Jobvite Turns to AppDynamics to Enhance Development Quality, Speed, and Innovation

Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, Jobvite is leading the next wave of talent acquisition innovation to engage candidates with meaningful experiences. The Jobvite Talent Acquisition Suite weaves together automation and intelligence to increase recruiting speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness. Jobvite serves thousands of customers across a wide range of industries including Ingram Micro, Schneider Electric, Premise Health, Zappos.com, and Blizzard Entertainment.

In the crowded and competitive HR technology market, customer experience is key. Jobvite—known for its applicant tracking system (ATS) and recruiting software—understands the importance of customer experience.

“We need to ensure our solutions are the best on the market in terms of fit and function for the organizations we serve. At the same time, we need to innovate and move fast,” says Ron Teeter, Chief Architect at Jobvite. “Balancing development quality, speed, and innovation concurrently is challenging, but we can’t afford to fail on any of these fronts. We have thousands of customers that rely on our applications daily. If we make a mistake, it’s hugely impactful for our customers.” 

With millions of job seekers and recruiters using Jobvite every year, the company needed to deliver an application experience that would strengthen loyalty and power retention. To do this, they enlisted AppDynamics, available in AWS Marketplace.

After successfully transitioning to a cloud-native microservice architecture, Jobvite turned to AppDynamics to manage and monitor its multiple AWS-based applications, including the company’s popular Recruiting and Canvas applications. “Just within the Jobvite Recruiting application, we have five microservices and monoliths fully instrumented in AppDynamics,” adds Teeter.  

To extend observability into its live production environment, Jobvite most recently added AppDynamics Deep Code Insights (DCI) powered by Rookout. DCI allows Jobvite to gain an unprecedented level of visibility into production code to capture critical debug data entirely on-demand and without disrupting customers. 

By gaining the ability to capture granular debug data from production—instead of combing through log data—Jobvite has slashed the time and effort it takes to solve issues. Even better, “We are learning that DCI is faster at solving a problem in every environment,” says Teeter. 

With AppDynamics, Jobvite is also able to add automated performance verifications. “We now have logs and AppDynamics filtering into the AI under continuous verification, so the teams can see what 'normal' looks like through the lens of a neural net,” says Teeter. “It allows us to optimize the performance and availability of our services.”

Using AppDynamics DCI, Jobvite can quickly pinpoint functionality issues in production, eliminating the time previously wasted sifting through log files, writing new logging statements, or deploying code to gain the insights. “We saw immediate results after implementing AppDynamics DCI. By shortening the investigation cycle to identify the root causes of issues and democratizing access to production data, DCI easily saves several hours per incident,” says Teeter.

Prior to DCI, senior lead engineers were performing the debugging, hindering their ability to drive strategic priorities. “Everything you’d expect a lead engineer to do wasn't happening because they were spending time diagnosing maintenance issues, which is absolutely the most expensive way to deal with unplanned work. With DCI, they can stay focused on strategic tasks instead of rushing to resolve maintenance emergencies,” says Teeter.

“With AppDynamics, we can detect any issues early in development and resolve them before they become customer-impacting issues,” says Teeter. By providing deep performance insights at every stage of the software development lifecycle—from CI all the way through to production—Jobvite can also accelerate innovation. Teeter adds, “AppDynamics allows us to shift left and get our most important products to market faster, while still delivering them with the high-quality standards the market expects.”

Steven Long, Regional CTO, AppDynamics, part of Cisco, and Ron Teeter, Chief Architect & VP of Engineering, Jobvite virtually connect with John Furrier for AWS re:Invent 2020.