graylink Speeds Up Job Recruiting in Africa Using AWS

2018

graylink is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) ISV firm that helps companies be more effective recruiters by automating and streamlining recruiting and HR functions. Neptune, one of graylink’s products, is used by more than 70 large enterprises in Africa to screen applicants and search for talent.

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When a customer launches a big recruitment campaign, we ramp up our AWS infrastructure to handle the potentially 100,000s of applications that come in, and scale down after this initial rush."

Mark Gray
CEO, graylink

The Challenge

A Cure for Inflexibility

Historically, the company delivered its solutions via on-premises platforms, but this lacked flexibility so graylink planned to migrate to Microsoft Azure. However, a member of the IT team proposed Amazon Web Services (AWS), so the firm ran parallel proofs of concept, and AWS outperformed Azure. What’s more, the company saw that the AWS SDK for .NET helped it to integrate Microsoft .NET applications with the AWS Cloud. Mark Gray, graylink’s CEO, says, “Using AWS, page-loading times were three times faster than with Azure. Plus, we gained access to many more platform services to help us drive innovation.”

Why Amazon Web Services

Greater Performance, Lower Cost

Over a weekend, graylink switched its production systems to AWS. “We had fantastic technical support from AWS in Luxembourg,” says Gray. graylink now uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with AWS Auto Scaling so it no longer needs to capacity plan. As critical storage, it uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which enables it to send data to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, which indexes job and candidate data for rapid searching.

Gray says, “Using AWS, we can migrate from our traditional Microsoft applications such as SQL Server. We see much better results when we search large data sets in Elasticsearch.”

The Benefits

Delivering Agility, Confidence

graylink can quickly scale its IT to meet traffic spikes. “When a customer launches a big recruitment campaign, we ramp up our AWS infrastructure to handle the potentially 100,000s of applications that come in, and scale down after this initial rush,” says Gray. He adds that AWS gives graylink customers increased confidence because its security features protect sensitive data.


graylink offers cloud and mobile solutions, to recruit new talent quicker, more efficiently and for less. To date, its solutions have helped more than five million candidates and processed more than eight million applications.

Benefits of AWS

  • Handles traffic peaks
  • Focuses on innovation
  • Reduces cost of backups
  • Cuts cost of hardware
  • Enhances disaster recovery
  • Avoids capacity planning

AWS Services Used

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. 

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Amazon EC2

Secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Launch applications when needed without upfront commitments.

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Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to deploy, secure, and operate Elasticsearch at scale with zero down time.

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