How Hireology enables faster, safer software delivery and migration

A lot of companies want to move toward continuous deployment, but haven't taken the steps to get there. Hireology is not one of those organizations.

Founded in 2010, Hireology is an all-in-one hiring and HR platform that equips business leaders with the skills and tech needed to manage the full employee lifecycle. 

When Scott Gainous joined Hireology as Director of Engineering in July 2022, one of his goals was to move the company to a continuous deployment model. At the time, the development team was delivering about two software updates a month for its 7,500 customers, but those releases often were regularly beset by rollbacks. 

"With the way we deployed for the first 10 years of Hireology's tenure, there was the potential for more risk," says Billy Eline, Manager of Product Solutions at Hireology. "We would have to put in more of a manual lift to see if we would find something via listening to customers or checking ourselves."

The headache of hotfixes and stability issues would drag out releases, multiplying every single deployment into two or three just to get something right. 

When Gainous arrived at Hireology, he knew rollouts needed to be smoother, faster, and safer. There were other priorities as well, such as a large-scale, multi-year migration. In this case, maintaining the status quo in terms of Hireology's release process was not an option.

Gainous and the team surveyed the landscape and went about making changes. One early move was adding Datadog to gain better observability around error rates, uptime, and latency. 

In terms of releases, Hireology had been relying on an open-source feature flag solution that was functional but not capable of meeting the team's requirements for increasing its speed. For that, Hireology turned to LaunchDarkly.

At a previous company, Gainous was a power user of LaunchDarkly, so he knew the platform's capabilities. When LaunchDarkly was chosen as a way to improve the release process at Hireology, there was some initial internal trepidation. The team knew it needed to go faster, but there was concern that adopting a new tool, and adding feature flags to basically everything, might actually slow things down.

"Obviously, the exact opposite has happened," Eline said. "It's really night and day."

Relying on Gainous' LaunchDarkly expertise, Hireology was able to take an aggressive approach to adoption that began in September 2022 and spared few areas of its application.

"We're using it everywhere," said Heather Harter, Staff Engineer, "Frontend, backend, mobile app—all the places."

As the team ramped up its use of LaunchDarkly, there were early wins for example, like simplifying the QA process. Prior to LaunchDarkly, any time the team wanted to build a new feature, it would build a long-lived feature branch and then test that independently. Altogether, the team estimated it had around 10 separate, active QA environments. Then when it came time to release, all those branches would get merged and the team would cross its fingers hoping everything would come together. 

Now, with LaunchDarkly, the Hireology team is leaning into more of a trunk-based development approach, using just a single branch with one QA environment. This has significantly reduced infrastructure hosting costs while simplifying QA. 

As the team began expanding its use case for LaunchDarkly, it turned its attention to the company's planned large-scale migration.

Hireology is in the midst of a multi-year migration that'll impact the entire application stack. Among the changes, the company is looking to move to C# and .Net for their tech stack, and then transition over to Next.JS for the frontend. The team is already at work on migrating its infrastructure, and for that Hireology is moving onto Microsoft Azure. 

In the past, the company had attempted migrations, but not always successfully.

"It's just been this insurmountable mountain where we're just like, 'how the heck are we going to rewrite all of this?'" Eline said. 

Aside from gutting the whole legacy app and dropping an entirely new build—which can introduce a ton of risk and stress for all involved—Hireology struggled over ways to migrate in a more strategic and efficient fashion.

With LaunchDarkly, the Hireology team has a fresh option. By standing up a new system in parallel with the existing one, and using LaunchDarkly to progressively route traffic, the Hireology team can control a migration in a similar way to how they would release a feature. By precisely targeting which users experience which system, and instantly routing traffic back to the original in the event of an error, the team can replace legacy components in a way that makes sense for them and their users. And they can do this all without fear or risk. 

"What LaunchDarkly does is it provides a safety net for this change so we can test out the Azure app services without exposing it to everybody in the world," said Nick Macellaio, DevOps Manager at Hireology. 

Breaking the migration up into pieces, and releasing when things feel strong and stable, is also a way to ensure you're delivering the highest-quality version possible. 

"From a quality assurance automation standpoint, what we're doing is testing how we expect something to work, turning the flag on, and making sure we see all the enhancements and fix the bugs," said Sam Elliott, Staff Quality Assurance Engineer at Hireology. "And now let's turn it on more globally to make sure that we didn't break anything. Oh we did? Let's dial it back until we figure out what's broken or that we're in a good spot."

This wash-and-repeat process that Hireology has been following with its migration has eased a lot of minds on the team.

"From a product perspective, I'm sleeping a lot easier," Eline said. 

Roughly six months in, the partnership between LaunchDarkly and Hireology is already paying off. Combined with the implementation of Datadog for APM, some of the early results include:

• Deployment frequency: increased from twice per month to on-demand. 
• Lead time: Cut from 14 days to three hours
• Recovery time: Slashed from a couple days of rollbacks or hotfixes to less than an hour
• Change failure rate: Dropped from 75% to just 8%

Along with those wins, Hireology is also excited about digging into custom contexts, which allow you to target features to as many kinds of things (user, device, organization, etc.) as you want, all at once. This increases power and control while reducing risk and technical debt.

"We're going to understand some new use cases that we're not even doing today just as this starts to get in people's hands and they think about it more," Gainous said. "Our CEO is stoked about it."

Hireology is also looking to scale out LaunchDarkly beyond their core product and development teams, and expand to their product marketing team.

"The really exciting thing about workflows, which is part of the enterprise aspect of LaunchDarkly, is that it could potentially allow us to make our product marketing team the sole approvers on basically all features going forward," Eline said.

Hireology's previous internal tools limited their usage beyond the engineering department, Gainous said, and the fact that LaunchDarkly can cover that gap for non-technical staff is very exciting. It gives Hireology more ways to get people involved with changes that impact the whole company. Plus, it'll make everyone's lives easier.

"You can't undersell how having tools like this helped bring joy to developers' lives," Gainous said. "And not just developers, but product marketing and beyond. It empowers people."