On, Monday, July 19, 2021, Matador Jobs 3.7.5 will be was released to all subscribers. Let’s break down what is in this minor “hot fix” release.

Job Posting Structured Data 'directApply' Property Support

On July 13th, 2021, Google posted an announcement with changes to their handling of the Job Posting Structured Data, which we dissected for you, our users, in a post yesterday. In that announcement, Google revealed a new Job Postings Structured Data property ‘directApply’. This property will be used to communicates to Google (and therefore, to their users) that a job seeker can directly apply to a role from the search results on the page where the job is located.

Given the nature of Matador Jobs Pro, all users of Matador Jobs Pro (not Lite) with the “Accept Applications” setting value turned to “On” will qualify for use of ‘directApply’ and, beginning with this update, will have the property included in their Job Posting Structured Data. Users of Matador Jobs Lite or those who use an alternate application processing system (have “Accept Applications” turned off) who believe they otherwise meet the standards for directApply, should pass true to the filter matador_bullhorn_save_jsonld_direct_apply. Conversely, if your site interrupts applications in some other way and you do not meet the standards for directApply, you should pass false to the above filter or be subject to interruptions from Google for Jobs Search.

For more on this topic, check out our blog post breaking down the July 13th, 2021 Google announcement.

Enhancements to Make Matador Jobs Better

While we typically focus hot fixes around bug fixes, from time to time, we sneak in some backward-compatible enhancements. Given the development cycle for release 3.8.0 is still ongoing, we wanted to give you all some of these new improvements now, instead of making you wait for them. There were a total of 8 enhancements, some of which you may not even notice, but the all-starts of this update are:

  • To allow developers to customize how taxonomy (ie: Category, Location) data shows from job meta or the job info shortcodes and functions, you can now filter the arguments using matador_get_the_job_meta_taxonomy_args() filter. This will be most helpful for users wishing to modify the function of the link made for each term, including removing the link altogether.
  • Added support for multiple files inputs in applications. This feature will be developed more fully in 3.8.0, including with more intuitive user interface/user experience, but for site operators who can improve the UI now, support for the capability now exists.
  • Added additional information to log files to help us help you (and us) debug issues more quickly and efficiently.
  • Cleaned up the query string on pages with Matador search. Now, search fields that got no user input will not be listed in the querystring.

Technically the above mentioned directApply support is also an enhancement, but we wanted to explicitly point out separately of the rest.

Bug Fixes to Make Matador Jobs Work as Intended

In this hotfix, we fixed 10 bugs that have been discovered since 3.7.4. Most of these are extremely isolated to specific use cases, including–surprisingly–a bug for a 3.0.0 launch feature three and a half years old that somehow no one has used prior to this past month! I won’t list all the bug fixes, but here are the highlights:

  • Added better error handling for when Bullhorn API errors occur, including 429 Too Many Requests capacity errors, continuing to improve on lessons learned since the emergence of these behaviors from the Bullhorn API.
  • Fixed a troublesome bug preventing Matador from activating reconnection routines in certain cases when disconnected from Bullhorn, resulting in users needing to intervene to restore connection.
  • Fixed issues where names with apostrophes, ie: O’Shea, was still being mishandled by Matador resulting in things like O%#39Shea being included in an email. Previous attempts to fix this were successful, but the fix was too “low” in the workflow so certain actions that occurred before the bug fix, like a candidate email confirmation, were still seeing the issue. We fixed it this time for real, and very “high” up in the workflow. We hope this zombie bug is gone for good!
  • Fixed a three-and-a-half year-old bug select multiple inputs in Matador Search was resulting in 404 error search results when no items were selected for one of the fields.

Update Now!

Matador Jobs 3.7.5 is released for the automatic update to all subscribers as of Monday, July 19, 2021. If your subscription is expired, renew it on your account page. If you find any issues, please send a support request.