Lever Uses AWS Global Accelerator to Boost Performance for Recruiting Software

Thousands of hiring managers worldwide rely on Lever software to find, nurture, and manage their job candidates in a central location. Lever, a San Francisco–based company, provides an applicant tracking system used by recruiters in all industries. “We offer a complete, real-time collaborative platform for managing the entire hiring process, from sourcing potential candidates and gathering résumés to scheduling interviews and hiring,” says Charlie O’Leary, the infrastructure engineering manager for Lever.

Since its founding, Lever has run its application environment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, taking advantage of services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for on-demand compute capacity, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storing customer data, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to manage and orchestrate containers. “We chose to run on AWS from day one because we knew it would enable us to grow our business quickly and focus on the software instead of infrastructure management,” says O’Leary.

As Lever added more customers in new global regions, it wanted to increase application performance and address latency issues that resulted from the company having a presence in only the AWS US West Region. “We had customers in India and elsewhere in Asia seeing latency issues, so they weren’t benefiting from the real-time features of our software,” O’Leary says. “As a result, they weren’t moving candidates through quickly enough and were worried about losing potential hires to other companies.”

To reduce latency for its customers, Lever began using AWS Global Accelerator, a service that improves application availability and performance. AWS Global Accelerator provides static IP addresses that serve as a global fixed entry point to application endpoints such as Application Load Balancers in one or more AWS Regions. It takes advantage of the AWS global network to optimize the path from users to applications, which boosts the performance of IP traffic, whether TCP or UDP. “We were very excited when AWS Global Accelerator was announced,” says O’Leary. “We had tried doing some things on our own to improve latency, but without any results. Global Accelerator seemed very promising.”

By using AWS Global Accelerator, Lever gains better application failover capabilities by optimizing routing and simplifying management. “If something were to happen in the US West Regions, we would quickly and seamlessly fail over to other AWS Regions in less than 30 seconds to ensure we’re backing up our customers’ critical data,” says O’Leary.

Lever initially used AWS Global Accelerator for customers in Europe. “It was very simple to set up the service, and we saw dramatic latency improvements in minutes,” states O’Leary. Lever then deployed AWS Global Accelerator for customers in India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Australia.

Lever customers across the globe have seen significant latency improvement and better overall performance since Lever began using AWS Global Accelerator. “Lever helps companies attract, source, and hire talent, and thousands of recruiters depend on our product daily,” says Eric Hwang, staff software engineer at Lever. “Simply by enabling AWS Global Accelerator, one multinational customer saw a 51.2 percent reduction in mean end-to-end app load times, week over week.”

Other Lever customers in Asia and Europe have also seen 50 percent load-time reductions when running Lever software. “Our global customers noticed the performance difference right after we enabled AWS Global Accelerator,” remarks O’Leary. “The application loaded faster, and the customers saw less latency in the real-time collaborative features. Overall, customers reported a smoother, more reliable experience.”

As a result, Lever customers can move job applications through the system faster. “Our customers receive thousands of job applications through our software every day, so being able to move those applications through different stages quickly is critical,” says O’Leary. “Recruiting is a very competitive industry, with many companies vying for the same pool of candidates. If our customers can’t access updated information on each person quickly enough, they could lose that candidate to another company. Using AWS Global Accelerator ensures that we get the best performance and lowest latency for our software, so our customers don’t lose out on hiring the candidates they want to hire.”

Lever also benefits from the agility of the AWS Cloud, which gives the company’s developers more time to focus on creating software features and enhancements. “We only have three people on my team, and we want to do project work instead of troubleshooting and managing infrastructure,” says O’Leary. “By relying on AWS, we are able to rapidly spin up proof-of-concept environments to test new tooling in hours versus the days or weeks it would take in a data center.” As an example, Lever is currently building new reporting features to meet customer demand for data analytics. “We can quickly build those tools and share them with users to get instant feedback,” states O’Leary. “Along with the performance improvements we’re seeing with AWS Global Accelerator, this is another example of how AWS is helping us better serve our customers.”

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/global-accelerator.