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Data mining / database question

Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2004 12:39 pm
by Dedman
A friend of mine is a controller for a small company in San Francisco. She was lamenting the fact that every time she needs to hire someone, she has to hire a service to put the word out that they are hiring. She then gets a boatload of emailed resumes. As you can imagine after a while she gets tired of reading these things. What happens is she winds up choosing the first qualified candidate(s) whose resume she gets to.

This method has two main drawbacks; 1) she spends a boatload of time reading resumes, and 2) she possibly misses out on a more qualified candidate who got their resume in closer to the cutoff date.

I know that a lot of companies have a candidate submit their information by filing out a form on the companyĆ¢??s website. This then populates a database from which the company can use data mining techniques to search for key words and key qualifications. This lets them quickly weed out all non-qualified candidates.

My question is this: is it simply a matter of setting up a website that will automatically populate a database such as access or some other utility, can this be accomplished with some off the shelf software or does the system have to be built from scratch?

Thanks for your help.

Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2004 2:54 pm
by Pun
It can be accomplished with PHP/MySql, which are opensource and free. She just needs to make sure her web hosting company supports MySQL. And, she'd have to hire someone to build it into the website, obviously.

Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2004 4:54 pm
by DCrazy
It probably can be done with off-the-shelf software.

A better idea would be to hire a web programmer (like me) to write a PHP/MySQL application custom-built for her needs.

Re: Data mining / database question

Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2004 6:47 pm
by Verran
What DCrazy said. ;)

Or, if you can't afford it, check open source applications. This one looks very robust (although Java/J2EE):
http://www.vectrics.com/

Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2004 11:21 am
by Dedman
Thanks guys. I will pass along the info.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 2:26 pm
by Testiculese
You can also take those emailed resume's and do a keyword search within them, and only list the matching resumes. You can even use MS's Search fnuction. Just right-click on the folder and choose Find, and put something in the 'Containing Text' field. Although I cannot vouch for it's accuracy, since I've long ago disabled the search feature in Windows.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 4:45 pm
by Nitrofox125
DM I'd be willing to write a farily simple site that you could expand on that does what you need. Might cost you a bit but dirt cheap compared to other places. E-mail me services[NOSPAM]@arasian.com if you're interested