On the morning of Wednesday 19 February 2020 we discovered through a significant number of candidate queries that there seemed to be a problem with the "Save Progress" button within the application form.
What we did:
- We immediately raised a critical case with our software providers to investigate the issue;
- The myjobscotland team then over the next day and a half thoroughly tested multiple scenarios that had been brought to our attention by candidates, raising an additional case in the process;
- By Thursday evening we had enough information to pass on our findings as to our suspected problem with the system;
- This was subsequently traced back to a patch which was run by the suppliers on Wednesday morning and only this morning (Friday 21) after a call with the supplier, web developer and ourselves were we able to fully understand the problem.
What has happened:
- The "Reuse Previous Application" button had disappeared from the application form but was still performing that function when candidates were applying for jobs, as if it had been pressed;
- The result of this was that whilst the save button was working correctly, any candidate starting a new application or continuing from a saved application was having their most recently saved information on their application form immediately overwritten, without any warning with older application information.
What will happen next:
This is not something that was communicated with us that would be happening, nor would we have agreed to it, our supplier have now confirmed that a resolution has been found but will need to be built and applied as a fix.
RESOLVED:
A fix was applied to the website on the evening of Monday 24 February 2020. Following candidate feedback we were able to make an improvement as part of this fix whereby the "Reuse" button has been removed and new applications will now pre-populate automatically without the need to use the button. If continuing from a saved application this will not be overwritten with an old document as was happening last week.
We truly apologise for this inconvenience which is out of our control but the support team are doing all they can to make sure this is fixed and something like this doesn't occur again.