It’s safe to say that most people don’t like job hunting. Applicants are stressed trying to impress potential employers, while companies with open roles are worried about attracting the best talent.The last thing anyone needs is a recruitment process strained by poor quality HR software, especially now that the labor market is roaring back as COVID vaccinations are rolling out. According to the United States’ Department of Labor, companies have added jobs for four consecutive months, wages are picking up, and those that have been out of work due to the pandemic are re-entering the workforce. 

At the center of this whirlwind are HR software companies like Friend of mabl CareerBuilder, a global provider of end-to-end human capital solutions that help companies recruit and retain great talent. With mabl, CareerBuilder maintains quality and a laser-focus on improving the user experience. 

Managing a Wide Range of User Experiences

CareerBuilder serves a large audience that includes everyone from small business owners and global HR directors to job seekers in fields as diverse as construction, healthcare, and communications. To deliver a quality experience to each of these groups, the CareerBuilder quality team relies on continuous learning and improvement to stay ahead of user expectations. The team plays a critical role in ensuring quality for every user by managing the automation team and building the POCs, frameworks, and other automation solutions for various projects. As a customer-centered organization, QA’s top priority is making sure that the CareerBuilder web application works for every jobseeker’s browser, so that every CareerBuilder visitor has the same quality experience while searching for their next opportunity. 

It’s also important that the CareerBuilder recruitment application integrates seamlessly with recruiters’ employee management systems. But their legacy scripted automated testing solution often derailed this focus as it forced the CareerBuilder QA team to spend the bulk of their time on maintenance for specific tests related to browser and OS versions, rather than developing a quality strategy that stayed ahead of user expectations.

Less Maintenance, More User Focus

Since CareerBuilder relies on a CI/CD pipeline, their developers have committed to a “fail fast” philosophy. They write code as fast as possible, test it as fast as possible, then clean out the failures and put the code into production. Unfortunately, CareerBuilder found that their legacy scripted automated testing created a bottleneck. The dual pressures of test maintenance and manual testing were very time-consuming for a small team managing a global software product suite. 

The manual testing process was such a problem that CareerBuilder’s quality leaders were worried that it would burn out their budget, as well as the QA engineers that they relied on to maintain and run their tests. 

Remember that CareerBuilder is an application that’s supposed to be accessible to everyday users with a range of technical skills, which means that an important aspect of effective tests is user-centricity. By forcing QA staff to focus on the technicalities of maintaining scripted tests, that important aspect was lost. The day-to-day needs of technical test management were overshadowing a user-centric quality strategy, despite the priorities of the testing team. 

In order to re-focus testing on usability for their consumers, CareerBuilder needed to find a less fragile testing framework that could adapt to their wide range of user journeys. With mabl, maintaining in terms of compatibility with the environment and browser, the QA team has saved 80% of the time typically spent on test automation. Yet compared with their previous testing strategy, the CareerBuilder QA team has increased test coverage by 30%. 

Making HR Technology More Human 

Recruiting and retaining top talent is a stressful process that requires significant time and effort by hiring managers, organizations, and job seekers alike. As millions of people seek to rejoin the workforce or find new opportunities, HR technology leader and Friend of mabl CareerBuilder is ensuring that hiring managers have the resources to connect with the best talent across mobile and web browsers for a seamless, stress-free hiring experience. 

81% of companies compete on customer experience alone. Is your quality strategy keeping up? Join mabl’s 14-day free trial to see how quality engineering can support customer-centered testing for your team.