Pruffi's recruiting potential for social media through Windows Azure

Editorial Staff Note: Today this article, written by Pruffi founder Alena Vladimirskaya and Pruffi CTO Alexander Ivanov, describes how the company uses Windows Azure to support its pruffi Graph and Pruffi Friends social media Services.

Pruffi is committed to developing WEB and mobile applications that leverage social media capabilities to help job seekers find suitable jobs, while helping hiring managers, HR commissioners, and recruiters find qualified candidates. Pruffi is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, founded in 2009. The company's newest products are pruffi Graph and Pruffi Friends.

Pruffi Graph

In 2012, we released Pruffi Graph, a browser-based application hosted by Windows Azure. Pruffi Graph generates social networking profiles for job seekers to help job seekers find the companies with the highest probability of job success based on their training, experience, interests and activities.

Pruffi Graph captures the social networking activity of the candidate and analyzes these social networking activities according to 17 parameters to generate personal data. Generate aggregated employee profiles for companies with vacancies, and match candidates with all 17 parameters to determine the suitability of candidates and positions. Pruffi Graph collects and analyzes social network data using a custom algorithm that runs on the Windows Azure worker role cluster.

We use the distributed switched Azure cloud infrastructure to quickly process user queries from any location in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and other CIS countries, and to respond to unbalanced user requests from different time zones. For example, by redistributing the request to a Windows Azure instance in a neighboring region, we reduced the time required to process Pruffi Graph personal data by nearly two-thirds.

To adapt Pruffi Graph to the cloud infrastructure, we did make some architectural changes and partially rewritten some of the application's components. But these changes are easy and fast, and enhance the stability of Pruffi Graph. We use ASP.net to write applications and run background processing and WEB interfaces with multi-tenant Windows Azure Web role and worker role. User data is stored in a single tenant instance of Windows Azure SQL database, and we use the Windows Azure Table Service and the Blob service to store diagnostic and application data, such as logging and uploading data.

As a start-up, we need to avoid large sums of money and minimize long-term risk, which was initially the two points that attracted us to Windows Azure. We finally took part in the Microsoft BizSpark program, which enabled us to take advantage of the reliability, scalability, and affordability of Windows Azure, and to forge a closer relationship with Microsoft, Cooperation in technical knowledge to joint marketing to all aspects of public relations.