After 35 years in business, AppleOne Employment services used to take hundreds of thousands of paper applications per year for people seeking temporary and permanent employment. Since November 2000 they take over 30,000 applications per month via an online wizard developed by Baarns Consulting.
Baarns Consulting worked with AppleOne to develop AppleXpress, a dynamic wizard that takes employment applications via the browser 24x7. As of June 2002 AppleXpress has taken over 1,019,500 applications, with over 6.2 gigabytes of data moved from the browsers into the backend databases. These applications are instantly available, printable and searchable for AppleOne’s network of over 300 offices nationwide via an extensive custom Intranet application (the subject of future case studies) developed by Baarns.
Before AppleXpress, employment candidates sat in AppleOne offices for 30 to 60 minutes writing down routine pre-employment information. Using standard paper forms, applicants provided contact information, work preferences, references, detailed work history, education experiences and a large set of additional details related to their future goals and work history. After completion, AppleOne account executives keyed those applications into their local office system before matching those candidates with job openings from companies seeking to hire.
Today candidates use their browser of choice to work through a dynamic online wizard. They can sit in the comfort of their home 24 hours per day or if they choose, go into an AppleOne office to complete the application. Because employment applications require detailed information, the wizard is designed to allow candidates to start, stop, and return to the wizard at a later date. Behind the scenes, the wizard tracks their progress and allows the candidates to fill in an application in one sitting or spread it out over days if that suits their needs. For example: if they don’t remember a previous employer’s address, they can stop the wizard and return after obtaining that information.
In the background the wizard has over 20 pages, but it customizes itself based on answers the candidate provides. For example, early in the wizard a candidate is asked if they have a government security clearance. If they choose “yes”, the wizard later displays a page asking about the details of the clearance. Most people don’t see the security details page because it’s not necessary. Many other pages, including employment history, personal references and previous temp assignments dynamically configure based on answers to simple questions asked early in the process. A few people will see lots of pages, but all candidates see the minimum necessary to gather the appropriate information.
AppleOne estimated the average cost of moving the old paper data into their systems at two to four dollars per application. AppleXpress has saved over 3 million dollars in data input since the system went live. Every month the company continues to save money on the tens of thousands of applications pouring into the AppleOne databases.
While the hard dollar savings are impressive, the other business benefits
continue to grow. Today AppleOne account executives focus on finding
matches between AppleOne’s 50,000 clients and new candidates rather
than typing employment applications into their local systems.
Applications are instantly available to all AppleOne offices, greatly
enhancing the value to both the candidate and the companies seeking
to hire people. Candidates enjoy a more pleasant, streamlined
experience at an AppleOne office. They used to spend 30-60 minutes
filling out paperwork in the offices; now they spend the time
interviewing and skill testing.
Baarns developed AppleXpress using a large set of Microsoft technologies. These include Windows 2000 IIS servers front-ending SQL Server 2000 databases. All the servers run on Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Those servers are co-located at a high performance ISP and owned by AppleOne. Baarns specified the servers before they were purchased, reformatted the drives, and installed the appropriate Microsoft software from the ground up. The end result was a set of servers optimized for high-performance online operations. In other words, Baarns installed and configured the complete software foundation required to run the server farm, including the internal network connecting the machines.
Obviously, Baarns knows what it takes to build high-value, high volume, line of business applications. AppleXpress is simply one of the many custom applications developed by Baarns Consulting. Baarns provides both strategic consulting and application development. With over 13 years in the business technology field, Baarns provides a wealth of high quality advice and implementation services. Contact us today to see what Baarns can do for your bottom line.