Announcing Recruiter 1.0 - the road to our Drupal 7 e-Recruitment distribution

After more than two years of development, our team at epiqo is excited to announce Recruiter 1.0 - the final release of our e-recruitment solution based on Drupal 7. Go and download the fresh and shiny Recruiter 1.0 from drupal.org or read further, as I'd like to share some insights on how we have been creating the distribution as our base product over the last years.

Step 1: Creating a fresh platform for extensible e-recruitment websites based on Drupal 7

At epiqo, we started developing Recruiter early on by September 2010. As one of the very first Drupal 7 based distributions, short time after Drupal 7 was released in January 2011, our first beta of Recruiter was announced on March 4th, 2011. Creating the Recruiter distribution early on by that time involved figuring out the right feature-driven development workflow and working on fundamental Drupal contrib modules. Entity API, Profile2, Field-collection, the Search API, Rules, the Rules Autotagger module and a Term-level field is just a brief exerpt of the great variety of modules that have been sponsored during the creating of the Recruiter distribution.

Step 2: Stabilizing the Recruiter platform

Since our first beta release, we have been continously improving and expanding the Recruiter distribution which forms the basis of all our job boards. A lot of stabilizing happenend under the hood like figuring out the optimum of default field settings for job postings and our detailed resume feature. Over time, we also added a number of additional features to Recruiter like job applications, a content admin role, a registration feature and the ability to switch between Search API Database and Solr backends. It took a while until the drupal.org distribution infrastructure was able to build full releases, so since beta7 we are able to host them entirely on drupal.org.

Step 3: Adding Cloudy, a Omega 4.x responsive base theme

Back in early 2011, shipping Recruiter with a red Bartik theme was kind of cool because we were showcasing the new and fresh Drupal 7. Frontend web design has evolved dramatically since then, so we decided to create a modern, new base theme for our Recruiter based sites. Together with Sebastian Siemssen we worked on his complete rewrite of the Omega 4 base theme. In summer 2012, we relaunched our demonstration platform DrupalJobs just in time for DrupalCon Munich. Since then, our Recruiter-based job portals are based on our mobile-first and reponsive base theme Cloudy that leverages Sass, Compass and the Susy grid. With the final release of Recruiter, we are glad to include the fully open-sourced Cloudy base theme within the distribution. Omega 4 is moving towards a stable release. For more information, consult the issue queue and or find a in-depth discussion in the comments of Amazee Labs Blog post on the new face of Omega 4.

Step 4: Finalizing the Recruiter distribution with demo content

So far, Recruiter was a great platform technology-wise, but after installing the distribution you didn't see anything. We have now added a Recruiter Demo feature to provide a good starting point when evaluating the Recruiter distribution. The installer will automatically import a set of demo data, including job postings and a complete applicant resumes. Similar to other modern Drupal distributions, Recruiter now provides a nice out-of-the-box experience that show cases the essential functionality provided by our distribution.  simplytest.me is a great way for evaluating Drupal projects online. Take a quick Recruiter 1.0 test ride using the direct link: http://simplytest.me/project/recruiter/7.x-1.0

Conclusions and outlook

Recruiter is a Drupal distribution that focuses on a specific nieche - job portals. By leveraging and actively contributing to the Drupal ecosystem we have found a great way of building on the shoulders of giants. The great amount of extension modules for Drupal is the perfect fit for creating flexible and extensible e-Recruitment solutions. epiqo also provides premium-features built on top of Recruiter and we offer Recruiter consultancy from job board architecture over implementation details to related module development. Come and contact us to discuss how Recruiter can help bring success to your job board project.