( 01 — The brief )
Two networks, one identity.
The job boards are transactional and anonymous; the professional networks have identity but bury the useful parts behind paywalls. The client’s bet was that these aren’t two products at all: your CV and your network are the same object, seen from two angles. So Zievy keeps one profile — one write path, two views — rendered as a document on the Jobs side and a social presence on the Network side. Even the name plays along: Zievy is a play on “C.V.”
— The client, in every case on these pages, was us. We are a demanding client.
( 02 — The craft )
The switch is the brand.
The signature interaction is the Flip: a single control in the header — one tap, or the backtick key — that turns the whole product over. Each side remembers exactly where you left it, and the interface re-dresses itself as you cross: teal for Jobs, violet for Network, the same two colours that blend in the wordmark. The design intent, verbatim from the framework: the switch should be as recognisable to Zievy as the swipe is to Tinder.
The homepage argued with itself into shape — from an Indeed-simple search box, to pitching both sides, to a headline that shed its own sub-line. The philosophy that won: earn the click. The jobs page lists nothing until you actually search, the logged-out homepage pitches rather than pre-loads, and the hero says everything it needs in seven words: “Find jobs. Post jobs. Grow your network.”
One profile. Two faces. One flip.
( 03 — The engine )
An honest jobs machine.
Direct adverts play by house rules: employers are verified before they can post, and every native advert must state its salary range. The wider inventory is imported from the big applicant-tracking systems’ public feeds, with per-source health monitoring and automatic expiry — because, as the code comment puts it, stale listings burn trust. And the salary guide is built from Zievy’s own live adverts — real percentiles with the sample counts shown, and, in its own words, never scraped from anyone.
Under the surface: weighted full-text search in plain Postgres, autocomplete that’s race-safe and still works with JavaScript off, forward-only SQL migrations each wrapped in its own transaction, and a deploy that’s a single git push — with the database migrated before the new code is allowed to serve.
( 04 — Foundations )
Free where others charge.
The analytics that professional networks famously paywall are simply given away: profile views, search appearances, CV downloads, follower growth, and for employers a full advert funnel — impressions to views to applications. Even the who-viewed-you list is simply included — named where viewers are signed in, honestly counted where they aren’t — rather than dangled as bait for an upgrade. Behind it, events are append-only and every dashboard reads pre-computed rollups, so the numbers are cheap to serve and hard to distort.
The quieter foundations follow the house pattern: in-house sign-in with properly hashed credentials and server-side sessions, a news rail where “reading happens at the source; the conversation happens here” — and, for a break between opportunities, an arcade of twenty-three games from WugZo, one William Arby platform waving to another. Deeper identity verification and paid reach are next on the roadmap — chosen, not guessed.
“Analytics are free on Zievy” — the paywall is the other lot’s business model.
( In brief )
- Identity
- One profile, two faces
- Salary on direct adverts
- Required
- Analytics
- Free, for everyone
- The flip
- One tap (or a backtick)