3.15.2024

Streamlining a process of global hiring with MarTech solutions

The worldwide crises of recent years have caused changes in various industries. The main ones were the transition of businesses online and the positive experience of remote work for employees. The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that work effectiveness isn't related to physical presence in the office. That's why a global work-from-home tendency remains. Most specialists want to choose their place of residence freely, not considering the locations of offices.

But what does this mean for businesses? New opportunities to hire talents despite the city, or more, the country of the office location, of course! Furthermore, this is a large field for creating solutions to help businesses find professionals and professionals find fascinating jobs.

We are thrilled to share our experience developing such a solution for our client, OysterHR. It is an HR startup unicorn, a distributed platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for teammates regardless of location. We worked as an R&D team with the client-side marketing department and helped them create a united platform for global hiring, calculating taxes, streamlining paperwork, and more.

The project consists of 10 autonomous apps. The trick was to combine them into high-performing unity, including various integrated solutions designed to solve any problem of worldwide hiring. We also used trendy low-code and no-code solutions in our apps.

Let's consider our work in detail.

Working with time zones

Global hiring allows businesses to staff their projects with employees despite their location. At the same time, they should consider a convenient overlap to set up the working process, both synchronously or asynchronously.

To achieve this, we developed a Time Zone Crossover Calculator. It's an app that allows hiring teams across borders, counting the needs of both employers and employees. Employers select a preferred time zone or pick it on a map, choosing a level of remote work using filters with custom hours. Additionally, they can get a list of all time zones and helpful resources to move with global hiring further.

Working with time zones is not easy as pie. Numerous details should be considered when building a solution, such as various names of specific time zones, different time offsets from UTC standards to determine hours, etc.

It was necessary to merge everything to a unified standard. For example, we renamed outdated time zones, such as Godthub/Nuuk (Greenland), and returned Ukraine’s capital to its real name — Kyiv. Unfortunately, some places are remaining russian spelling and transliteration, but we believe that Ukrainian cities deserve Ukrainian-language-derived spelling. Other corrective concerns the Crimea. Most maps, unfortunately, refer Simferopol to the russian timezone. We returned the peninsula to Ukraine’s +3 UTC.

That's not all. Ukraine is located in 3 different time zones. The western territory is placed in the 1st time belt, Kyiv in the 2nd, and part in the East in the 3rd. So, our team created specific behavior for Ukraine to consolidate all locations within the app.

For fulfilling our ideas, we chose Spacetime — a pure JavaScript library used to manipulate, traverse, compare, and format dates and times across Earth. Our choice of the map was also based on Spacetime. We examined the library, checked the time zones it supports, and accordingly changed the map to it.

SEO improvement and pages communication

Hiring foreign workers has numerous difficulties for the employer. One of them is dealing with local laws and taxes. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, so incorrect or late taxes payment threatens hefty fines. The Cost Calculator solves these problems. It's an app that allows employers to select a country and calculate in advance what taxes they need to pay when hiring in this country.

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Our task was to create an app that connects to countries' pages in the customer's system. So, it was necessary to make the solution as flexible as possible. To achieve this, we chose an iFrame.

Our main challenge was establishing the communication between countries` pages and iFrame. We used our custom solution — the code, which we call Trust Channel. It allowed us to expand the communication capabilities of the iFrame and change everything needed.

In addition, it was necessary to improve the SEO. Our client uses Webflow, so we used Next.js to achieve an SEO-friendly system.

To implement our ideas, we used React, TypeScript, and Next.js. For data storage, we chose an Airtable. It allowed us to speed up the system release and save the customer's budget. For system hosting, we selected Netlify. It's one of the best startup solutions for this type of task. It's also fast and easy to use.

Building questionnaire tree

Our business task within the project was to generate leads. So, another app we developed is focused on turning platform users into customers.

Many employers don’t have a clear vision of whether they need to hire globally. To help them, we created Employment Assistance — an application that answers the most common questions.

All is needed — to fulfill the questionnaire. The app generates logical answers depending on the goals, positions, industry, and other needs. Users also receive reading materials and video content with information on hiring in a particular country and links to other apps (for calculating taxes, for instance).

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Due to certain limitations, writing the backend part wasn't an opportunity. So, we chose other solutions. At first, we used Jotform to host our questionnaire. But there we faced a challenge. Since there was a lot of information, a difficulty arose in how to build the answers' logic. Therefore, we manually wrote out transition scenarios and transferred them to the Airtable.

Furthermore, we have prescribed rules for changing questions and answers. Thus, our client can easily add new options to the questionnaire and connect them to existing ones.

Low-code and no-code development

During the work on this project, we often used low-code and no-code platforms in development. Such solutions are perfectly fit for hybrid development. This approach can cover a vast number of scenarios, and the maintenance of an app could be operated by a non-technical person. It was important for our client because some apps were supposed to be managed by non-technical specialists (for example, Content Managers).

One of the projects where we used low-code or no-code platforms was building the MVP of a job board. The platform allows employers to post their vacancies using specific filters that match the global employment approach. But the main difference in this job board is the concept of hiring. Employees can filter job opportunities due to their preferences for company culture and other benefits beyond ordinary office work.

To develop this app, we used no-code solutions Airtable and Netlify. Their capabilities are enough for small projects and MVP launches. Furthermore, it allowed us to release and test the product directly in the market without spending much time on development.

We also used PaaS Airtable for constructing a database. A table contains data and the logic of transitions between stored questions. A custom interface involves relevant information and can be managed and transformed in a needed way. Content managers or other marketing specialists can deploy changes by themselves without the assistance of software engineers. Airtable is user-friendly and takes over the lion’s share of infrastructure tasks in terms of hosting front-end projects.

Conclusions

“Our chief advantage is that we are a fast and scalable team. We work quickly, generate ideas, research, and come up with a solution. Our team provides consulting. And more, we are icebreakers because, for our client, we were the first team they had worked remotely.

Our collaboration is an example of how global hiring works: service company in Europe, the US-based product, and no gaps in communication.

I believe we all understand the gains from our collaboration. We are not just tech-focused guys. We analyze the product and figure out how our decisions affect business.”

Taras Yakymiuk, Frontend Engineer, Oyster’s team

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The project on which we had been working with OysterHR was fascinating. We were not only a team for implementing technical solutions, but also an outsourced R&D team. Our work was focused on generating and testing ideas, finding solutions, and rapidly implementing them in the market.

This project was also a curious opportunity to work with nowadays trending low-code and no-code platforms. The rapid application development (RAD) approach, to which low- and no-code platforms are attached, enables automated code generation through interaction with convenient interfaces. At the same time, no-code platforms bring advantages for companies with no technical specialists because of allowing low-code users to add code over auto-generated code. These tools are a great fit to start with or to save time and resources. Nevertheless, the need for custom code development appears with the progress of a business or a company.

We can see how such a work approach streamlines the processes of collaboration between employer and employees, company and customer, and automates operations in the development. The ability to work without physical limits and apply well-defined use cases to the most common scenarios fastens tomorrow’s innovations today.

We’re happy to be icebreakers, implementing modern approaches and the newest features. Stay tuned to learn more.