DRIVE Recruitment Portal Case Study

01 / Overview

One dashboard, the entire pipeline.

Drive Recruitment runs a high-velocity temp labour and recruitment business across New Zealand. The team was juggling Trade Me job posts, an external CRM, candidate compliance docs, daily rosters and SMS comms across half a dozen disconnected tools.

The Drive Portal collapses every one of those flows into a single WordPress-hosted dashboard. Recruiters land on a single page that shows today's roster, new candidates from Trade Me applications, compliance status across the whole team, and the live sales pipeline. Every action — log a call, send an SMS, post a job, run a duplicate-check — happens without leaving the portal.

02 / Features

What's inside.

Eight distinct feature areas, each replacing a previously-manual workflow.

// 01

Candidate Management

Six-point compliance tracking — MOJ, Drug Screening, Eligibility, Contract, Reference Check, H&S — with traffic-light badges
Phone-based duplicate detection in the merge tool, handling middle names and full CRM data transfer
Auto-create from form submissions — matches by email/phone every 10 minutes via WP cron
Submission history per candidate, fully searchable

// 02

Client Management

Client records with attached compliance and deployment documents
Negative-ID prospect clients — pipeline-only entries that haven't been formally converted yet, so they can flow into rosters early
Race-condition-safe document loading when switching between clients quickly

// 03

Roster & Assignments

Daily and weekly roster management with drag-friendly UI
Bulk SMS direct to rostered workers' phones — one-click team broadcasts
Compliance column showing every worker's six-point status at a glance, with a drill-down modal
Compliance manager assignment per role

// 04

Sales Pipeline CRM

Three-view interface — Pipeline (kanban), List, and Overdue
Call logging and follow-up tracking timestamped against company records
509-company bulk import capability for kick-starting the pipeline
Negative-ID prospect handling so leads can be rostered before formal conversion

// 05

Trade Me Jobs Integration

Mirrors Trade Me's "List a job" form exactly — cascading category & subcategory, region/district, work type, duration
Predefined pay-value dropdowns matching TM's allowed values to avoid post rejections
One-click Save & Post — saves to the local DB and posts live to Trade Me in one action
Withdraw and close listings via the API without leaving the portal
Default contact wiring for the lead recruiter

// 06

KPI & Compliance Dashboards

Recruiter KPI page with built-in compliance accordion
Phone-number-matched activity tracking with normalised exact-match logic — no double counts, no missed calls
Company KPI drilldown view for admin users

// 07

Communications

Bulk SMS sending direct from rosters to phone numbers
Direct phone integration — call from inside the candidate record
Email comms tracked back to the candidate timeline

// 08

Timesheets & Payroll

Timesheet capture tied directly to assignments
Approval flow from worker → recruiter → admin
Output ready for handover to the payroll system

03 / Under the hood

Built on WordPress.

// Backend

WordPress custom plugin (PHP)
Custom DB tables for pipeline, calls, submissions, candidate flags
WP-Cron jobs for auto-create & matching
AJAX endpoints for live UI

// Frontend

~15,900-line portal.js
Single-page experience inside WordPress
Direct DOM rendering — no SPA framework
Live updates via AJAX polling

// Integrations

Trade Me Jobs API (list / edit / withdraw)
External CRM — REST API + direct DB
SMS gateway integration
WP core plugin architecture

// Stack at a glance

PHP WordPress Plugin API MySQL Custom DB Schema JavaScript jQuery AJAX WP-Cron Trade Me Jobs API REST API SMS Gateway

Drive Portal.