Discover how Greyhound Studio helped Digital Futures streamline over 40,000 applications through high-traffic windows — reliably and error-free.

The problem

Digital Futures relies on Greenhouse, a widely used Applicant Tracking System (ATS), to track and manage applications to their various programmes and services. While reliable, the default Greenhouse form builder fell short in two key ways:

• Lack of customisation options: Digital Futures struggled to easily modify key aspects, behaviours, and fields on their forms, making quick updates or iterations unnecessarily difficult. The default form also offers limited error tracking.
• Embedded form limitations: While Greenhouse forms can be embedded into pages, they lack certain functionality, such as pagination. For an organisation that requires extensive applicant details, this means excessively long pages and forms, and an increased abandonment rate.
• Poor branding and UX: Both the native and embedded forms have limited visual customisation options and didn’t match the site’s style or branding.

With thousands of candidates applying for upskilling opportunities, Digital Futures needed a more integrated, customisable, and scalable solution.

The solution

Considering the limitations Digital Futures faced with the built-in Greenhouse forms, we built a custom form directly on their WordPress site using a flexible forms plugin integrated with the Greenhouse API. This gave them complete control over all aspects of their forms, with some of the key improvements including:

• Splitting the form into multiple sections to avoid overwhelming applicants and reducing the drop-off rate.
• Adding conditional fields that appear or disappear based on the applicant’s previous answers.
• Built-in error checking and correction prompting, as well as custom error logging for quick debugging if anything goes wrong. 
• Admin-friendly configuration tools that allow staff to open or close applications independently. 
• Source tracking that allows Digital Futures to tag referral links, e.g., LinkedIn profiles, for further tracking and analysis.
• Visual improvements to match their brand identity across all devices and a more seamless user experience.

The results

This case study is a good example of how optimising your forms and other ways that users interact with your site can help brands grow. Since launching the new application system, we have:

• Facilitated and processed over 40,000 applications with high reliability and minimal errors. 
• Served more than 200,000 unique users, including during high-traffic windows without a second of downtime.
• Reduced applicant drop-offs and form abandonment through considered and responsive design.
• Allowed Digital Futures to capture and track more relevant applicant information, streamlining their internal processes.

For organisations such as Digital Futures that rely heavily on Applicant Tracking Systems, and therefore lots of user-submitted data, streamlining all aspects of form management can be a significant challenge. While in-house experts and third-party solutions may offer some of the answers, a skilled WordPress developer can leverage the full flexibility of the platform to combine custom development and API integrations for a superior user experience, personalisation, and scalability.