A bespoke plugin to unify job vacancy data in 13 languages

Staples is the world’s 2nd largest ecommerce site and the largest office products company, operating in more than 26 countries.

Their global recruitment site is built on top of WordPress and is available in 13 different languages, allowing users to search for jobs in 25 locations.

The site required some sophisticated extensions to be provided by BrightMinded.

Data integration

First we made the job vacancy data available by integrating 11 XML feeds which carry data about job vacancies across their global operations. As is often the way with data integration we had to handle a wide variety of data formats, multiple methods of fetching the data and we needed to repair the information where inconsistencies were found. For regions where no XML feed was available we added an interface to the WordPress dashboard where administrators could manually upload and edit job vacancies.

The outcome

The data from all of these sources was unified into a single format and stored as a custom content type in the WordPress database. We then provided the search functionality, allowing users to search in 13 different languages (including 2 Chinese dialects) and filter by job keywords, functions and locations. The result is a seamless experience no matter where in the world their users are and which language they use.