Many web sites provide job listings, but do not provide an easy means to track the status of the position, or ability to enter comments, or capability to task yourself to do the follow-up calls, emails, and 'Thank Yous'. Also, most job seekers use several web sites or other means to search for jobs. Some innovative job seekers attempt to track their job hunting via emails, documents, or even elaborate spreadsheets. Other issues? You receive a call from a recruiter, but where are the notes from the previous meeting? You need to call them back, what is their phone number? Searching through disparate systems is difficult, to say the least!

Solution - Application Domain

Job Tracker provides the means to track your prospects (called positions), and set the status of the positions. To support the content of a Position, many Comments (date stamped) may be attached to each Position. Also, many Tasks (suspense date - due date) may be attached to each Position. Job Tracker is a tool to collect and organize your job seeking efforts, regardless of how many different resources used in your job search. This is one area you really want, and need, the power of a database! You can search for all key information and see highlighted results instantly! The system is not over-engineered, not entirely 'normalized', but as a work in progress has been tuned to work well for the average job seeker and tracker.

Job Tracker Application Project Page

The Job Tracker Application can be downloaded from the project web site at http://rubyforge.org/projects/jobtracker/

System Environment

Requirements:

RAILS > 1.1 or greater

MySQL > 4.1 or greater

Ruby > 1.8.2 or greater

Installation

Unzip into any directory.

Starting:

- Server

> cd $job_tracker directory

> ruby script/server

- Client (Web browser)

Enter URL "http://localhost:3000/"

Use Cases

The following use cases document what Job Tracker does.

Legend for Use Case actions:

Green = Creation

Dark green = Base level object (parent), i.e. Position

Light Green = 2nd level (child), i.e. Comment attached to a Position

Yellow = Edit

Red = Delete

Red = Base level object

Light Red (Pink) = cascaded delete when parent is deleted

Blue = Associations

* Companies (base level object) and associations are not yet supported as of this release.

Illustration 1: Use Cases

Navigation

Start by entering URL http://localhost:3000/

Login

To support some degree of security, this can be turned on/off. See development notes.

Enter user name and password.

To set initial account info, navigate to http://localhost:3000/user/signup

Illustration 2: Login Screen

State Diagram

The state diagram displays the various states a 'Position' may be in. The user normally manually changes the states by editing the Status. The 'flow' (state transitions) are not enforced or tracked, but provide a general usage guidance of how most states would change.

Definitions:

Active - Position that you are interested in.

Inactive - Position that you are no longer interested in, or hve not received any feedback in for quite some time.

Negotiation - Position that is being interviewed for, received an offer letter on, etc.

Accept - Position you have taken

Rejected - Position you have turned down.

Closed - Someone else was hired.

Archive - An Inactive or Rejected Position that is 'stale' and can be archived.

* Note - The Menu option 'Administration' provides a means to 'bulk' move Position states from Active to Inactive, and from Inactive and Rejected to Archive.

Illustration 3: Position States

Illustration 4: Position - Add

Add a Position

Enter a Title, etc.

Note that the 'text' fields (description, skills, and salary) can store up to 65536 characters. 'Created on' and 'Updated on' are automatically set by the application.

Sent On = Date applied for the job, date you sent in your resume.

Scroll down to the bottom to Save the record.

The Main Menu will update the total 'count' of Positions and by State.

Field	Type	Null
title	varchar(255)
description	text	YES
skills	text	YES
status	varchar(16)
company	varchar(255)	YES
address	varchar(255)	YES
contact	varchar(255)	YES
phone	varchar(255)	YES
email	varchar(255)	YES
sent_on	date	YES
created_on	date
updated_on	date
salary	text

Table 1: Position Fields

Illustration 5: Position - Added Successfully

Add a Comment

Illustration 6: Comment - Add

Add a Task

Illustration 7: Task - Add

Position Details

After adding Tasks and Comments, the details for a Position.

Illustration 8: Position - Details with Tasks, Comments

The Tasks and Comments are hyperlinked for direct Detail and optional Edit views.

Searching

Click on Search for the input form. The results will dispaly what was searched for as well as the number of records and the text will be highlighted.

Each record is linked for a detail view of the record.

Note: Leaving the input form empty (Blank) will return ALL records

Illustration 9: Search - Input Form

The results are presented in summary form ...

Illustration 10: Search Results

Clicking on the linked element (highlighted green here, as the mouse is hovering over it at this point in time) will present the detailed screen.

Illustration 11: Search Results showing Details

All instances of the matching text are highlighted.

Note: Although the Comments and Tasks are NOT part of the Search for Positions, the 'displayed' text WILL be highlighted if it also contains the same phrase as was searched for.

Please also note, the Comments and Tasks have individual Search functions for complete searching on those records.

* Comments and Tasks are truncated to 255 characters on the Position Details screen, although they can hold up to 64K characters EACH!

Tasks Due

The Tasks Due link provides a quick view of what is due or overdue.

Red is overdue by MORE than 1 day.

Pink is overdue by 1 day (Yesterday)

Yellow is due Today

Light Green is due Tomorrow

Dark Green is due in more than 1 day form today (in the future starting from day after Tomorrow)

Illustration 12: Tasks Due

Editing a Task and marking its completion date removes it from the Tasks Due queue