CASE STUDY: Smith & Wilson Executive Placements Ltd.
CASE STUDY: Smith & Wilson Executive Placements Ltd.
Smith & Wilson Executive Placements Ltd (SWEP) is an organisation which tries to match people seeking new job opportunities with companies offering employment prospects. SWEP have several offices in major cities in the Midlands and North-East. Many companies prefer not to advertise vacancies themselves, instead using an agency for the major part of their recruitment. Thus such agencies as SWEP place advertisements in the most appropriate journals. Each advertisement includes details of one or more jobs. Where a number of jobs are listed in a single advertisement, the vacancies are with a range of companies, rather than each advertisement listing the opportunities available with a single company.
SWEP operates in a variety of ways:
Companies register with SWEP, notify them of job vacancies and supply a job description for each. Each job description is analysed and the key requirements, such as preferred age range of applicant, skill and experience requirements will be coded. For example, a particular experience code might imply no experience, two years experience, or five years experience as a minimum requisite for a particular vacancy. SWEP records the name of a contact from the company and their telephone number for each job vacancy. This is useful when applicants request further information about a particular job. Clearly many vacancies in a company may have the same contact. Each company is identified by an account number.
Each job vacancy is allocated a unique job number. There are two types of job vacancy that the SWEP accepts, routine and executive. For each executive level vacancy a company will hire SWEP to advertise the vacancy, to vet the applications, prepare a short list of candidates, to do the first interview of those candidates and finally to organise the selection interviews with the company. For this SWEP negotiates the charges. Further they will need to record different information about the two type of vacancy. For an executive vacancy they will also need to store the salary, whether the job includes a company car and a comment on any other benefits included. Routine jobs need an hourly rate, the number of hours per week and whether flexitime is possible.
For the routine grade of vacancy SWEP will short list applicants for these jobs and negotiate interviews with the company. SWEP receives a fee which is a percentage of the first year's salary of the successful applicant.
SWEP places job advertisements in the journals and newspapers (generally called publications). It will be necessary to record all publications where SWEP have previously placed advertisements. The executive grade vacancies are advertised individually in appropriate journals. For routine vacancies, for which SWEP only receives a percentage fee, group advertisements will be designed in which a variety of vacancies for a number of companies will be included. SWEP uses its knowledge of journals and their readership to determine the job type composition of a particular advertisement and its placement.
People seeking new job opportunities may approach SWEP because they have seen an advertisement for a particular job vacancy or because they believe SWEP may know of suitable vacancies which have not yet been advertised.
In either case they register with SWEP, specifying their requirements and submitting a CV (Curriculum Vitae), and wait for SWEP to offer them suitable interviews. For the records the CV is analysed and key attributes such as age, key skills and experience are extracted and stored for matching to the requirements of job vacancies. There is no charge to the applicants for the services provided. Each CV is given a number and the paper based CV is filed appropriately.
To ensure continuity SWEP appoints one of their staff to co-ordinate with each company to deal with the routine vacancies. A separate co-ordinator is appointed for each of the executive grade vacancies.
SWEP requires a system which will:
Record each of the job vacancies notified by the companies and the key attribute requirements.
Record each applicant, whether they have directly applied for vacancies or are simply seeking job opportunities.
The system should record the vacancies an applicant has applied for. Further, it should keep a record of the events which indicate the stage to which each application has reached, for a particular vacancy. The company has a list of standard event types that could be used to record the stages an application goes through. An application for a vacancy could result in more than one interview. Thus the same event type could be repeated more than once in the history of that application.
An application for a vacancy starts with an 'Initial Application' stage for an applicant an a particular vacancy.
Typical event types are' initial application', 'short listing', 'interviews' where appropriate, and a 'final status' which would indicate whether the candidate was successful in their application for a particular vacancy. SWEP refer to an event taking place during the life of an application as an Application Stage. Every stage an application goes through should have a general comment to be included together with the date and the type of event the stage records. All extra information about a particular application stage (of an event-type) is recorded in the large general comment field. There is no need for extra tables for Interviews etc.
The 'Final Status' stage (event-type) would be required to record in the general comment whether the applicant is accepted or rejected by the company, whether the applicant has been informed of the decision and also a comment to record feedback from the company about reasons for accepting or rejecting. This aspect is particularly useful so that SWEP can build up a profile of the type of applicants that are most acceptable to a particular company. The applicant who is successful for a particular vacancy should be recorded.
Advert copy is the design and layout of a particular advert. SWEP prepare advert copy themselves. Details of advert copy will need to be recorded in the database A particular advert (described by the advert copy), which could include several vacancies, may be placed in a number of publications. Of course the same vacancy could be included in more than one advert copy and adverts in a particular publication can be repeated. SWEP need to record when a particular vacancy is included in an advert copy as well as the cost of placing an advert in journals and newspapers.
Entity Documentation of selected entities (partial list only)
Applicant
Primary Key / Applicant#Attributes / name, age, gender, address, experience-code, skill-code, cv#
Description / A person who has registered with SWEP so as to make an application for an existing vacancy or because they believe SWEP may know of suitable vacancies which have not yet been advertised now or in the future.
Event-type
Primary Key / event-type#Attributes / event-description
Description / Applications by a person for a vacancy go through various stages. Each application-stage is an instance of a particular type of event. Examples being 'Initial Application', Interview' etc.
Vacancy
Primary Key / vacancy#Attributes / vacancy-type, experience-code, skill-code, age-range
Description / A job or post, either routine or executive.
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