Application notifications – debugging email deliverability
One of the most common support requests we receive is when applications are not being delivered back to your job posting service. In this article, I will explain how applications are tracked back to your multi-posting service, why this might not work and some steps you can take a find issues to resolve this.
Before reading further, it is important to understand how applicant tracking works, when using the applicant tracking email address.
What does JobRelay do when a candidate applies?
The answer here is very simple – not a lot!! Where jobs are sent through the JobRelay system to your website, this is not case for candidate applications. These go directly from your website, to the multi-posting service, using the applicant tracking email address outlined above.
It is your website that is sending the emails to the applicant tracking address, not the JobRelay service.
How do I debug email deliverability?
Unfortunately email is very unreliable. An email is the equivalent of putting your message in an envelope and posting it through the letter box. You never really know whether it ended up at its destination. More importantly there is no indication that the deliver failed.
Install a WordPress email logging plugin
The only part of this you can control, is whether or not your website actually passed the email across to your web server to send. To check whether this has been done, and to check whether the correct email headers (remember the From or Reply-To headers I mentioned earlier?) you can install an email logging plugin.
My favourite plugin for this is the WP Email Logging plugin by Wysija. This will log every email that was marked for delivery from your site, and it will show you who the To, From, Reply-To address were as well as the email body and attachments.
Using the WP Job Manager plugin with the Applications Add-on?
If you are using the WP Job Manager Applications Add-on, the JobRelay WP Connector plugin should automatically ensure the correct email notification is delivered to the tracking address with the correct email headers.
If this is not happening, check the emails are being triggered (see above for email debugging) and if they are, please get in touch for assistance.