bespoke web development for legal recruitment agency

NQ Solicitors is an online matching platform that allows Newly Qualified Solicitors, who are seeking new opportunities, to create an anonymous Profile and to be matched with private practice law firms who are looking to hire for specific vacancies. The business operates solely within the legal sector, providing a unique service bringing together the legal graduates to the leading law firms in London and across the UK.

why wirebox?

The business required a system to manage their business online to reduce calls and emails which due to their success was becoming difficult to manage. The requirement was to literally provide a platform for both newly qualified solicitors and law firms to find opportunities based on their requirements – be it a specific role within a specialist law firm or for a company to filter graduates based on their credentials and preferences. The system would be required to manage their documents, CVs, applications and communication – whilst business could upload their roles and manage their profile remotely, whilst receiving applications pre filtered through the system. The online system was to manage the accounts of both the prospective employer and also the graduate.

our approach_

Consultancy was provided to understand the needs of the users of the website, user journeys were worked through and the functionality listed and mapped out, which NQ Solicitors signed off on. As with all web applications both UX & UI were taken into account, as was a responsive design to allow the platform to work on all devices. The build of the site was created using the Laravel framework. By using the frameworks Vagrant tool Homestead, we were able to create development environments that closely replicated the production server, to reduce environment related bugs. To further increase stability in our workflow we used Laravel Forge to provision our staging/production servers and automate releases by pushing to named GIT branches. Automating releases to a staging server allowed NQ to approve new features and allowed us to verify the release process before production.

Law firms can run searches on the solicitor database which will return intelligent matches based off both the solicitors and law firm’s profile and preferences. Once matched, a law firm and solicitor can accept and decline various requests from each other such as “Releasing CV”, “Interview Invitation” and “Job Offer”. This whole process is mediated by the NQ Recruitment team who has an overview of the entire system.

The application created a great deal of email notifications between all the different users (Solicitor, Law Firm and NQ Admin). A lot of the notifications gave the user the chance to interact with the application, which would in turn create more notifications for other users. To demonstrate these notifications to our client we routed all emails on the staging application to mailtrap.io. This allowed NQ to easily simulate being any user without setting up multiple email address.

An important feature of the search algorithm was to ensure a solicitor’s anonymity, by never returning them as a match to their current employer. We created many unit tests to prove that the intended outcome of any search would not break this important business rule. These unit tests are now run before any release to check that future changes haven’t broken these rules.

During development the client had regular access to builds and was able to give us feedback as we worked. This led to a new feature being implemented which allowed the NQ admins to login as any user via their admin panel with one click. This allowed NQ admins to support solicitors or law firms with any part of the application over the phone and act on their behalf.

the project included:

• Law firms can run searches on the solicitor database which will return intelligent matches based off both the solicitors and law firm’s profile and preferences.
• Ensure a solicitor’s anonymity, by never returning them as a match to their current employer.
• Solid scalable platform hosted on AWS

outcomes_

NQ Solicitors was launched in the later stages of 2016 and was widely recognised as a disruptive influence on the traditional recruitment process. Both legal graduates and legal companies are now using the site as their preferred route to both market and opportunity seeking.

After the application’s release we continue to monitor its health by sending application logs to Airbrake to give us instant alerts of any issues. This helps us to swiftly deal with any unexpected issue without the need for a report from our client or their users. We continue to support NQ Solicitors and are a valued client of Wirebox.

our approach delivered:

• A new way for employers to go through the hiring process whilst cutting down hiring costs as they had full control over the fee they paid
• Disruptive influence on the traditional recruitment process