A An Enhanced Employer – Job Application Career Tracer Of Rural Areas Electricity Company (RAECO) A project presented to the Faculty of Computing Sciences of Gulf College in academic affiliation with Staffordshire University In partial fulfillment of the award of BSc (Hons) Information system Supervised by: Dr. Rolou Lyn Rodriguez Maata Submitted by: Ibrahim Hamood Al Maskari / 9508   Chapter 1 RESEARCH DESCRIPTION 1.1 Introduction Rural Area Electricity Company (RAECO) is a well-known company that provides electricity for Musandam, Al Wasta and Dofar regions. The company has been in operation since year 2005. There are more than 400 employees, RAECO have 15 branches within the Sultanate of Oman. The company has no information system installed to hiring new employees they used to do it manually. The company has manual processes on selecting employees: (1) the job-applicants send request to the Human Resource Department by sending their Curriculum Vitae (CV) and filled-up application forms with specific job title, job description, Bachelor's degree average grades, job location and educational requirements; (2) the human resource department representative will send to the newspaper agencies for the announcement of their job vacancies; (3) the human resource will receive job applicant application forms through an e-mail; (4) the human resource department representative filter the curriculum vitae submitted; (5) the qualified job applicants will be notified through an e-mail for possible interview; (6) finally, the human resource department will choose the best job-applicant fit for the vacant position. With this manual system, the employer is facing many problems such as: 1. Long Process The current system it takes long process and this will affect the business of the company. Moreover, this sometimes will make lose in information because of the manual form request. The new information system will make this process throw online and they will be no losing in information. Also, the manual form will converted to electronic form through online. 2. Spend more time in the selection of qualified job-applicants Manual system definitely involves a long process of selecting job-applicants to fit the needs of the employer. On the other hand, the proposed system will definitely process the application in a short period of time compared to the manual system. With this, it will help the company to hire new employees efficiently and effectively. 3. No Reports Generation The staffs of the company facing big problem when they are trying to generate any report because they have to search in files and this make it very difficult and take time. 4. Difficult to Follow-up Managers and administrators of respective departments could not easily follow-up on their request for additional manpower. 5. High Cost The current system is very costly because it follows many procedures. First of all, entails high paper cost. Secondly, newspaper it cost a lot when they advertise to available vacancy. 6. Difficulty when making filtering for job-applicant When the Human Resource Department receives requests from other department for list of job vacancies, it is difficult for them to filter that requests. 1.2 Research Objective General Objective: To develop a web portal of Employer-Job Applicants Career Tracer for Royal Areas Electricity Company (RAECO). Specific Objectives: There are many targets or specific objectives for An Enhanced Employer – Job Application Career Tracer website, which is as the follow: 1. To design simple and very easy systems that the job applicant and staff can be use it. 2. To provide fast, easy and safety website for job applicant and staff. 3. To improve the work environment by using this proposed system. 4. To improve the company reputation by using the technology. 1.3 Scope and Delimitations/ Limitation of the Research The system is a web-based application that allows the job-applicants to apply their desired position in the RAECO. The system will be able to view applicant's personal information easily in a short period of time. The additional features are as the following: i. Saving information: The system connected in to MySQL database which provide security and saving all information to protect the information from loses. ii. Generates reports: There is option that the staff able to generate reports such us, number of applicants that apply for specified position or in general. iii. Search for position: The systems have option to search for position by name of the viable position, date of upload the position and by the closing date for the available position. In the light of the discussions above, the website is limited in four ways. The first limitation of the website is that the jobseekers cannot view any available position an les he or she register first in to the website. Secondly, there is no option to print the conformation when the jobseekers apply for a position. Thirdly, the staff cannot export any reports from the website only from the database. Finally, the website will not work without internet connection. 1.4 Significance of the Research The proposed project is definitely to improve the work environment in the company. In the other word, the Rural Areas Electricity Company (RAECO) training their best to improve the work environment by using the technology and keep abreast of the time. Secondly, the reputation of the company when they using the modern technology. Moreover, the company by using the technology wills receives more job applicant so they will search for job applicant in short time and as their requirement for the position. Finally, the most important significance of the research is to make easy and fast for job applicants to find and apply for stable position that feat the experience and qualification. The most beneficiaries for the user's job applicants and employees can get from the system are as the following: • Job applicants can register one time and they can apply for one or more position by only entering user name and password. • Job applicants can modify their information any time. • HR employees can raise any available position and they can give the job requirements. • The system will save any information entries in registration. • The system have search feature that help job applicants can search for any position that feat there experience. Chapter Two REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES This chapter presents the review of related literature and studies to show the support of other researchers related to this research study. Review of Related Literature The internet has significant impacts on many aspects of people life. There is a rapid increase to utilize current technologies and the World Wide Web (WWW) to execute different business processes. Due to the significant benefits of WWW, many organizations are adopting online recruiting systems using WWW as a platform. A significant financial saving of up to 90% can be achieved when switching from traditional recruitments method to online based methods as well as 25% time saving on hiring cycles [1]. (Cappelli, 2011; Cober, Brown, Blumental, Doverspike, & Levy, 2010; Freeman, 2012; Lievens & Harris, 2013). The online recruiting process has changed the way the staffing process is understood and executed by the organization. Unlike tradition way of recruitment, the online process focuses more on attracting more candidates and making the process accessible and easy to use. Using the internet the organization can pass more information to candidates dynamically and consistently. This allows candidate to make far better decisions before applying to the advertise job. The ubiquity of the internet provides great flexibilities for job seekers. As Cappelli (2011, p. 139) stated 'the labor market . . . has at last become a true market: wide open, uncontrolled by individual companies, and unconstrained by geography'. Organizations now are able to recruit talents from any location in the world [2]. Using online recruitment site allow organization to present information in a very interactive, informative and appealing way. Using appropriate and effective web design principles, applicants can be attracted to revisit the website in the future. Using website customization and personalization via cookies and other methods can encourage users to revisit the site to view new job updates (Lievens & Harris, 2003). One of the first approaches used in online recruitments was job board. The job board is similar newspaper job listing. Monster board was one of the earliest adopted boards (www.monster.com). Job board allows organizations to search for candidates by the skills and view resumes online. Unfortunately, it can be very complicated for organizations to select best candidates due to the high volume of available resumes on job boards. Some e-recruitment sits can hold up to 110 million jobs and 20 million unique resumes. For example Monster.com holds up to 10 million 2007 (Li, Charron, Roshan, & Flemming, 2012). According to some studies, 94% of Global 500 companies have their own online recruitment website (Greenspan, 2011). This trend is highly attributed to the flexibility, cost effectiveness and efficiency of online recruitment systems (Lee, 2010). According to some research studies the organizational recruitment website can change the impression, favourability, attractiveness, and organization image. Organizations can improve their image and influence viewers' perceptions of the organization not only by providing a website which is appealing and easy to use and navigate; Also, by providing organizational recruitment websites (Braddy et al., 2011). Due to the highly competitive job markets attracting good candidates to the job posting is very critical for organizations. Company's online presence plays a very critical role in attracting talents and job seekers (Zusman & Landis, 2010). Companies should aim to attract as much candidates as possible by increasing their online presence through web search engine optimization. The company site should provide users with relevant and useful information, services, job openings, and good insight about the company (Lievens et al., 2012). Job seekers should be given the opportunity to know and learn more about the company such as company goals, corporate values, and benefits. Even if the company decide to use third party services such as monster.com it is very critical for the company to enable the job seeker to get more insights about the job and the company by visiting their main website (Zusman & Landis, 2010).. CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY This chapter presents the methodology to be used in the research study. In addition, it includes participants of the research study, data collection and procedure, data analysis, and programming language to be used. Research Methodology This study will evaluate the performance of the proposed system in order to improve the processes of job applications and selection by RAECO Company. This will surely measure the quality of the proposed system and the efficiency of the system as well. The professor Alan Gillies said: "considered as design quality, whilst ensuring a match to the specification is considered as manufacturing quality. The classic software development waterfall life cycle tackles this ambiguity by addressing and production in different stages of the process". [1] Waterfall methodology is describes a development method that is linear and sequential; it has many steps and etch step has specific goals or target of development, once a phase or step of development is completed the development proceeds to the next phase or step and there is no turning back. There are many advantages of waterfall methodology such as, it is allows for departmentalization and managerial control, the time it can be set with deadline for each stage or step of development, the phase or the steps of development proceeds in strict order without any overlapping or iterative steps. The disadvantage of this methodology it is inflexible division of a project into separate stages, this means it is unsuitable and difficulty to change in the steps or phase With this, the researcher decided to use waterfall methodology to design the proposed system. This methodology specifically shows the step by step procedure in designing the system. In the first phase, requirements analysis was stated, wherein the researcher will collect data from the concerned company and job applicants. These data will be analyzed and use in the system (2nd phase). Further, the researcher will write the appropriate codes (source codes) to start designing the system (3rd phase). (4th and 5th stages) . Data Collection Procedure The researcher selected the appropriate validated questionnaire to prove that there is a need to develop a new system. In addition, the questionnaire will simply evaluate the performance of the proposed system in terms of user-friendliness, security, accuracy_______. After the selection of the validated questionnaire, the researcher will ask permission to the concerned company (RAECO Company) for him to distribute the questionnaire. Survey was administered to a selected sample from job applicants and employees. Sample surveys or questionnaires are an important tool for collecting and analyzing the information from selected individuals. They are widely accepted as a key tool for conducting and applying basic social science research methodology. The goal from the survey it collect data from job applicants and employees to assist when design and implement the system. For this study, the methodology for this study was a stratified random sample of job applicants and employees. Survey Please put a tick  in the box next to the answer of your choice or write in the space provided as the case may be. Sex Male  Female  1. Which of the following you are? Employee  Job Applicant  Other  If other please specifies: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. If you are job applicant or would like to move on to other work which of the following methods prefer when you applying for a position? By Email  By Company Website  By Fax  By visiting the company  Others  If others please specify: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Have you applied for a job using a website of the company or the organization in the past 3 years? Yes  No  4. What difficulties did you encounter when applying for a job online? _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________. 5. In the below table there are the methods of applying for a position and some features of the methods, kindly put a tick  that you think each of the below methods feat or match with the features which are listed below. For the Others please specify if any. By Email By Website By Fax By visiting the company Others: Fast Lis time Safety Easy to use Clear Easy to follow-up 6. Do you have any additional feedback or thoughts about improving the accessibility of the online job seeking process? _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________. 7.