Recruiting Industry

The Recruiting Industry section contains an in-depth business and technology analysis with emphasis on the use of the Internet. It establishes the likelihood of continued need for vigorous recruiting by quoting outside sources vis-a-vis the strength of the economy and the projected need for workforce expansion. It also presents a list of several coincidental factors that contributed to the slowdown of the early 2000s to show how many things "had to go wrong" to create the slowdown.

Then, the section categorizes the types of systems/services available for recruiting, gives a summary of several products that cover a wide range of target customer sizes, and goes into the analysis of the problems that exists with many systems. The problems include a lack of standardization (e.g. in application information), separation of job posting from applicant tracking, poor skills matching (including the weaknesses associated with using "keywords"), poor matching on other requirements (such as geographical locations and salary), poor facilities for establishing communications and lack of centralization. Surveys conducted by a major human resources magazine show that HR professionals feel recruiting is difficult and rate it a major challenge. They also believe that a "war for talent" is underway. In an original survey of jobhunters, they were asked to assign letter grades to how well existing job sites matched candidates to jobs and facilitated communications between candidates and recruiters/hiring managers. On a scale with "A" = 4, the grade point average of their responses was 1.875 for matching and 1.556 for communications. These averages are both in the "D" range.

The section concludes by enumerating a list of desirable capabilities for an Internet-based recruiting system. The list is a combination of facilities that already exist in certain existing sites augmented by facilities that we believe will provide an improvement. The fact that many of the capabilities already exist is not a deterrent to our efforts. There are still a large number of job sites that do not provide all of these capabilities and the job sites are not "tied together" to support efficient recruiting and jobhunting.

Our Proposed System and its Marketing

In Our Proposed System we examine the list of desirable capabilities that resulted from our study above, select the ones that will be supported in the first version of our proposed system and discuss the features that will implement these capabilities. Then we show that the selected features are sufficient to provide an excellent recruiting environment. Finally, we summarize the state of the project including the current status of the Guided Tour which provides samples of the user interfaces of our proposed system and the Design Document which gives a functional description of the proposed system and the design of its database.

We have selected a functionality that is fully adequate to support recruiting/jobhunting without running up excessive development costs. Features which implement each of the following capabilities are addressed in detail in the System Features discussion.

The user interfaces are intuitive and easy to learn. Skills matching between candidates and job orders (i.e., requisitions) is based upon skill levels, NOT just keywords, in order to achieve the greatest possible accuracy and user efficiency. In addition to being able to perform job order searches, the candidate is automatically informed when a new job that is a good match for his/her skills enters the system. Similarly, an organization can both search for candidates and receive automatic notification when a new candidate that is a good match for one of its job orders enters the system. Recruiters and hiring managers working on a job order are automatically notified of each other's actions. The hiring manager is always "in the loop" to provide business/technical expertise when needed. There are special features for agencies that allow them to associate their clients with job orders and track submission of candidates to clients.

The Sufficiency of the Features discussion presents two sets of guidelines from outside authorities vis-a-vis setting up a recruiting program and then discusses how the proposed JobBank system will allow a user organization to achieve all the guidelines. This gives us added assurance that the capabilities of the proposed system are sufficient in its first released version.

Next, the State of the Project considers the current status of the Guided Tour, the Design Document and this Business Plan. The Guided Tour contains over 40 sample screens and it is organized into a demo in the sense that multiple versions of certain screens are given that show how the screen can change over time. The Design Document contains over 200 pages devoted to a detailed functional definition of the JobBank system and to providing supporting information. Topics covered in the Design Document include the modeling of skills information (skills, skill sets, job categories and disciplines) and geographical locations (grouped by inclusion), recruiting and jobhunting functions, a complete entity-relationship data model expressed in terms of tables, referential integrity and, finally, a development team and schedule. The Guided Tour and Design Document will greatly reduce the time-to-market that might be expected for a product as large as JobBank.

The Marketing the Product Line section then presents the entire product line and discusses its promotion, pricing and distribution. The section also deals with the issues of customer retention and market growth. The Products and Services consist of the Web site and applicant tracking software, the resume distribution service provided by the vendor candidate database, training and consulting, examinations, and configuration data (such as "packs" of skills and geographical information).

The Promotion and Distribution discussion then deals with literature and additional materials that can be used in the promotional process. It also discusses methods by which the vendor can "get out the word" about the product line through free or inexpensive advertising. These methods include popularizing the vendor's own Web site, buying sponsored links, contacting existing customers and starting an affiliates program. It will also be possible to provide cost-effective distribution of the products. Compact disks are inexpensive to produce and may contain online documentation. A duplication fee can be charged to those customers who prefer hardcopy documentation. Also, smaller distributions, such as supplying "packs", can be done by download from the vendor's Web site.

The document continues with discussions of Pricing, Customer Retention and Market Growth. Pricing is a vital issue in the marketing of any product line. Our pricing philosophy is aimed at providing an excellent product at a reasonable cost. In addition to controlling promotional and distribution cost, we expect that the efficient development of the software by starting with a well-defined design will also limit costs. All of the careful study and design work outlined above was aimed at producing a system with a lot of popular appeal; this will also keep the price down by allowing the vendor to sell a large number of licenses. The vendor will charge the customer according to the customer's usage of the software so the system will be practical for a large number of small customers. The charge to a candidate to appear in the vendor's candidate database will be no greater than the cost of the popular resume distribution services.

Once the system has attracted customers, the next goal is customer retention and the key issue there is satisfaction. If people feel they are receiving an excellent product and support at a reasonable price, and they continue to have recruiting needs, they will stay. Excellent support involves email and telephone help, updates to products, fair and accurate billing and newsletters. Product promotion and customer retention will be two major factors in market Growth during the first few years because the vendor will seek to gain larger and larger market share. The overall market size is also expected to increase because of general economic growth.

Operations, Management and Finances

The topic of Operations is broken down into daily operations and long-term milestones, and the project staff is broken down into the following groups: software, marketing, sales, customer services and human resources. On a daily basis, the software group is responsible for both software development and maintenance. The marketing group will have to be highly innovative in their own right. In addition to providing the "bang for the buck" in terms of promotions, they will help the software group understand user needs and prepare promotional literature, demos, etc. The sales group will be responsible for interacting with potential customers and making presentations while the customer services group will help existing customers with their problems and report "bugs" to the software group. The amount of human resources support that will be required for the project will vary with time and it will be the greatest during hiring periods.

The Long-Term Milestones we have established at this stage follow our development and marketing strategy; groups are assigned relevant tasks that support the achievement of each milestone. We briefly summarize the milestones next. The sequence has been designed so that funding can determine staff size and, consequently, the amount of time required to achieve each milestone.

In order for the project to succeed, the Management Team must function as a closely-knit group in which each member has an understanding of how the groups should work together. The management for the Software side is divided among two individuals with different, but interrelated, specialties. A Designer/Quality Assurance Engineer will maintain the current state of the design and be responsible for testing. An Architect will choose the hardware and software architecture for the system. Both will be responsible for portions of the coding effort and for directing the other developers.

All of the Business managers will need to know the products well. The marketing manager will be the "managers' manager" of the business side. He/she will be in charge of developing strategies for promoting the product line and the sales manager will have part of the responsibility of implementing those strategies. The sales and customer service managers will make sure that their groups have all the resources they need to perform their duties.

The Finances section discusses the balance between Income and Expenses. Income will be generated by all items in the product line. Of course, licensing of the Web site and applicant tracking software can be expected to produce the first and largest income. During the early marketing of the products, we expect to limit spending so that it is largely covered by re-investment of income. Expenses will include personnel, office space, equipment, third party software, advertising, expert help, taxes, legal fees, loan payments and any other miscellaneous expenses. Our very general profitability projections are closely tied to the achievements of the operational milestones considered above.

SWOT Summary

The Business Plan concludes with a SWOT Analysis that begins together information found in many different places in the document. First, we consider the major Strengths of our proposal. The system that we describe provides improvements over the current state of Internet recruiting. These improvements were suggested by a thorough study of how the Internet is used for recruiting and jobhunting today. In addition, the features that we have selected have been combined into a coordinated system design. We have also devised a comprehensive marketing strategy built around inexpensive promotion/distribution and a graduated pricing model. This strategy will make our products affordable to a large number of smaller organizations. The end result is a fresh approach that will stand out among the competition.

These strong points act to offset a number of Weaknesses. The first weakness is that the system is not part of any complete human resources suite. This characteristic is not unusual among systems that are targeted toward smaller organizations. Further, vendors that provide complete suites often find that customers only want to select a few modules. The product line is likely to be new to the vendor that develops it, so there will be a significant learning curve. Also, the project will be under strong time pressure during the initial development phase because it will not be producing any revenue. Next, we consider some aspects of the system design. Several data elements are maintained as simple, free-form text fields. This approach reduces development cost but may not provide as much structure as some customers would like. Currently, there has been no technical design work done on the facilities for accessing the vendor candidate database, maintenance of information for billing purposes, online testing, publicity mailings and summary reports. Finally, the architectural decisions have been postponed at this time.

We have studied Opportunities in some detail. The economy has become more diverse and hiring trends are expected to remain strong. Staffing is regarded as one of the two major challenges of human resources departments. Finally, there are a large number of job sites and applicant tracking systems and we have documented problems with them and devised solutions. This establishes the potential market for our proposed product line.

We believe that our system's strengths and the opportunities available in the recruiting world offset any Threats that exist, and we have considered the possible threats and presented arguments to show that their dangers are minimal. These threats include the return of hiring hibernation, software project failure, the possibility of a competitor taking over the market, and the fear that customers that use existing products may not switch to our products.