Case Study
A ChatGPT-style candidate search inside a staffing agency's WordPress site
A staffing agency wanted a better way for employers to find candidates than scrolling through endless filters. I added a ChatGPT-style search widget to their WordPress site: employers type what they want in plain language and instantly see matching candidates.
The agency uses it as a marketing tool - visitors search candidates, the agency captures leads. Because it looks like ChatGPT rather than an annoying chatbot pop-up, people actually trust it and use it. Client feedback: "This is really cool. Seems to load a lot faster than ChatGPT."
Full walkthrough
I connected ChatGPT to a WordPress website, so the site now has the same kind of experience you get in ChatGPT, but in the branding of the website. On top of that, you can search the candidate database of a staffing agency just by typing what you want, instead of clicking through filters. In this video I explain the background of the project and show a little of what's under the hood.
Why a ChatGPT-style interface works
Almost everyone knows ChatGPT, from consumers to enterprises. Many people also know Perplexity, which looks roughly similar, and a whole set of other products like Google Gemini. They all have this chat box, and people recognize it and have good associations with it, because the experience of using them is genuinely good.
My client runs a staffing agency and wanted to integrate that same chat experience into his WordPress site - specifically as a marketing tool. So instead of connecting the entire pool of candidates, we used a shortlist of about 200 candidates and made the chat integration public, so any website visitor can come and search.
The live demo
When I type something like "find candidates with project management experience," it answers in natural language. That's a much more natural way to interact than traditional search filters. In this case it's a marketing tool, so a visitor lands on the site, sees the recruitment agency's branding, and can find real people from the client's database. There are no contact details exposed - the thing I blurred is a link to the candidate's video interview, and each result has a page with information about that candidate.
Under the hood in WordPress
It was very easy to install - it's essentially a WordPress plugin you drag and drop into the site. In the side panel you get the plugin settings. As you scroll down there's a prompt, the same idea as what you type into ChatGPT when you want to ask something, except here we have a predefined prompt that instructs it to search candidates. Then there are the conversation settings and the candidate database - in this case a shortlisted pool of 217 candidates that the chat searches through.
Why this isn't a chatbot
I keep seeing more websites move toward this free-text, conversational search. And it's important that this is not a chatbot. It's very different from those annoying pop-ups in the corner. People have a bad association with that little circle in the corner - it usually feels like an annoying thing that doesn't help. But when people see an interface that looks like ChatGPT, they have good associations, because ChatGPT is genuinely useful and can help with almost anything. That difference in perception is a big part of why this works.