New Features

AI Matching

Talent Catalog now runs a hybrid matching engine behind the scenes, combining traditional text search with AI-generated vector embeddings. This release brings the first user-facing pieces of that engine online — skill-aware search from a job description, search scoped to any list, and full search filters alongside AI-powered matches.

Refugee ID Card Scanning

GRN candidates who hold a refugee ID card can now scan its QR code straight from their phone to capture and verify their refugee registration number and personal details — either from the Services tab, or as an optional step during registration. Scanning is disabled in this release; the capability exists but awaits partner agreement.

PiFi Property Casi Integration

GRN candidates now have a new CASI service card signposting them to PiFi Property, helping them explore rental homes in their new country — starting with Australia.

Full List Filtering & More

Filter any list down to just the candidates that matter, tighter permissions and clearer messaging for candidate deletion, and a principal occupation field giving admins and job matching a clearer picture of what a candidate is really looking for.

UI / UX Enhancements

• Fixed inconsistent line-height across dropdown items.
• Removed a duplicated warning triangle icon from the erase-candidate modal.
• Added a “Mark All as Yes” button to speed up the registration destinations step on mobile.
• Aligned a help icon with its text on the CV Google Doc download.
• Fixed the sign-in button not being centered with the language icon on the mobile candidate portal.
• Number and range inputs now properly respect their configured minimum, maximum, and step values — including a fix so a range slider’s endpoints are actually reachable.
• Removed the legacy “Old fetch” checkbox from the candidate search screen.
• Fixed email validation incorrectly failing when an address was pasted in with invisible characters attached.

General Improvements

• Task email alerts now confirm on-screen when an email has actually been sent, and a broken translation key that showed raw placeholder text has been fixed.

Data Improvements

• Talent Catalog can now hold its own list of TC-identified skills, alongside the standard ESCO/ONet skill sets — useful for job-description acronyms and terms (e.g. PLC, SCADA) that aren’t well covered by the standard lists.

Performance Improvements

• Rebuilding candidate-experience embeddings skips records that already have one, so a restarted or resumed batch run picks up where it left off instead of starting over.
• General tuning and clean-up of the AI matching engine based on early testing.

Bug Fixes

• Intake PDF export was truncating free-text fields; the “Export PDF” action has been replaced with a “Print page” button that renders the full data.
• Fixed the Data Processing Agreement showing a literal “[Your Organization]” placeholder instead of the actual counterparty name.
• Hardened JWT authentication against Redis cache failures: a cache outage now falls back to the database instead of silently breaking login for every user.
• Migrated (legacy) candidate skills are now correctly included in the text used for search and matching.
• Fixed job-experience description validation and display: empty section titles no longer appear, and the “Original” description field is now properly required.

Developer Notes

• Updated the CASI developer README with documentation for agreement management.
• Replaced outdated copyright headers with the standard Talent Catalog license across the codebase.
• Upgrade note: this release ships 5 new Flyway migrations (V2_19–V2_23). After deploying, run the build_embeddings admin action so existing candidates and experience get AI-matching embeddings — matching has nothing to work with until that’s done.

Test Coverage

Continued the push toward 80% line coverage: new and expanded unit tests across the admin portal, candidate portal, and backend service/util/config layers; public-portal test setup and CI wiring; database specification and query-builder tests; SystemAdminApi coverage; CV and DOCX helper test fixes after the CV-generation refactor; and new Playwright end-to-end coverage for the Verify+ flow, including reusable candidate-portal authentication for future E2E suites.

Code Refactoring

• Modernised deprecated Spring test annotations (@MockBean → @MockitoBean) across the server test suite.
• Removed the unused partner Data Processing Agreement acceptance code — partner DPAs are handled manually with partner organisations rather than through an in-app flow.
• Generalised embedding table naming convention so it can support future non-job experience types, not just job experience.
• Switched CV generation to native XHTML templates, removing an unnecessary conversion and sanitisation step.

Continuous Integration & Deployment

• Added a CI workflow to run Candidate Portal Angular tests, mirroring the existing Admin Portal test workflow.

New Tools and Standards

• Added CodeCov test coverage badge to the GitHub README, along with the CI wiring to keep it up to date.
• Documented how to install and use Claude Code in the IDE, to get new devs setup and actively using the team Claude subscription.

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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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