Matador Jobs 3.5.0 is the second major release of Matador Jobs in 2019, and our fifth overall major release since our launch in January 2018. We’ve had various pre-release versions out for testing for months, and we finally believe its ready for everyone! Let us introduce you to some of the highlights of this long-awaited release.

New Features

We consider a feature to be a change that adds usefulness to Matador for its users. Some features are simply new filters or actions most won’t use, while others are completely new tools everyone will find value in. 3.5.0 includes a lot of both!

Candidate Traffic Source Tracking

The biggest addition to Matador Jobs 3.5.0 is what we call “Candidate Traffic Source Tracking.” This new tool will attempt to determine where a visitor to your website originated, and pass useful data about that visit along to their Candidate and Job Submission or Web Response records in Bullhorn, allowing you, the site operator, to better understand where your traffic originates from.

Any website operator should monitor traffic sources, including and especially when you are pushing advertising onto your website. Generally, it is recommended you use Google Analytics or other traffic monitoring tools to do this. But even more important is knowing how to derive useful data from reports generated by those tools, and that is not easy.

Matador’s “Candidate Traffic Source Tracking” does not replace those tools, but it does provide an additional layer of tracking for your traffic that, unlike Google Analytics or similar tools, can actually communicate its findings into Bullhorn data.

Let’s say you are purchasing pay-per-click ads from an advertiser. They’ll have you install a “pixel” to your site so that they can follow traffic they initiate back to your site, but once that traffic is on your site, then what? An important step to purchasing ads is ensuring that once your paid traffic gets to your site, you get the desired result. This might be a sale, a newsletter sign up, etc. For a person driving ads to Matador-powered job listings, your desired result is a job application. Now, with the right setup, when you see a new candidate, job submission, or web response from a submission on your website, you will also be able to review the “Source” field on that record and know if that user found you because of that ad, your Google for Jobs listing, or something else.

There is a lot more to this, so check out our new help doc for Using Candidate Traffic Source Tracking.

Other New Features

While the “Candidate Traffic Source Tracking” is huge, we didn’t stop there. Here are some other changes that will power up Matador for you and your site:

  • A new setting lets you choose how the Job Category taxonomy is populated. Now you can populate from either the original “categories” value, or Bullhorn’s new “published category” value. This is especially helpful for newer Bullhorn customers who are using new workflows.
  • The Job Location taxonomy can now accept the value of “Job General Location”. This allows you to create taxonomy terms like “Phoenix, AZ” where in the past you could only create “Phoenix” or “Arizona”.
  • The Hiring Client Corporation name is now saved into job data, should you wish to create queries based on the hiring company or display the name of the company you’re hiring for. This is not displayed to the customer unless exposed by your developer.
  • Application processing now checks if a submitted resume is under 1mb (1024kb) and does an additional server-side check that the resume is of a valid extension. This fixes two issues caused by extremely large resumes and resumes that had a valid physical extension but a mismatched MIME type.
  • Previously, when an application was submitted to Bullhorn and a matching candidate was found, the name would not be updated with new data. In order to allow for subsequent applications to append a middle name, name suffix or prefix, or update a first name from a nickname to a legal, given name, name can now be updated by data from the resume.
  • In 3.4.0, we introduced a method for a site operator to track the most recent acceptance of the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. This was tracked into a Bullhorn candidate customDateXX field. Now, this can also be saved into a customTextXX field, and the value can be filtered to be simply TRUE or 1 if needed. Props to Scott R for the feature request!
  • Email confirmations to recruiters can now also be sent to the “Published Contact” in addition to “Job Owner” and “Assigned Users”.
  • The matador_jobs() function, and [matador_jobs] and [matador_jobs_*] shortcodes now accept a new parameter ‘paginate’. Pass false, “off”, or “no” to turn off page navigation when a job query can produce more results. Default is true, or “on”. (Some may consider this a bugfix, but our use cases for the shortcode were not clear in prior versions.)
  • The matador_jobs() function, and [matador_jobs] and [matador_jobs_*] shortcodes had the ‘limit’ parameter deprecated and renamed ‘jobs_to_show’ and the ‘minimum’ parameter deprecated and renamed ‘backfill’. This change, along with the addition of the ‘paginate’ parameter, helps to create more clear use cases while limiting confusion.
  • The text input fields in the Matador Search form are now wrapped in <div> tags, matching formatting for the taxonomy drop-downs and allowing greater control over styling to template designers.

That isn’t everything, but it covers the major changes! So now, let’s talk about some squashed bugs.

Bug Fixes

Matador is a big piece of code, and bugs are sure to exist. As Matador’s user base grows, our bugs are identified and quickly fixed. Here are some highlights:

  • Fixed an error where the Jobs Structured Data would not honor the setting ‘”Hiring Company” Data Source’ in certain cases, resulting in the Hiring Company Name, and not the Agency Name, being included in the structured data in certain cases. Props to Phil V. for the bug report.
  • Fixed issue where the new [matador_jobs_listing] and [matador_jobs_table] shortcut shortcodes were doing each other’s behavior.
  • Fixed an issue where the Bullhorn API would return a non-breaking warning when Matador updated an existing candidate in Bullhorn, which generally happens when an applicant applies for more than one job in the same 2-year period. This was not causing any issue at this time, but could in the future.
  • Fixed issue where taxonomy drop-down menus with method set as “link” would fail to trigger page reload automatically.
  • Fixed an issue where large resume file sizes (larger than 1mb) would cause a Bullhorn Candidate/Submission sync to fail. Now, sync will continue, but may fail completely later on if not enough user data was required by the form. (Related, also, the new filesize check feature, listed above.)
  • Fixed an issue where job description would not properly display when using the [matador_jobs] shortcode or the matador_jobs() template function outside of a standard loop.
  • Generally refactored how uploads are stored on the server to fix filesystem issues when a user hosted on a Windows IIS server environment. Note: Thank you to this user for allowing us to fully test Matador on IIS for the first time. While we still don’t officially support IIS, we can confidently say Matador works on Windows hosting.
  • Fixed an issue affecting the frequency at which local application data was automatically deleted.
  • Fixed an issue causing some intended HTML to be escaped, causing a visual error, when using specific settings with some Matador Shortcodes.

Other Notes

In addition to these new features and bug fixes, here are few more notes about this release:

  • Matador is tested up to WordPress 5.2.3
  • Matador is tested up to PHP 7.2.18
  • Matador now requires PHP 7.0+. While it will continue to work on PHP 5.6, all new major features will be developed to PHP 7.0+ specs, including the “Candidate Traffic Source Tracking” feature. That means these new features will not load in PHP 5.6 environments. We will completely require PHP 7.0 in a future version, so start upgrading now, if you haven’t already!
  • Matador now supports the new Bullhorn datacenters added recently. Note: Bullhorn is making it more difficult to determine your datacenter, and we are working on a method to determine datacenter automatically in a future update.

Updates to Matador Jobs Pro All Access Extensions

Given the size of this update, many Matador Jobs Pro All Access extensions also saw minor or major changes with today’s release.

All

  • Now tested up to WordPress 5.2.3
  • Requires at least Matador Jobs 3.5.0
  • Updated how jobs are searched, if applicable, based on changes in core that prevent duplication of jobs.

XML Feeds

  • Now include utm_* variables in your feed URL, ie /feed/?utm_source=indeed&utm_medium=aggregator to take advantage of new Candidate Traffic Source Tracking.

Leads & Referrals

  • If reCAPTCHA extension is enabled, add reCAPTCHA to forms generated by Leads & Referrals.
  • Updated deprecated filter name.

reCAPTCHA

  • Force the reCAPTCHA to be the last field in a form, always.

Advanced Applications

  • Fixes bug for when site is not connected Bullhorn, settings page can still load.
  • Better support for associative field types, notably categories and skills.
  • Number of additional filters and actions.
  • Number of bug fixes.

Looking Forward

Looking forward, we have exciting updates in both the next week and in the next few months.

Two New All Access Extensions

Next week, we will be releasing two new All Access Extensions that All Access subscribers of Matador will be able install to improve and extend Matador’s usefulness.

The first is our Social Web Suite integration. Social Web Suite is a powerful social sharing platform for WordPress. Users of Matador who would like new job opportunities to be auto-posted (or otherwise easily shared) to social media, including LinkedIn and Twitter, may find this a powerful tool to add to their site.

The second is called Company Profiles. This add-on will help web site operators highlight the companies they are hiring for. While we know some users of Matador choose to hide this information, some find value in promoting the company alongside the job. Company Profile will import information from the ClientCorporation record in Bullhorn as well as give site-level tools, like adding a company logo, and build a profile page for the company while showing jobs for the company.

Roadmap for 3.6 and beyond

With 3.5.0 officially launched, we are also looking forward to working on a few key new features and enhancements we want to put into your hands soon, some we hope by year-end. They include:

  • WP-CLI commands. WP-CLI is a command-line management tool for WordPress sites, and a tool of choice of highly efficient WordPress developers and hosting companies alike. Not only do we want various commands like connect, disconnect, and sync available to WP-CLI users, we also want to provide WP-CLI commands for the purpose of setting up true CRON tasks that are run at the server, as opposed to site, level.
  • REST API. In order to support the next items on this list, we will be adding a custom endpoints for the WP-JSON REST API. This will help us add support for Gutenberg and asynchronous data loading, but it will also enable users to push jobs to more external sources (ones that require JSON as opposed to XML) as well as build “headless” WordPress sites.
  • Gutenberg support. Paul and I both love WordPress’s new editor, code-named Gutenberg. That said, Gutenberg is for editing posts, and for a tool like Matador that only imports posts, it isn’t really our thing. That said, we will be adding custom Gutenberg blocks to supplement our shortcodes and exploring how we can support the Gutenberg editor for your jobs.
  • AJAX/asynchronous loading for job data in shortcodes. If I were to describe the last few years of WordPress, it could be told in the development of Gutenberg and the surge of Managed WordPress hosting. The former we’ve just talked about, but the latter matters also, because with Managed WordPress has come aggressive caching to improve WordPress load speeds. We’re finding that users who employ the Matador Jobs shortcodes to power jobs pages are sometimes not seeing their cache clear when a job is added. This is easily fixed by a server-level setting, but we plan to circumvent this need by beginning to also load job data asynchronously upon page load. This also will give us the opportunity to extend more robust, near-instant search results and sorting to your pages, improving the user experience.
  • LUCENE search. Ask any WordPress developer how good search is in WordPress, and they’ll say “it isn’t.” That is because truly relevant searching is a difficult task to accomplish generically and instead varies greatly on each site’s data structure. For this reason, WordPress search is simple to a fault. We aren’t going to try to solve that problem, but we are planning and pass user searches asynchronously into Bullhorn’s new LUCENE search tool and get results based on Bullhorn’s robust search results. We aren’t sure yet if this will be an included core feature or a new All Access add on, but we will be getting to work on this very soon!

Fin.

Well, I feel like I’ve been typing for days. In fact, I’ll admit, we’ve been “done” for about 10 days and the only thing holding back the formal release has been this incredible project of writing these release notes!

I hope you can see how hard Paul and I have been at work on Matador, even though some of you haven’t per se heard from us lately. And we’re definitely not done yet; there’s lots more to come.

Thank you again for all your support, trust, and in some cases, patience, as our small team builds something amazing for you and your business.