A carefully chosen collection of recruiting concepts has matured into a detailed system design and a plan for developing and marketing that system. First, we have a Guided Tour that presents sample screens that introduce the reader to the features of the proposed system. Next, we have prepared a highly detailed, largely implementation-independent Design Document that provides a functional description of the recruiting and jobhunting facilities of the system, an entity-relationship data model with a relational implementation, an aggressive development schedule and much more. Finally, this Business Plan discusses the need for improvement in Internet recruiting and jobhunting processes, explains why our proposed system will provide this improvement, presents survey results from a popular human resources magazine and our own Web site regarding the state of acceptance of recruiting/jobhunting technology, examines four existing recruiting solutions and presents development and marketing strategies for the proposed system.

Guided Tour

The Guided Tour contains an extensive collection of screens that will exist in the completed system. The Tour demonstrates how the system will be used by an end employer (which we call a client of the system), by a recruiting/placement agency on behalf of its agency client organizations and by individual candidates. It also summarizes how the provider of an installation prepares that installation for use and how it maintains it. The Tour provides the quickest possible introduction to the details of the use of the proposed system.

The Tour window consists of two frames. The upper frame displays representations of the actual screens that the users of the proposed system will see as well as a few additional informative screens. The lower frame contains a tour guide that allows the reader to choose which screen to display in the upper frame, explains the purpose of each screen, and tells how the user moves from one screen to another while working. The Tour looks similar to a demo in the sense that it allows the reader to see how screens change as entities are added and actions are performed. There are a total of over 40 screens in the Tour, not counting multiple versions of the same screen.

Design Document

The Design Document provides over 200 pages of detailed information essential to the efficient development of the system that we propose. The Design is implementation-independent, except for the fact that it provides a relational representation of its entity-relationship data model. The document is intended to provide an early introduction to the recruiting and jobhunting functions that will be available.

Next, we will consider the sequence of topics in the document. First, there is a goals section which outlines the primary features of the system which we propose to develop. Next the document defines skills and skill levels and explains the grouping of skills into skill sets, the inclusion of skill sets in job categories and the grouping of job categories into disciplines. Then it discusses geographical locations and how they are grouped into hierarchies by inclusion. The document next discusses the matching between a job and a candidate profile based on skill information and on other requirements such as geographical location(s), etc. (A client job order represents a job(s) and an association between an agency client and an agency job order represents a job(s).)

The section on recruiting and jobhunting functions briefly describes how the provider enters new clients and agencies into the system. Then the section provides detailed functional descriptions of the many screens that support recruiting and jobhunting. The document describes the content of each screen along with explaining the operations that can be performed in each screen. Parallelism between the many different screens is exploited to simplify the design of the user interfaces and their functional definition. The creation of job orders and candidate profiles, searching, status tracking and automatic email generation are discussed in detail. Also, the association of agency clients with agency job orders and the tracking of submissions of candidates to agency clients are explained. Similarities between the activities of clients, agencies and candidates are identified and used to make the interfaces as consistent as possible. The situations that cause the user to receive an error or warning screen are given in detail. (The document does not describe the exact format of screens. Instead, samples of all the system's major recruiting and jobhunting screens are provided in the Guided Tour.)

A complete persistent, entity-relationship data model follows. The document describes how the model may be implemented using a relational DBMS. There are over 40 tables in the database. A collection of entity-relationship diagrams that represent the database design are given; they provide a visual introduction to the database and may also be used as a quick reference. The discussion of the data model concludes with a section on the deletion of objects, including an enumeration of the types of delete verifications required. Referential integrity issues are considered in detail, particularly as they relate to deletions and to certain modifications. Then the document interprets the functions of the system in terms of the data model and explains how they must be implemented.

The definition of the system is completed by sections on background processes, the conventions for unique identifiers and additional responsibilities of the system provider. Next, the document suggests a development team and an aggressive schedule with milestones for the implementation for the first release of the system. Finally, a section presents an enumeration of the limitations of the document itself, many of them related to the implementation-independence of the system definition.

Business Plan

This Business Plan is a "living, breathing" document that will certainly be expanded, clarified and altered during the development of the product line. The current plan is strongest in the areas of the analysis of the Internet recruiting industry and the definition of the Web site and applicant tracking software. The document presents a financial plan that is very flexible. In particular, the plan is based on the assumptions that there will be a period in which the products produce no income (the initial software development) and that re-investment of early income will power promotion of the product line.