Replacing a Legacy Job Board Iframe with a Custom WordPress Plugin
A careers page stuck in 2015
The client’s job listings were buried inside an outdated third-party iframe — hard to use on mobile, impossible to brand, and completely invisible to Google Analytics. Candidates were dropping off before they ever hit apply.
- Iframe rendered the ATS’s default UI — no brand control, no styling flexibility
- Poor mobile experience — the iframe did not adapt to smaller screens
- Zero analytics visibility — job views, apply clicks, and shares were untrackable
- Stale listings visible to candidates — no filtering for active-only positions
A native, API-driven job board
We designed and built a custom WordPress shortcode plugin that replaces the iframe entirely — pulling live job data directly from PCRecruiter’s REST API, caching it server-side, and rendering a fully branded two-column job board inside the existing WordPress page.
“700 views and 238 applications in a single month — and both still climbing month over month. That’s not an iframe doing that. That’s a board candidates actually want to use.”
We took an iterative approach — building and testing each layer in staging before any production deployment, with careful coordination between the WordPress environment, Cloudflare CDN, and PCRecruiter’s API authentication requirements.
What we built
Eight interconnected feature sets, each tested independently before integration.
Measured in the latest reporting period
Technologies used
Built on the client’s existing WordPress stack — no new infrastructure, no new SaaS dependencies.
What we learned
Every ATS has its own quirks. PCRecruiter’s apply flow depends on a hidden iframe being present on the landing page to initialize the session — a constraint that isn’t documented anywhere and took significant debugging to uncover. Understanding the full apply URL architecture before writing a single line of code would have saved multiple sessions.
The other takeaway: managed WordPress hosting (WordPress.com WP Cloud) is more restrictive than it sounds. No cPanel, no SFTP, no File Manager, no control over managed plugin auto-updates. Jetpack backups are your only safety net. If you’re building anything custom at this level, advocate early for a hosting environment that gives you proper access.
“Verify technical constraints before building anything. An assumption about what’s achievable can send a project in the wrong direction fast.”
