Online Job Portal

Online Job Portal

Overview :

This project is for building a specialized job portal for Tourism Schools in Bad Gleichenberg, Austria. These institutions offer training that enables college students or graduates to get trained for jobs in hotels, cruises and other tourism related firms. The main subjects included in training are foreign languages, tourism & leisure management and hotel & gastronomy management.

The schools were jointly looking for a recruitment site to effectively enable its students to get placed in hotels and other tourism companies. This site will be a platform to bring the students, agents, employers and alumni together. Sponsors and merchants are also targeted to improve the revenue model and bring a wide range of useful products and services within easy reach of students.

The purpose of this project was to provide a job portal specifically focused on TOURISMUSSCHULE and other smaller schools. There will be some informational pages about the services. It will be a multi-lingual site. The site will be structured around 25+ branches (employer categories) and 50+ job categories. Applicants, employers, merchants, sponsors, alumni and agents can register and login into an account on the site. Applicants can upload / maintain their multi-tab profile and track / exchange messages with agents or employers. Employers can post job openings and track / exchange messages with applicants or agents. Agents are internal admin users who represent a particular school and track / exchange messages with employers or applicants to facilitate better communication. Agents can maintain a personalized landing page for their specific school, manage featured items, run an online store and moderate a forum for the school. Merchants are external suppliers who can create a paid account to add their products to site catalog for online sales from the home page.

Sponsors can have a paid account on the site and post featured events as well as do banner advertising on the site. Alumni can create a paid account and be associated with a specific school to participate in forums as well as apply for jobs directly from site home page. Site content can be managed using CMS. Banner advertising can be managed in admin panel. Site pages should be search engine friendly and optimized for a set of keywords for good visibility on popular search engines. Revenue comes from following sources:

1. Employers pay registration fees
2. Employers pay a fee each time a student is recruited
3. Alumni pay registration fees
4. Sponsors pay for banner advertising and featured events
5. Merchants pay to get their products displayed on the site
6. Merchants pay a fraction of revenue collected from online sales of their products
7. Agents get paid for their services by the school (offline)
8. Site Manager makes a periodic offline payment to merchants and schools towards fee adjusted sales revenue from the online store (offline)

The key benefits of the proposed application are listed below:

1. Better job placement for students
2. Provide a platform for smaller schools to reach employers
3. Build an alumni network and earn revenue from alumni registration
4. Earn revenue from employers through job placement
5. Earn revenue from sponsors through advertising and featured events
6. Earn revenue from merchants and schools through online store sales

In this document we have provided the feature list and technology architecture overview for this job portal.

Feature List

The portal will be used by site visitors, merchants, sponsors, alumni, applicants, employers, agents and a super admin user. We have provided a brief description below about what each of these users can do on the site:

1. Site visitors can view the informational pages on the site that describe the services and terms of use. They can register to become merchants or sponsors or alumni or employer or external applicant. They can query the site manager using a contact form. Site visitors can search for jobs but only members can apply to various job openings. They can subscribe for the general newsletter on the site home page. They can also subscribe to a newsletter for a particular school
2. External applicants pay registration fees and can create their resume to apply for the listed jobs but their applications are not moderated by agents
3. Merchants can pay fees to register on the site and get an account page after login to manage their catalog, browse orders, update order status, and browse payments and request for withdrawal from account by offline check. Merchants will be charged a commission on every sale through the site.
4. Sponsors can pay for banner advertisements and featured events for monthly purchase
5. Alumni can pay registration fees and post messages on the specific school forum
6. Applicants get a login account free of cost from the agent that represents their school. Applicants can create their online resume and apply for jobs to any employer. The resumes of applicants are moderated by the agent appointed for their school. Applicants can use a message board to interact with the agent or employer
7. Employers can pay registration fees to get an account and post jobs to receive applications from applicants of various schools listed on the site as well as external applicants. There is a message board to interact with applicants or agents. Employers must pay the specific school if they recruit any applicant
8. Agents get a free account on behalf of a school and there can be more than one agent account for a particular school. Agent may be an internal employee of school or an external consultant acting on behalf of school. School pays the agent a fee by an offline check which is not processed through this application. Agents can view the list of job postings to which school applicants have responded and exchange messages with employers on behalf of applicants. Agents can also submit resumes on behalf of applicants to employers. The role of the agent is to help school students get placed with employers of their choice. Agents also manage the online store catalog, order processing, featured sections, newsletters, moderated forum, school landing page content and invoices to employers on behalf of the school. Agents can also create accounts of the applicants and have full access to applicant details, besides using a message board to interact with any applicant.
9. The super admin user of the site gets an admin panel to use a CMT editor for managing all informational content, creating agent accounts, tracking site statistics and managing various types of site users with a message board facility to interact with users. Payments can be tracked and account balances of various users can be tracked and offline payments can be manually adjusted in account balances. Site admin can publish the general newsletter. Site Admin has shadow login with full rights to access the account page of any user. Site Admin can manage featured sections and moderated forum on the home page.

Technology Architecture

The web application is programmed in web architecture using ASP.Net 2.0 (with C#.Net or VB.Net as language) and MS SQL Server 2005 as RDBMS. Application architecture will be centralized for easy manageability. Application will be optimized for Internet Explorer 6+ but HTML 4 compliance will be preserved to ensure cross browser compatibility with other common browsers like Firefox and Netscape Navigator.

Cross browser compatibility is largely ensured through use of XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4 compliance. All application testing will be done in Firefox which has a more restrictive implementation of HTML / JavaScript and this ensures that it runs well in IE browsers too. Any cross browser issues will be debugged if they arise during module testing. Optimistic locking will be used in database operations to improve concurrent user performance. Extensive use of stored procedures will ease network traffic and database performance.