DESIGN OF A JOB RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION SYSTEM USING ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.0 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The rapid development of modern information and communication technologies in the past few years and their introduction into people’s daily lives has greatly increased the amount of information available at all levels of their social environment (Neumann, 2010). People have been steadily turning to the web to improve their knowledge and skills (Ho et al., 2010) as well as for career development (Jansen et al., 2005). What is more, job seekers are increasingly using Web 2.0 services like LinkedIn and job search sites (Bizer and Rainer, 2005).
A job is the regular activity performed in exchange of payment. Some people have multiple jobs. A person usually begins a job by becoming an employee, volunteering or starting a business. The duration of a job may range from temporary (e.g., hourly odd jobs) to a lifetime (e.g., judges). If a person is trained for a certain type of job, they may have a profession. Typically, a job would be a subset of someone’s career. They differ in the sense that, one usually retires from their career versus resignation or termination from a job.
Recruitment refers to the process of attracting, screening, selecting and appointing suitable candidates for jobs. Managers, human resource generalists and recruitment specialist may be tasked with carrying out recruitment, but in some cases, public-sector employment agencies, commercial recruitment agencies or specialists search consultancies are used to undertake parts of the process. Internet based technologies which support all aspects of recruitment have become widespread (Adam, 2016).
A lot of companies use online knowledge management systems to hire employees, exploiting the advantages of the World Wide Web. These are termed e-recruitment systems and automate the process of publishing positions and receiving CVs.
E-recruitment systems have seen an explosive expansion in the past few years (Meo et al., 2007), allowing Human Resources (HR) agencies to target a very wide audience at a small cost. This has greatly enhanced access of prospective job seekers to opportunities beyond national and continental boundaries. Also it has provided greater opportunities for employers to recruit the most ideal candidates from a larger pool of applicants.
In online recruitment systems, candidates typically upload their CVs in the form of a document with a loose structure, which must be considered by an expert recruiter. However, this incorporates a great asymmetry of resources required from candidates and recruiters and potentially increases the number of unqualified applicants. This situation might be overwhelming to human resource (HR) agencies that need to allocate HRs for manually assessing the candidate resumes and evaluating the applicants’ suitability for the positions at hand. Several e-recruitment systems have been proposed with an objective to automate and speed-up the recruitment process, leading to a better overall user experience and increasing efficiency.
For example, SAT telecom reported 44% cost savings and a drop in the average time needed to fill a vacancy from 70 to 37 days (Pande, 2011) after deploying an e-recruitment system.
This work, proposes prescreening of applicants’ curriculum vitae (CVs) using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The applicants will not just submit their CVs in an unstructured format but will fill a form (structured format) that contains the requirement of the company. This structured format will aid the automatic screening of applications.
1.1 PROBLEM STATEMENT OF THE STUDY
Thousands of job seekers queue everyday for recruitment into various organizations. The process of job seeking can get tiring and frustrating. The traditional recruitment process is costly and timing consuming for both the employers and job seekers. It requires candidates moving from where they are to where they are to apply for the job. Traditional recruitment also tends to favour connected candidates even when they don’t meet the minimum requirements of the employers.
Manually assessing all the curriculum vitae (CVs) of the applicants and evaluating their suitability for the vacant positions can be overwhelming to Human Resource department of organizations, especially for big organizations that tend to receive hundreds of thousands or millions of applications for their vacant positions.
Common problems encountered in the traditional recruitment process are:
- Time consuming manual reviewing and screening of CVs.
- No centralized database for information storage and retrieval.
- Heavy administrative workload in the traditional recruitment process.
- Hiring lead time is much longer, increasing expenses.
HR practitioners have long been under pressure to transform the HR function into one that is both efficient and can contribute to an organization strategically (Parry and Tyson, 2009).
1.2 AIM AND OBJECTIVES
This project is aimed at developing a job recruitment and selection system using analytic hierarchy process.
The objectives are:
- To design a job recruitment and selection system using Analytic Hierarchy Process.
- To implement (1) above
1.3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The methods to be used to achieve the aim and objectives of the study are as follows:
- A comprehensive literature review of existing systems deployed for job recruitment.
- HTML (Hypetext markup language) to build the structure.
- CSS (Cascading style sheet) and Bootstrap to define how to display the HTML elements.
- Javascript and JQuery to add functionality, validate forms.
- PHP (Hypertext preprocessor) to make it a dynamic system.
- MySQL (Structured query language) for accessing and manipulating the database.
- Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 as my integrated development environment.
- Use of Analytic Hierarchy Process-OS(bpmsg.com/ahp/ahp-calc.php) to prescreen applicants’ applications.
- Utilization of Windows Apache MySQL PHP (WAMP) server as web deployment platform with MySQL, the relational database management system for existing database and manipulating the database which serves as the backend.
1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
The main goal of developing this system is to optimize the recruitment process for an organization. The system has been designed to reduce paperwork, reach out to a wider range of audience, save time, reduce biasness and reduce cost.
1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The scope of this project work covers developing job recruitment and selection system using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for applicants’ CV screening. The system is designed to shortlist only applicants who meet the minimum requirement of the employer, reducing their workload.