We are excited (and a little relieved) to finally announce the release of Matador Jobs Pro 3.8.0 on Monday, October 17, 2022. This large release contains 318 total changes, 104 files added, updated, or removed, changes to over 14,000 lines of Matador’s code!

The 11-Month-Old Elephant in the Room

When we released Matador Jobs in January 2018, we would go on to average a release every three weeks on average until mid-year 2021. Since November 2021, however, there has not been a release of Matador Jobs.

This long-awaited and long-promised release has been “almost done” since early May. For months we’ve felt “almost” there and every time we felt we could confidently feature-lock the release and finalize it, something important came up, up to and including earlier this month!

This was made easier to accept by a lack of any pressing need for an update. Our software has been largely stable due to minimal changes this year in the WordPress, Bullhorn, or Google Indexing APIs, which meant we weren’t “forced” to issue an update.

Despite that fact, we know how a lack of releases gives the appearance of us not working, which of course is not the case! We’ve been busier than ever, but thankfully on helping you all get to use Matador instead of needing to update it with short-notice when things break! But so moving forward we have set up better workflows that will make it easier for us to put out minor releases on a regular basis again.

Just to reiterate, just because it has been 11 months between releases doesn’t mean we haven’t been working for you, and we want to shout out to the nearly 30 Matador users who have been running pre-release builds to test 3.8.0 features and ensure they are ready for prime-time. Thank you so much!

Whats In 3.8.0?

There are too many changes to list everything in this announcement. We are going to focus on what we deem are the highlights, but you can view the entire list in the Changelog section of the Readme.txt file or view a total history of all the changes in Matador Jobs in the CHANGELOG.md file.

And to help you experience them better, we’ve organized the updates into categories!

Last Version to Support PHP 5.6, WordPress 4.9

This will be the last major version of Matador Jobs to support PHP 5.6 and WordPress versions prior to 5.8 6.1. When released early to mid next year, our next version will require PHP 7.4 or higher and WordPress 5.8 6.1 or higher.

This section was updated on October 28, 2022 to reflect a change in approach made since our review of the WordPress 6.1 Pre-Release Field Guide. See our post on how WordPress 6.1 will impact you, our users, and our development priorities in the near future.

Connectivity & Stability

  • New Sync (Beta): This release includes a beta release of our updated sync routine. The sync routine (which primarily runs communication with Bullhorn, but also Google Indexing API and others if you use extensions) was fully rebuilt with a pause and continue behavior to avoid interruption by “long processor killer” triggers set up by many web hosts. This pause-and-continue sync routine will keep track of its allowed processing time and end its process while spawning a continuation process over-and-over until it fully completes.

    Some users, especially those with more than 2000 active openings, could see syncs fail due Matador literally running out of time to complete everything it needs to do. This was more likely when communications with external APIs are slow due to traffic.

    While this new sync routine is very reliable, we have decided to make it opt-in until 3.9.0. Users can opt-in to the new sync by adding this developer flag to your site add_filter( 'matador_experimental_sync', '__return_true' ); A later minor release may make it even easier to opt-in (like via a settings toggle).
  • CareerPortalDomainRoot Detection: Several Bullhorn systems, including Bullhorn Automation (formerly Herefish) and Bullhorn Publish to Indeed provide generated web addresses (URLs) for the jobs based on a settings value in Bullhorn called careerPortalDomainRoot. Matador users who use Matador as their primary job board (or portal) should notify Bullhorn to update this setting when they complete Matador setup and deployment. We found many users didn’t know this, so now, Matador will try to determine and subsequently warn you when it thinks you need to have the value of careerPortalDomainRoot changed at Bullhorn. For more on this feature, check out our associated help document.
  • Added “Cookie Bug” Warning: Long time Matador users will know about the “Cookie Bug.” This is a bug in the Bullhorn authentication system that allows a logged-in user’s cookie to hijack the Matador Jobs authentication with Bullhorn and authorize as that user, not as the API user. This has serious potential consequences including job syncs bringing in the wrong jobs and the site being unable to auto reconnect in the event of a downtime. Matador will now detect when a “Cookie Bug” has occurred and will warn the user.
  • Added Matador Unsafe Password Warning: Matador Job’s auto reconnect routine cannot reconnect when the API User Password has certain “unsafe” characters. While valid Bullhorn passwords, these passwords with unsafe characters will cause automatic reconnection to fail, so Matador will now detect these and provide a warning with advice on how to fix it.

Marketing/SEO

  • Experience and Education Updates: Google for Jobs Search and other systems that consume Job Structured Data/LD+JSON can now read new values in the Experience and Education requirements for the schema. Matador will now serve the updated schema if your job object contains the required values. Take advantage of this feature by fully filling out education and experience related standard fields in your Bullhorn ATS for each role.
  • Employment Types Detection: Job Structured Data/LD+JSON expect some standard values to be used in for employment type. To help ensure minor differences do not cause an issue, we will now map many variations of common employment type terms to the field. For example, in 3.7.0, “Full Time” would map to “FULL_TIME”, and in 3.8.0, “Full Time”, “Full-time”, “Full_Time”, and “FullTime” will map to “FULL_TIME.” This will prevent occurences of users offering terms they expect should work but do not.

Privacy & Consents

  • Terms of Service Consent Field: A Terms of Service consent field was added as an optional Application form field. It behaves similarly to the existing Privacy Policy consent field, which saves user responses into the Bullhorn Candidate Consent tab/object.
  • Discontinued Recognition of “Do Not Track”: Matador Jobs Pro will no longer consider your site users’ web browser “Do Not Track” setting when determining whether to load Matador’s Source Tracking features. This browser-level setting is largely ignored by the big trackers and was further never intended to apply to 1st-party tracking like Matador’s trackers, only 3rd-party tracking.

Appearance Templating/Themeing

  • New Shortcode [matador_portal]: A new shortcode [matador_portal] is introduced. This shortcode will help users of “Classic Editor” and visual page builder tools (excluding the WordPress block editor) to streamline access to a standard “job portal” with a single shortcode. Learn more about this new shortcode in our documentation.
  • New Shortcode [matador_general_application_link]: A new setting paired with a shortcode [matador_general_application_link] and associated template functions, when used instead of other methods in WordPress to make a link, will provide a simple button link to the “General Application” while giving site operators the freedom to change this page after their developer has exited stage right.
  • New option for Taxonomy “method”, “search”: The matador_taxonomy() function (and associated shortcode) now accepts a new value for the ‘method’ argument: search. When passed ‘search’ the link will go to the jobs listing page (as set in settings) or jobs archive with the value of the link as a search term. This makes it easy to include the list of taxonomy terms in your design without requiring you to have a taxonomy archive page prepared.

Applications/Submissions

  • New Company and Occupation Form Fields: Added “Your Current Company” and “Your Current Occupation” form fields to the core form fields. Include them by passing them to the fields and required arguments of the [matador_application] shortcode or via the matador_default_application_fields filters.
  • New Cover Letter and Additional Files Form Fields: Added “Cover Letter” and “Additional Files (Multiple)” form fields to the core form fields. Include them by passing them to the fields argument of the [matador_application] shortcode or via the matador_default_application_fields filters. Cover Letter will save into Bullhorn as a “cover letter” while “Files”, which we imagine can be repurposed to allow for submission of other files like portfolios, examples of work, answers to assessments, or disclosures documents, will be saved into Bullhorn as “other” type files.
  • Select Candidate “Owner” Setting: Prior to this release, the “owner” in Bullhorn of a new candidate would be the API User. Certain agencies would prefer to set the “owner” based on the applied to job’s “ownership” and a new setting will allow for this. Select from ‘API User’, ‘Job’s “Owner”‘, or ‘Job’s “Published Contact Recruiter”‘.
  • An Existing Candidate’s Name Will Not Updated: Matador will no longer update an existing Candidate’s name when a submission finds a matche. The assumption shall be that a Candidate’s name was correct on initial application moving forward.
  • Removed Email Validation: All email address validation is removed from the plugin. Our email address validation was too strong; it was based on an outdated international standard which didn’t allow for certain international characters in the email address or name as well as certain internationalized URLs after the @ symbol. New email address standards are now so relaxed that it is consensus among developers that there is no reliable way to validate an email address without triggering false negatives. Further, assuming that risk of a false negative is deemed worthwhile, even a properly structured email address that passes validation does not a guarantee that an email box exists at that address. For those reasons we will no longer validate email address entries.

Notifications/Emails

  • Recruiter Notifications Bullhorn Deeplink: Recruiter Notification emails will now include a deeplink into the Bullhorn Candidate and Web Response/Submission records if the emails are set to “send email after the candidate sync”.

General

  • WP-CLI command wp matador sync: Our first WP-CLI commands are live! This first command, wp matador sync runs the full sync process from WP-CLI. This can be used on webhosts with system cron options and WP-CLI to disable Matador’s sync and rely on a custom sync scheudle. This also opens the door to ongoing expansion of Matador’s use of WP-CLI, a favorite tool for power users to manage websites efficiently.
  • Analytics: Matador will now report annonymized analytics when certain triggers occur and otherwise on a regular schedule. Actions include plugin activation, installation, upgrade, and connection to Bullhorn. The purpose for these analytics is to help us understand our users’ needs and provide more reliable support both in our channels and at Bullhorn. As per our terms of service, we are obligated to notify Bullhorn of our Pro users to ensure, in part, that Bullhorn Support knows right away when providing you support that you are a Matador user.
  • Overhaul to Software Licensing and Automatic Updates: We completely overhauled Matador’s handling of Licensing and software updates, fixing many bugs and adding features and utility, including:
    • Automatically deactivating a site when a URL change is detected.
    • Button to manually deactivate a site, making it easier to manage sites that consume activations.
    • Automatic detection of common staging and development URLs so that sites can activate against a license without consuming an activation from their allowed limit.
    • Regularly check your activation to detect if an external deactivation was made, which helps keep sites working as expected.
    • Matador plugins will play nice with WordPress Automatic Plugin Updates (WordPress feature since WordPress 5.5). Sorry it took us so long!
    • When attempting a site activation that fails, Matador will provide more detailed descriptions of issues, including where helpful, a link to MatadorJobs.com to resolve the issue.

And That Isn’t All

Again, these were only the highlights. The full changelog has over 75 individual change notes, including deeper explainations of items explained here.

With the release of Matador Jobs Pro 3.8.0, our All-Access subscribers can also now enjoy unlimited access to the all-new Job Object Customizer Extension and a freshly updated Advanced Applications Extension. A post announcing these releases more formally and completely will be available later this week.

Update Now!

Matador Jobs 3.8.0 is released for the automatic update to all subscribers as of Monday, October 17, 2022. Go to your WordPress site admin area, Plugins, and find Matador Jobs Pro to update. We highly recommend you do your update in a staging environment first. If your support and updates subscription is expired, renew it on your account page. If you find any issues, please send a support request.