HeyJobs Modernizes Legacy Marketing Applications with Appsmith - Saving Weeks of Development Time

Legacy custom applications can create challenges for businesses as they scale. These older apps often lack the flexibility, scalability, and efficiency needed to meet the changing needs of a growing organization. Limited functionality, complex maintenance, and high costs can limit productivity and the ability to adapt to market demands.

Boris, the Chief Technology Officer, and Anton, the Head of Marketing Engineering, were struggling to maintain and scale their existing legacy applications with limited resource investment. This initiated their journey for a more modern solution.

Anton handles marketing-related engineering tasks, including integrations, app creation, and performance marketing automation. Boris manages all company-wide technical projects at HeyJobs, the recruitment solution for the scarce candidate market. We spoke with them to understand how they used Appsmith to streamline their marketing operations, improve their internal tooling, and achieve significant time and cost savings.

About HeyJobs

HeyJobs is a career platform for essential talent in Europe. They help recruiters launch new positions and receive quality candidates using a combination of machine learning, marketing automation, and a matching platform. With over 3,000 clients globally and more than 400 employees, HeyJobs is dedicated to hiring successfully at scale.

High development efforts, increased costs, and limitations with the existing legacy admin panel

HeyJobs is focused on helping its customers to achieve their recruiting goals. To achieve these goals, HeyJobs has a number of marketing programs in place. However, managing the activities around these programs became challenging as the company grew. To address this challenge, HeyJobs has developed several custom applications to manage automation rules and budget allocation to ensure their marketing operations are efficient and scalable.

Building all of their applications from scratch came with its own challenges. For example, HeyJobs had an existing legacy app with an admin panel as the interface built on Ruby on Rails and Active Admin, but it lacked the flexibility, scalability, and capabilities required to handle their evolving needs. They investigated how to address this issue by adding a React integration on top of the platform, but this solution required significant development effort and increased the total cost of ownership.

The intensive development, maintenance, and costs associated with the legacy application and admin panel prevented Anton and his team of 15 engineers from prioritizing marketing requests for new features and tools.

It became clear that HeyJobs needed a new solution that offered a better interface, flexibility, and the ability to handle dynamic scenarios without extensive development efforts.

Appsmith facilitated the development of new features, reduced dependence on engineers, and allowed non-engineers to create features

HeyJobs was in search of a tool that would facilitate the efficient development of new features, and reduce the dependence on engineers. They aimed to replace their admin panel with a more scalable solution. Additionally, they wanted a platform that would allow non-engineers to create additional tools and features in the future.

At first, they were unsure about switching to a low-code platform, since they had previously worked with highly customized systems. However, upon discovering Appsmith, they found it provided the flexibility they needed while offering a developer-like workflow. After assessing over 25 tools, including other low-code platforms, they discovered that it was straightforward to quickly and efficiently develop proof of concepts (POCs) with Appsmith. This would significantly cut down on development time and enable non-engineers, like technical product managers, to collaborate and add new features to the applications.

In Anton’s words: “All that layering logic is handled by the application. It's replaced by drag and drop, the visual editor, widgets, and components. You don't have to build them from scratch. The only thing that you have to do is write standalone JavaScript functions within certain components to extend or customize the standard functionality, which is a significant time saver.”

Automated tasks, improved user experience, and reduced development time

HeyJobs leveraged Appsmith to rebuild their legacy applications, including a project called "Contract Group Steering." This application automated budget allocation for enterprise clients and ensured efficient marketing activities. The transition from the old admin panel to the new Appsmith interface resulted in a faster and more intuitive experience.

The “Contract Group Steering” application.

The technical product managers were able to add new features, such as table widgets, filtering, and additional logic, without the need for extensive development involvement. As Anton explained, "It was a significant time saver in that respect because it was a matter of three, four hours from the product manager versus a week of development engineering.”

The feedback from the engineering team has been positive, citing faster interfaces and improved productivity. Appsmith's platform handled the layering complexities, enabling engineers to focus on building sophisticated business logic while maintaining flexibility.

The "Marketing Job Health application" is designed to track campaign and budget status.

Optimize operations and modernize legacy applications

Anton and Boris plan to further leverage Appsmith in other departments across the company, including a B2B admin panel for their customer service team and other engineering platforms. They see the potential of Appsmith not only to replace their existing legacy applications but also to optimize operations and deliver exceptional value.

Appsmith offers a powerful, yet easy-to-use platform, to modernize your legacy applications. You can use the free cloud-hosted or the self-hosted version to quickly build your POC or full-fledged applications. Take a look at our available versions and if you are looking for enterprise-grade support and reliability, be sure to get in touch with our team.