Smart Stores Recruitment System Application - The Solution

Smart Stores Recruitment System Application—The Solution

The solution is to create a Web-based application for the HR department. After this application is implemented, applicant records can be added to the centralized database from all regional offices. This, in turn, will help reduce the data entry workload. The application will provide the following benefits:

• The latest information will be made available online. Therefore, regional managers will be able to determine the status of a particular applicant online without calling the HR centers in New Jersey and Santa Clara.

• The search feature in the new application will allow employees to search for specific records. It will also help them obtain information that's regularly required by the management team.

• The application will save time for the IT department because it will use a centralized database. This will eliminate errors due to the improper merging of databases from the HR centers.

• The speed of the recruitment process will be optimized.

To implement the proposed solution, a front-end Web-based application that provides a simple and interactive interface is needed. Because this application will deal with confidential data, only authorized employees should be allowed to access the data. The application should prompt for a username and a password through a Login page. After successful login, the application should display the main page with a list of applicants, with details such as applicant IDs and names. The main page of the application should provide links for searching and adding new applicant records. On the main page, clicking a particular applicant ID should display complete details about the applicant. The page displaying the applicant details should allow the modification and deletion of the record.

After a preliminary analysis of the solution, the company management hires a team of software professionals consisting of a project manager and two application developers. The team decides to use ColdFusion MX to develop the application because it's fast, reliable, and allows structured Web application development. ColdFusion MX uses ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) for application development. Although CFML is similar to HTML, it's more advanced because you can create custom tags and therefore extend the language. ColdFusion MX applications can interact with databases through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and OLE DB interfaces. In the back end of the ColdFusion MX application, you can use different databases, such as Oracle, SQL Server, and Microsoft Access. The development team decides to use SQL Server as the back end for the application.

The following section describes a typical project cycle for developing a Web application.