Streamlining Global Talent Management

Published: October 2025
Client Name: Condé Nast, Vogue
Industry: Media, fashion

Background

Condé Nast is a global media company renowned for iconic brands such as Vogue, GQ, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. Operating in over 30 markets worldwide, the company combines award-winning journalism and storytelling with cutting-edge digital innovation to engage audiences across print, video, and interactive platforms.

The Open Calls project is a talent management platform designed for Condé Nast to modernise and centralise how the company manages casting opportunities and applicant submissions. The platform enables editors, producers, and talent managers to create, manage, and review casting calls while seamlessly integrating with Condé Nast’s broader content ecosystem and its newly launched User Generated Content (UGC) platform.

Challenges

Condé Nast’s distributed data architecture posed significant technical and operational complexity.

• The system operated without direct database ownership, relying on an event-driven architecture using AWS EventBridge to synchronise data across multiple services. Maintaining data integrity and quality during real-time replication was critical to the platform’s success.

• The platform had to integrate with a complex mesh of internal Condé Nast services, demanding resilient state management, secure authentication handling and graceful degradation across service boundaries.

Compliance and consistency added further layers of challenge — ensuring GDPR alignment, maintaining consistent user experiences, and managing reliable stage progression in dynamic talent workflows all required strong observability, rollback mechanisms, and careful handling of eventual consistency.

Solution

Irysan partnered with Condé Nast to design and implement a scalable, event-driven platform capable of handling large volumes of data and interactions across multiple business units.

Key aspects of the solution included:

• Event-driven synchronisation via AWS EventBridge to ensure data consistency and responsiveness across distributed systems.

• Resilient service integrations designed with robust state management and graceful degradation to handle dependency failures without disrupting user experience.

• Secure, compliant architecture aligned with GDPR requirements and supporting clear audit trails for all applicant data.

• Enhanced observability and monitoring pipelines to provide real-time visibility into data flows, user activity and system health.

Through a close collaboration with Condé Nast’s internal teams, the platform was engineered for performance, resilience, and long-term scalability, supporting both editorial and commercial casting operations worldwide.

Benefits & Results

The Open Calls platform completely transformed how Condé Nast manages talent discovery and selection, resulting in a number of business and operational benefits:

• Automation and integrated workflows reduced time from casting announcement to final selection by up to 60%. 

• Enhanced applicant experience led to higher-quality submissions and more reliable decision-making data.

• Automated processes decreased administrative overhead and human error by up to 80%.

• The system also enabled scalability during major campaigns when the system saw higher volumes of submission without performance degradation.
  
  And finally, streamlined workflows and reduced dependency on manual review processes translated into measurable operational cost efficiencies.