Job Description - The story of creating our own Chrome extension

Overview

I work in the Upstaff team, where we develop both turnkey projects and help expand the existing team (StartUps, SMBs, and engineering departments of large corporations). Everyone at some point lacks expertise and wants to attract simple. Like, say, call a taxi. My clients want to be able to scale very quickly and do not want to spend the standard 1-2 months on finding talent, which is a standard time to hire metrics in the IT industry.

We had three main tasks for which we needed help constantly:

1. Analyze an IT vacancy (especially a large one with several pages), sort everything out
2. Get recommendations on things to improve in your vacancy to attract the attention of the right specialists as quickly and fully as possible. These are our checklists, proven over the years, and other tools, such as some AI assistance.
3. Get profiles of several developers at hand that fit there to the maximum extent.

These are the basic things, there are additional goodies, and we will release them one by one somewhere in Q2 2025 as part of the Pro version, more on that later.

Prehistory

First of all, I would like to note that we already had experience developing Chrome Extensions for our customers in the previous 5 years – unfortunately, I cannot name names due to NDA, but these are mainly investment funds and other companies for whom it is important to see and enrich aggregated information about other companies, their sites, traffic, and internal data. We understood the complexity and it was a familiar technology for us.

Platform Choice

• Desktop vs Mobile?
  Mobile applications lose to desktop apps, not provide the required speed, and functionality in the recruitment business (talent sourcing, resume profiling, etc. And I am not talking about ATS for now). It’s rather convenient to check something when you travel, chat a few lines with someone, and forward links but not more. Most activity is done in browsers and desktop apps on a notebook. So browser extension is exactly what we needed, and we don’t care if it’s not supported on a mobile version. 
• Chrome, Safari or Firefox?
  It’s a natural choice. We use Chrome as our preferred browser for everyday work, so the extension was developed specifically for desktop Chrome. 

Test Challenges

• Performance
  The first thing we encountered (including on the example of similar extensions).  Most of the extensions that analyze the content of the page and make changes (for example, highlight elements) begin to make themselves known and slow down the browser by increasing the number of tabs where the extension works. For example, when you have several or more bookmarks with target resources such as LinkedIn – that’s all, work becomes impossible. When we install several such plugins – the situation becomes even more complicated. We had cases when we simply could not do anything because the tabs froze and stopped responding. And this was from the known And it is even more difficult to understand – which of all the extensions is stuttering more than the others and deactivating it.
  Therefore, the first thing is performance. We open what we studied at the University, the complexity of algorithms, big O, etc. and find a solution. The document is parsed at an acceptable time, and technical skills are highlighted. The result satisfies us.
• Display Options
  We played with drop-down windows but stopped at the sidebar because the windows constantly close when you go to another page or just a careless click. Also, it is unclear whether there are infies or not if the extension is closed. Therefore, our choice fell on the sidebar, which Google developers provide in the tools. Not immediately, but it worked as it should.
• Web resource coverage & support
  We proceeded from the reasoning that 90% of recruiters use similar platforms for posting JOBS (Indeed, Glassdoor, Linkedin Jobs, Workable, JobLeads), and we implemented support for these platforms first. Abstract parser of abstract pages, where content may occur – the plugin may not correctly highlight technical terms, or find elements. We are considering supporting Google Docs (as an interim option for preparing a JOB description), but for now, we have stopped at the platforms themselves. Of course, if the page templates of these platforms change, we may need to fix something ourselves, but this does not scare us. We desire to support the plugin in the future.
• Text analyses and context
  The context of parts of words in a sentence, for example, the programming language Go / Golang. People often use the verb go not at all as the name of a programming language, or the official library next (next.js). This also raises some questions, but the issue is solvable. Where should the analysis be performed, and with what tools? As a front-end, we chose javascript and vue.js (3). This allows you to work with the DOM of the document and make the necessary changes to the page. Regarding analysis, there are not enough libraries and frameworks for working with text arrays on the front end, it is more about backend tools such as ElasticSearch or AI models. Therefore, we decided to bring the analysis that is possible to do to the front-end and move the rest of the analysis to the back end, and make it available for public use in the Pro version.

Core Features Overview

I suggest going directly to the functionality overview. It was designed to be simple for the end user.

1. As soon as you enter one of the popular platforms such as Linkedin, Indeed, Glassdoor, or Upstaff, you get an X-ray in terms of technical requirements: programming languages, frameworks, libraries, utilities, small tools – all this is highlighted on your page.
2. In the sidebar, you will receive this information in a structured form, grouped by categories. For each name, you have indicators of popularity in the industry, and how much this term is disclosed in the job description. Thus, we have indirect information that the author of the Job Description considers more important, and how much this correlates with the general “temperature in the hospital” / industry. You also get an assessment of whether enough technical terms are used in the job description.
3. In the next block, you will see suggestions for using technical terms. For an IT specialist, it is important to get a description of their own system of coordinates and terminology. We also take into account frequent misspellings, abbreviations, and long names and offer alternative options if they are more familiar to developers.
4. At the top, you see the overall Job Description Score. The goal is to achieve the maximum score. This means that within the scope of the job description, the work is done, and now you can proceed to posting on other resources and ATS.

Conclusion

If you read this to the end and find it relevant, I wish you success, attract attention, attract an appropriate audience, and see developers for your dream team.

• Download the Job Description extension in the Google Chrome Store
• Check the Roadmap for the Pro version and register for the whitelist on the extension page on the Upstaff website.
• We will be happy to receive your feedback and ideas on what other platforms should be added to support the next releases.

May I remind you that you can share your project or products with Upstaff? As a partner in AI, Data, Web, and Mobile, we will try to help you implement the project or hire developers who will solve these challenges.