Case Study

Overview

A local university wanted to start an Agents programme to evangelize the university to students, and needed a solution to manage student applications submitted by agents as they went through the university's pipeline. I was brought on to create a new private website that would allow both agents and staff to sign up, create applications, communicate and push the application through various pipeline stages. The website should also allow staff to upload recruitment materials that agents could download to use in their recruitment efforts. The website needed to be built in WordPress since that's what the university IT staff are most comfortable with managing.

Approach

My general philosophy when working on WordPress sites is to keep plugins to a minimum. If a plugin fully solves a problem I am facing and is well maintained, I will use it. Otherwise, I prefer to write custom code that I can tailor to my specific use case and keep maintained easily. The plugins I did use consisted of Pods, to create and manage custom data; a couple of plugins to handle new user registration management and turning the site private; and an advanced mailing plugin to handle email broadcasts.

The rest of the site was built with custom code. The majority of this work consisted of using WordPress hooks to tweak existing WordPress functionality, such as comments, to work better for the site's specific needs, as well as writing new APIs to handle custom actions taken on student applications. The most surprisingly complex task was generating a PDF through PHP - I could not find a plugin that would do exactly what I wanted, and ended up having to use the FPDF library to hand code the offer PDF in PHP. All in all, however, it was fairly straightforward to convert the default WordPress blog site into a multi-role communication website.

Result

The website delivered is fully private such that even uploaded recruitment materials require login to access. Agents can also only look at their own student applications instead of being able to search for any student application. The design is kept simple, with separate dashboards for agents and staff that display all the information the user would need in order of priority. Staff know which applications need their input in order of how long it's been since the last update, with agents able to mark certain applications as urgent in cases where students need an answer sooner. When a staff user approves an application, an offer PDF is generated and viewable by staff before being sent out to the student. Staff can communicate with a specific agent in an application page, and can also set up or broadcast announcements to agents.

Once a prototype of the site was demoed, the recruitment team at the university requested the ability to have staff members also use the site for submitting and tracking student applications, as their process at the time was much more manual. A few changes later, staff users had the ability to submit their own applications and see their submitted applications on their dashboard.