6.1. The Project

A problem has been identified by the human resources staff of XYZ, Inc. The staff is looking for a new solution to the age-old problem of controlling the hiring process within the company. The organization needs a new way to track jobs, managers, and potential applicants across the entire organization.

Currently, XYZ uses different documents and email to create different jobs in the organization. When a hiring manager has a new position open, they create a Word document that has the job name, description, pay scale, hiring date, and experience level. This document is emailed to the HR director where they assign a member of the HR staff to the job. The HR staff member then starts looking for different applicants and creates a list of resumes to send back to the hiring manager. At this point, the hiring manager looks through the list of applicants and starts scheduling interviews with the qualified applicants.

After the interview has taken place, the different interviewers fill out a form that rates the applicant based on fitness for the criteria in the interview process. These documents are collected by the hiring manager, and eventually a candidate is offered a job.

This process works well for the organization but is very difficult to audit when reviewing the hiring results for the company. The jobs also start slipping through the cracks when the HR director is either out of the office or busy.

Expecting significant company growth in the near future, the HR director has requested a computerized solution that will centralize the hiring process and make it more visible to the various stakeholders. The company has recently upgraded its intranet to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and would like to use this as the application interface. The staff has been trained on how to use the different types of sites and has Microsoft Office 2007 installed on their desktops.