Mono eRecruit

Bringing someting innovative to the very competitive recruitment market seems like an impossible mission. There are numerous recruitment solutions that claim to make HR data collection easier and tasks completed quicker.

Our client wanted to develop a job posting system that provides a simple, one-page user experience that allows companies to post jobs to multiple job boards in seconds. This can reduce the administrative headache of having to visit each individual job-posting site and manually posting each job. Simply put this service allows an organization to access all job boards from a single, one-page interface. Additionally, a fully featured Web 2.0 job board is planned to be developed.

After evaluating all the requirements, Mono Software decided to develop a modular browser-based recruitment solution based on the MonoX portal framework. MonoX has several unique features that allowed us to build a solution that is completely suited to the client's needs:

• interactive user interface compatible with any recent Web browser, allowing for intuitive, drag-and-drop interaction with the portal elements. MonoX uses Ajax-based user interface elements and all the latest "Web 2.0" technologies to allow users to be as productive as possible.
• full support for the ASP.NET Web parts framework: the Web Parts framework was one of the most conspicuous and the most powerful new features in Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0. Basically, it is a set of controls and services that specifically target the growing demand for Web portal creation, including support for personalization, membership, communication and other infrastructural tasks. MonoX is built on top of the standard Web part API, so there is virtually no learning curve involved.
• scalable and robust architecture: MonoX offers a scalable architecture that can satisfy the requirements of both small workgroups and large enterprises. Unlimited number of portals can be served from a single portal database.
• standardized plug-and-play modules and an open API: new modules can be developed and plugged-in via standard Web part API.
• high performance and flexible data layer: MonoX utilizes LLBLGen, a powerful object-relational engine that generates highly optimized, robust and scalable database-related code.
• unprecedented ease of use: non-technical users can administer most of the aspects of the working portal. MonoX employs standard WYSIWYG editors, file manager mimics the look and feel of the standard Windows explorer, etc. It fully supports offline editing tools based on MetaWeblog API (Microsoft Windows LiveWriter).

Being strongly related to Microsoft development tools and technologies, Mono Software based the application on Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 was the designated development environment for both client and the server portion of the app. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 was used as the RDBMS at the server side.

eRecruit job post list

Mono Software development team is devoted to the strongly typed, n-tiered, RAD programming philosophy. We are using LLBLGen (Low Level Business Layer object relational mapper & code GENerator) object-relational mapper by Solutions Design; without it, the development of such large scale project would be much more difficult. With its help, it's easy to generate the complete business tier based on a database architecture and transform even the most complicated kind of queries to the strongly typed C# code, which provides huge savings during both the initial development phase and the later bug correction/new features/maintenance phases. LLBLGen outperformed all the other similar tools we tested and remained a strong ground for all Mono Software projects to the present day. More recently we have started to use LINQ, a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations.

As for the reporting modules, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services provided an easy way to transform a simple query to a decently designed report in no time. Additionally, after assessing several different tools, we choose Active Reports from Data Dynamics for more complex reporting tasks. Its development simplicity, transparence, a powerful event model (which reminded to a simple ASP.NET web page), advanced sub-report options, data binding abilities and many other features started to pay off almost immediately and during the earliest development stages.

eRecruit job details screen

In addition to Microsoft Indexing Service, we've also used Lucene, an open source full text search system, for advanced text mining and document matching tasks. We were able to quickly prototype and build a fully featured job-to-candidate matchmaking engine using its powerful feature set.

We initially developed EmployIreland.ie, Ireland's premier fully automated job seeker's resource. It is an excellent example of how far you can go with customization of our basic MonoX package.
EmployIreland was initially based on the advanced Web crawler (spider) technology that continuosly tracks and downloads job posts from all major recruitment sites in Ireland. It used a sophisticated information extraction technology to store only relevant information to the central database, and making it available for full-text search. Our Web crawler engine is not sensitive to changes in site's design and layout and does not require any additional programming work when such changes happen. More details can be found in the article "Web data extraction with VB.NET".

The extraction process was subsequently reversed with the introduction of eRecruit system that allows users to access all Irish job boards from a single, one-page interface. This enabled our client to acquire fresh and well structured job posts in real-time and to fill the back-end EmployIreland database. Thousands of job posts are regularly updated through the eRecruit interface.

On the front end, EmployIreland.ie offers a wealth of custom built modules and features for job seekers and recruiters (security, personalization, user profiling, mail management, etc.). Portal employs Web 2.0 technologies in all segments: Ajax panels, auto-complete boxes, upload handlers, etc. Additionally, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was very high on a list of priorities for this project. Fortunatelly, MonoX includes several SEO-related technologies that helped us to achieve high search engine visibility for EmployIreland.ie:

EmployIreland home page

• ViewState oprimization: MonoX can completely remove the contents of the ViewState hidden form field. It practically means that your page will be much "lighter" in terms of size and load times, as ViewState hidden field can hold tens of kilobytes of data even in moderately complex applications. All this is possible without loosing any of the ViewState-related functionality. Instead of the hidden form field, the ViewState data can be stored in a database, file system, or session.
• HTTP compression: each page or related resource can be compressed on the fly, reducing the impact on the bandwidth and page load times.
• URL rewriting is a well known Search Engine Optimization technique. The basic premise is that clean URLs containing highly relevant keywords and without query string parameters will place your pages much higher in search engine rankings.
• SiteMaps generation: Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. MonoX comes with a ready-to-use HttpHandler for sitemaps generation.
• Automatic META keywords generation: switching the AutogenerateMetaKeywords tag to True will cause MonoX to automatically generate META description tags for every page in the portal.
• Integration with Google Analytics: setting the GoogleAnalyticsAccountNo tag to your Google Analytics account number (or numbers, for multiple portal instances) will set up everything that is needed to integrate your portal with Google Analytics
• Compact and standards-compliant output: MonoX produces very compact and standards-compliant HTML output which is favored by search engines.
• Powerful administration and editing tools: you can perform SEO-related fine tuning interactively and in real time.

EmployIreland personalized My Home page

The new recruitment system increased users' productivity and client's profit, improved security and created solid grounds for the future development of the new advanced features. This powerful Web 2.0 application platform increased the visibility of the main system portal on all major search engines.