Start your project with Spark
Find a solution that's right for your business, on your terms.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
EVP, Chief Administrative Officer, Joshua Rivera, from Headway, has joined us to talk about the system update and architecture redesign they are implementing to make their recruitment and staffing platform more agile, scalable, flexible, and resilient.
" We have implemented a platform that is easier to navigate, that works faster for employees to record their assignment details and smart enough to gather comprehensive reporting information for our clients."
Joshua Rivera, EVP, Chief Administration Officer, Headway
Joshua Rivera: Our staffing company is a force for good, providing custom workforce solutions on a national scale. At the heart of our business, we're committed to breaking down barriers and helping people achieve great things. Since 1974, our focus has been on building opportunities and going the extra mile to help people overcome obstacles. Character, commitment, and passion are the cornerstones of our story as week seek to deliver exceptional workforce solutions across the nation.
We thrive on the knowledge that we're making an impact every day. We're committed to meeting the challenges of high-volume, large-scale contingent, and permanent workforce requirements within highly focused sectors across the nation. Our high-touch, best-in-class service model encompasses two integral components: Recruitment & Staffing and Employer of Record services. Our vision is to partner with clients, candidates, employees, and stakeholders to leverage sophisticated technology without sacrificing hands-on connections that give us a reason to get up every morning.
Joshua Rivera: We wanted to update our existing system to be more agile, flexible, resilient, and scalable to help us continue to provide better user experiences and meet changing user demands. We needed to completely redesign our architecture, replace the old software, and update our system architecture to a micro-service model.
We chose Spark Equation because they were highly recommended by one of our channel partners.
Joshua Rivera: Spark Equation helped us address all the challenges that arose with working with legacy code and made sure we kept a consistent experience for our active users during development. To meet our product goals, they analyzed our existing system and collected data from multiple sources, moved it into the data warehouse, organized it for optimal data retrieval, and made that data as straightforward as possible for near real-time analytics. They brought their knowledge and expertise in solving complex problems, and in turn, allowed us to successfully introduce the company's proprietary onboarding and timekeeping HR platform.
In the 1st year, there were up to 10 members in various positions from Spark involved on the project. The team was able to flex in size over the duration of the project as needed.
Joshua Rivera: One of the best measurable outcomes is user experience and cost benefits through workflow efficiencies. The platform is more than just an online HR portal. It is a mobile-optimized comprehensive solution that streamlines the entire employee experience from offer management, and onboarding to time and expense entry, approval, and employee documentation. It’s meant to relieve the burden of having multiple sources to accelerate recruitment and hiring performance and reduce employment resources and costs. We are now able to fully focus on our mission and continue to provide custom workforce solutions that break down barriers and help people achieve great things.
We really appreciate how hands-on and committed they were to learning about the staffing and employment industry. This allowed them to really engage with us during our discovery phases to offer additional options and insights.
Joshua Rivera: We had a visual roadmap of our prioritized plans of where our product is headed. Everything was organized in a clear and straightforward way with quarterly milestones, metrics, and end goals. We always felt our communication channels were free-flowing and transparent. We used Jira for project management, Slack for communication, Confluence for code documentation, and Sentry for monitoring. In addition, our product manager and their project manager had bi-weekly sync-ups to ensure everything was on track, and the product was solving our customer's pains.
We had an efficient process in place to ensure all tickets and support items went through a workflow with all questions and concerns addressed so nothing was missed. This included estimations prior to development so we could budget properly per sprint. Bi-monthly sprint planning meetings were held to discuss the progress of the current sprint and what is to be implemented next sprint. The entire team is really responsive and stayed on top of each of their tasks. They push for good documentation, continuously keep all security practices up to date, and ensure quality is instilled into each deployment.
We started our project at the beginning of the pandemic and we had many worries about the road ahead, but their project management practices and overall engineering expertise brought us confidence in the decision we made and how we would excel during uncertain times.
Learn more about our project →
.png)