Employ Inc. provides people-first recruiting solutions that empower companies to overcome their greatest hiring challenges. Serving SMBs to global enterprises, Employ focuses on the unique recruiting needs of each organization — from foundational hiring to sophisticated talent acquisition. Employ is the only organization that offers companies a choice in their hiring solutions, providing a curated set of recruiting technologies and services. Employ helps companies grow, scale, and thrive by prioritizing people ahead of products through personalized choice, collective intelligence, and lasting relationships. Simple hiring to sophisticated talent acquisition. Together, Employ and its brands (JazzHR, Lever, Jobvite, and NXTThing RPO) serve more than 22,000 customers across multiple industries. For more information, visit www.employinc.com.

In the fast-paced world of talent acquisition, Employ, Inc., the parent company of the renowned Jobvite platform, found itself at a crossroads. As a long-time AWS customer, Employ had built a robust cloud infrastructure to support its innovative talent acquisition solutions. However, like many growing companies, they recognized the need to optimize their cloud operations and enhance their support structure. While working with another AWS partner, Employ began to experience challenges with support response times and ticket resolutions, which prompted them to explore new options that could better align with their evolving business needs.

Employ, Inc. knew they needed a change. They valued the concept of partner-led enterprise support, which offered the benefits of enterprise-level support at business-friendly costs. This led them to embark on a search for a new AWS partner who could meet their evolving needs.

The journey with Mission Cloud began with a focus on cloud financial management. Over the next two years, Employ utilized Mission Cloud to manage the AWS spend for its Jobvite product. As part of the Mission Cloud Foundation service, Employ was assigned a dedicated Cloud Analyst who regularly met with them for cost optimization and infrastructure health reviews.

The impact was immediate and far-reaching. The Mission Cloud Analyst diligently monitored unattached volumes, right-sized EC2 and RDS instances, provided EBS storage recommendations, and even suggested plans to upgrade certain technologies to avoid extended support fees. This hands-on approach brought a new level of efficiency to Employ's cloud operations.

One of the most significant benefits was the centralized visibility of all account billing. This made reporting and auditing substantially easier compared to the previous practice of logging into several AWS accounts. The RIO program proved particularly successful, with the Mission Cloud Analyst ensuring that Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) were optimally managed and not overcommitted.

For Employ's engineering staff, the time savings were substantial. They no longer had to manage complex spreadsheets to track AWS spend or handle the intricacies of purchasing RIs and SPs. This newfound freedom allowed them to refocus on product development and innovation.

The success of these optimization efforts led Employ to take another significant step: signing on for an AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) for their Jobvite product. Mission Cloud Analysts played a crucial role in helping Employ track and manage their EDP commitments, ensuring they maximized the benefits of the program.

The results spoke for themselves. Joshua Jackson, Sr. Director of Engineering at Employ, Inc., attested that the EDP would not have been possible without Mission Cloud and the cost management work they had done. Even more impressively, Jackson reported that with Mission Cloud managing their cloud spend over the last two years, Employ's AWS spend had decreased by a staggering 45%.

Jackson couldn't speak highly enough of the impact: "The Reserved Instance Operations program has been a huge benefit for myself. Instead of having to constantly monitor and work on RI purchases and savings plans, being able to remove that burden and leverage Mission Cloud's RIO program to manage RIs for both RDS and EC2 has allowed us to remove a huge amount of manual effort. With this time freed up, we can focus on actual product development and other areas that would otherwise be taken away by having to work out with spreadsheets what RI’s need to be purchased or renewed."

As the partnership between Mission Cloud and Employ flourished, new opportunities for collaboration emerged. Employ decided to expand the partnership to include help with planning the migration of several workloads into AWS. During the migration assessment, Mission Cloud helped identify which workloads could be migrated and which faced technical incompatibilities. Two key migrations were prioritized: moving Solr (EC2) to Amazon OpenSearch and transitioning their career site search from Google Cloud API to Amazon OpenSearch and Amazon Bedrock.

The migration planning process was thorough and insightful. Mission Cloud provided Employ with a comprehensive package including a summary of discovery activities and findings, proposed architecture designs, multi-year cost projections, and a detailed migration plan. Employ was particularly pleased with this phase, as Mission Cloud's groundwork freed up valuable time for their own engineers while providing a solid foundation for the migration process.

But the journey didn't stop there. Employ had been exploring the realm of generative AI and was keen to test its potential within their AWS environment. They wanted to create a proof-of-concept project that would be valuable both to their company and their customers. This idea, plus the savings from the various cost management activities, helped Employ reinvest in this exciting new AI project with AWS and Mission Cloud.

The project focused on leveraging generative AI to automate and enhance the interview question generation process. Mission Cloud worked closely with Jobvite to create a state-of-the-art AI-powered interview question generator. This innovative tool could craft interview questions based on a candidate's resume and job description, ensuring consistency, relevance, and fairness across multiple interviewers.

Mission Cloud's solution utilized a microservices approach, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) in Amazon Bedrock. The architecture included serverless components with API Gateway backed by Lambda functions in Step Functions. The system could generate various types of questions - from culture fit to technical assessments - and store them in Amazon S3. An intelligent retrieval system using Amazon OpenSearch allowed for the reuse of relevant questions, helping to reduce costs over time.

Importantly, the system was designed with bias mitigation in mind, carefully avoiding questions related to a candidate's race, location, or other potentially discriminatory factors.

The results of this Generative AI proof-of-concept were highly encouraging. It provided Employ with a solid starting point for integrating AI into their processes and familiarized them with Amazon Bedrock and Claude 3. The new functionality allowed hiring managers to easily compare applicants by ensuring all candidates were asked similar questions.

As Employ looks to the future, they're excited about the possibilities this new AI capability opens up. While there are no immediate plans for full implementation, the project has sparked discussions about how to further refine and expand their use of AI in the hiring process.

From cost optimization to cutting-edge AI implementation, Employ, Inc.'s journey with Mission Cloud showcases the transformative power of the right cloud partner. By addressing immediate needs while also paving the way for future innovations, Mission Cloud has not just been a service provider, but a true partner in Employ's growth and success in the competitive talent acquisition market.