On a mission to help young people make their futures a success, Wizbii is a digital service that connects them to jobs, internships, scholarships, and more. Central to the company's mission is a multilingual search experience that scales and adapts to user needs. 

Wizbii makes dreams a reality by guiding young people in France, the rest of multilingual Europe and beyond through different Wizbii branded online portals designed to help 16- to 30-year-olds enter the workforce. The websites allow them to search for jobs and recruitment events, assemble academic financial aid offers, and learn about tailored insurance products and drive test information.

 Based in France, with offices in Grenoble, Paris, and Pau in the southwest of the country, the Wizbii sites have a global reach and are used by recruiters and job seekers throughout Europe, Asia and America. 

In addition to Wizbii's business-to-consumer (B2C) sites, the company also operates a business-to-business (B2B) division that develops websites and platforms for banks and governments targeted to the needs of this younger demographic. 

An Algolia customer since 2018, Wizbii, with its 11 million users, is on its way to becoming an international and multilingual resource for young people in key markets in Europe and the rest of the world.

Improving user experience

At Wizbii, search is at the heart of the user experience. User expectations are high, and they simply won't stick around if the technology doesn't deliver meaningful results quickly. 

"The thing that's changed the most from a decade ago is the customer," points out Rémi Alvado, Wizbii's CTO. "Customers are no longer willing to accept a slow user experience or a site that isn't visually appealing. If the website isn't great, delivers results or works as promised, users will switch over to something else." 

Before 2018, the Wizbii team had been using Elasticsearch with lackluster results. Optimizing search functionality across multiple languages was critically important, but search results were slow, and relevancy was never particularly good. 

For the technical team, using Elasticsearch to ensure multilingual search functionality was not an easy or straightforward process, it required a dedicated group of employees to update and maintain, putting a strain on Wizbii's limited start-up budget. 

Wizbii had already opened lines of communication with Algolia in 2015 and was convinced of the technology's effectiveness. In 2017, following a round of new funding, Rémi Alvado and his team made their move and implemented Algolia Search. They haven't looked back since. 

"Wizbii Money is a great example," according to Rémi Alvado. "It is a portal for student financial aid. Things had been moving pretty slowly before Algolia. We didn't have traction with users or advertisers. A couple of weeks after we installed Algolia Search, the site exploded with traffic. It was a dramatic shift."

Fast and relevant multilingual search

Now with more than 300,000 job offers on the platform at any given moment, and new offers continuously coming in, indexing and making this information searchable for users is critical. Search must operate with a level of precision and speed that drives traffic and meets users' needs. 

Since 2018, the Algolia implementation significantly improved the speed and relevancy of search results on Wizbii's B2C and B2B projects. Algolia's search technology has been able to support the multiple languages used on the Wizbii sites and provide synonym capabilities that span globally across the platform improving the overall user experience.

The multilingual search functionality has been a boon to users and developers alike. Unlike the earlier search technology, Algolia's time to implement changes and updates is fast – typically taking only one or two days for the back end and only a couple of weeks to update and configure Wizbii's proprietary front-end APIs. 

Algolia features such Facets & Filters and indexing with Search have been easy to put in place and have been implemented across the company. The technology is available for public search, used by job seekers, letting them save searches and enabling them to send emails based on saved searches, for example.

For Rémi Alvado and his team at Wizbii, Algolia is “simply a great product.” 

Also used for back-office functionality, it allows Wizbii employees to refine and build databases for the platform. As Rémi Alvado notes, "Everyone at Wizbii uses Algolia Search. It is much easier and more convenient than other solutions. It is easy to configure technically and delivers quality search results that are meaningful to our users and critical for our business". 

Offering a straightforward, easy to use API with excellent documentation and support, Algolia helps free up valuable developer resources. It gives them time to work on new and innovative solutions for Wizbii's business customers, while the excellent search capabilities help drive traffic and improve the overall quality of service offerings to Wizbii's young multilingual target audience.