candidate portal, now resolved.
User reports of discrepancies where some search results did not match the total stats for that search, are now resolved.

Developer Notes

Test Coverage

This release expands our unit test coverage by ~30% across various components, including JobAdminApi, PartnerAdminApi, UserAdminApi, CandidateStatAdminApi, and more, with incremental effects on code quality and system robustness.
The introduction of Gatling/Scala performance testing harnesses to the TC build lifecycle, will now execute routine system and database performance tests, for the early detection of any performance issues or bottlenecks. Forthcoming releases will build further on this.

Code Refactoring

In this release we’ve implemented server and client support for two-way network conversations using websockets, with multicast capabilities to subscribers. Chat API endpoints can use websockets on the server side with Stomp API integrated on the client side (admin-portal and candidate-portal).
The SourcePartnerAdmin role has been refactored to the PartnerAdmin role, as the former no longer made sense in the context of destination partners.
To ensure consistency and readability of our codebase going forward, TC developers will adhere to Google Code styles as the coding standard for all contributors.

Continuous Integration & Deployment

Pushing changes to developer branches will now trigger a full build and a complete cycle of unit testing and performance testing - failure alerts will be notified to contributors for the early detection and resolution of breaking code.
We’ve introduced hot-fix branching which is to be used for out-of-band quick fixing of production issues.

Cloud Enhancements

Elasticsearch’s versions have been upgraded from the end-of-life v7.12 to v7.17.11.
The elasticsearch index has been rebuilt and the old v7.12 clusters have been safely decommissioned.
Elasticsearch production clusters have been migrated to the US for proximity to the TC cloud hosting, which also resides in the US. Co-locating both services will alleviate unnecessary transatlantic network hops when running elastic searches, with improved network search performance.
Postgres DB version 11 reaches end of life on AWS in February 2024, and has therefore been upgraded to Postgres DB version 14.7 with this release.
Data storage has been upgraded to AWS provisioned storage, which is AWS’s recommended data storage type for Talent Catalog production data.
Last but not least, we’ve upgraded to a 4 CPU RDS database to allow the application to scale with peak system usage.

Thank you for using Talent Catalog! Your feedback and support are invaluable to us. If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improvement, please don’t hesitate to contact us or open an issue on GitHub.

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