Johannesburg, 25 Apr 2005
The Working Earth, an e-recruitment provider, has streamlined its processes with the implementation of an application developed by Progress partner Telesis Interactive, a company that delivers Web-enabled products and services to a diverse range of businesses via the Internet.
As an online automated electronic screening facility, The Working Earth publishes recruitment advertisements on behalf of its clients and handles all responses, providing the clients with a final shortlist of suitable candidates. The company wanted to implement a solution that would fully automate all its processes via the Internet.
"Applicants used to submit their CVs via e-mail or fax, and handling the huge volumes of responses in a professional and fair manner, and in accordance with labour legislation, was a costly and time-consuming exercise," says Anne-Marie Stanisavljevic, marketing director of The Working Earth. "What we wanted was a technology-based solution that would enable us to leverage the power of the Internet to handle responses and create shortlists for our clients.
"Telesis`s solution has streamlined our workload and made the recruitment process entirely paperless, both for us and the clients we represent. A thousand applications for one advertised position is not unusual; the solution has reduced our turnaround time and made our volumes far more manageable."
Using the Web as its medium, Telesis Interactive specialises in technologies and services which lower the cost of delivering applications and communication tools. As a Progress development house Telesis developed a solution for The Working Earth using Progress`s WebSpeed, an environment for developing and deploying highly scalable, Web-based Internet transaction processing (ITP) applications, which support real-time data access and data management.
"Our brief was to automate The Working Earth`s response handling and screening processes via the Net," says Andrew Glenister, project manager at Telesis Interactive. "WebSpeed was the obvious choice in terms of the ease and speed of development the environment offers." Glenister says database speed and stability were major considerations for Telesis as The Working Earth has over 84 000 registered users. "The site can have, thousands of users log in. We knew Progress would provide The Working Earth with the stability required to support that many users."
Job seekers who register with The Working Earth are required to submit a standard online r'esum'e. To apply for a specific position, they have to work through a series of questionnaires which screen applicants to determine whether they are suitable for the position in terms of their qualifications and experience. The initial screening process works on a multiple-choice basis and screens out applicants who are immediately unsuitable. If, for example, the position requires a driver`s licence and the applicant does not have one, they are immediately notified and the application process terminated.
Once applicants have successfully completed this initial process, they are required to answer a series of random, competency-based questions. At the end of this process, their scores are compared to national tables and graded according to those. The third part of the process enables candidates to answer a range of open-ended questions like "Why would you like to work at this company?", or "What has motivated you to apply for this position?", all of which give candidates the opportunity to sell themselves to the client.
Stanisavljevic says the biggest benefit of the Telesis solution is the fact that it can take over 1 000 applications for a position and produce a shortlist of the top 20 eligible candidates. "We can also create shortlists based on race and gender, which is an important factor given the employment equity drive of most major employers."
In terms of good corporate image, all job applicants should receive a response from the company they have applied to, regardless of whether they are accepted or rejected as potential candidates. With the solution developed for The Working Earth, all applicants automatically receive an e-mail informing them of whether or not they have made the shortlist. "This is another major advantage for us and our clients, in terms of saving us time while ensuring that we meet legal requirements," says Stanisavljevic.
The company has over 60 clients, including the South African Revenue Service (SARS), Sun International, Nedbank, Liberty Life and Avroy Shlain Cosmetics. The screening processes are tailored according to the requirements of each client, some of whom may have more stringent criteria than others. The Working Earth can provide URL-based branded versions of its website to clients to integrate with their intranet or their Web site.
"Some clients have strict rules about the look and feel of their career section," says Stanisavljevic. "Our ability to offer them branded Web sites is a major differentiator for us, and it gives clients the ability to advertise their positions internally as well, while providing internal applicants with a sense of familiarity."
The application has proved to be so successful that Telesis recently duplicated it and is hosting it under a separate URL for The Working Earth`s Australian site.
"Progress WebSpeed is the best integrated development environment for building and deploying highly scalable, e-business applications that process large volumes of transactions like The Working Earth`s," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. "WebSpeed has proved itself time and again in several different market sectors in terms of its high throughput, sub-second transaction times, and dynamic load balancing, all of which provide the scalability to handle thousands of simultaneous users."
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