Give a U of T Student a Design Project
December 19, 2006 – 11:45 amCould your business use some help with a design problem? Perhaps you are wrestling with space layout, storage problems, environmental analysis, energy decisions, technology choices, websites or something along these lines? For the course Engineering Strategies and Practices, 1,000 first-year students must tackle a team design project for a community group, non-governmental organization, industry or a group within the university. Many projects are required in order to keep the teams small and individualized.
Please consider proposing a project, or passing this message on to someone who might need assistance. Serving as a project client only requires six hours of your time over the winter term, but the effects on the students will last their lifetimes. Work begins early in the new year, so please respond promptly.
For more information or to register a project, please contact Phil Anderson or check out the Project Clients section of the ESP website.
One Response to “Give a U of T Student a Design Project”
Ok - I want someone to design me a UI with workflows for managing relationships between potential employees and contractors, and a company that hires them (I won’t say who that company is, but it starts with “Jona” and ends with “roup”).
The problem - I’m looking for a better way to quickly plan for the recruitment of staff for consulting projects relative to the following 3 dimensions:
1) Availability of resources
2) Availability of projects
3) Likely “quality of an applicant”
I’m looking for a unique combination of the following 4 tools:
Monster / Workopolis
LinkedIn
Microsoft Project
PGP
Resume sites like monster allow candidates to post resumes for employers to browse resumes, and prospective employees / contractors to browse job postings. But they have a number of problems:
resumes are free form. It takes a while to grok what the candidate has really accomplished, and what seems more like fluff.
1) There are too many resumes to browse
2) Resumes become out of date
3) Availability of the candidate is not captured (2 weeks notice, 6 months from now for 3 months))
4) Quality of candidates is unknown - no referrals or referral chain for the candidates
5) It takes too long to post a job, wait for applicants, interview applicants, and place them. In consulting, the employer usually just ends up asking their trusted network “who do you know”.
an applicant, you’re just a resume in a pile - difficult to distinguish yourself.
6) Start date / length of position is often only informally captured
7) Can’t register “when they will be available” and “for how long”
LinkedIn has the beginnings of a good referral chain, but it also has limitations
1) Allows colleagues to post testimonials about other colleagues
2) Allows people to locate individuals they’re not directly connected to, and see who they are connected to
3) Can’t easily calculate the trust level or “referral strength” beyond the first level in the chain
4) Accepting a link to someone is tantamount to applying “full trust” to them. Further, they know when you don’t accept the link, which can cause some personal strife. There is no option to make testimonials private. No option to “quantify” the testimonial (and keep this private)
PGP has the concept of trust chains
1) Can calculate the trust level for any key based on trust chain. Should be able to do this for any referral.
2) It encrypts email. I don’t like this
So I want a UI for a webapp that allows for the following
1) prospective applicants can register interest in jobs, along with their projected availability
2) employers can assign a private “ability level” to the candidate (based on resume, other knowledge) to applicants.
3) employers can assign a private “trust level” to either the candidate relationship (direct personal knowledge) or the relationship to the candidate’s referrer (knowledge of the referrer). These are used to calculate various metrics relative to other candidates. It can be used to calculate the “effective ability level” if the employer has no direct knowledge of the aplicant. Think of applying (Trust level * ability level) in a series across the entire referral chain.
4) employers can register upcoming jobs or potential jobs based on their sales funnel, and approximate staffing levels at vaiours points in time (This really falls out of an MS project plan
5) Allow aggregations at the vendor level - consideration of the needs for multiple upcoming projects at once.
6) Allow employers to assign a resource to a job, locking that candidate down and removing him/her from the pool currently being considered, and from the list of needs for an aggregate set of projects
7) Allow empoyees to record actual quality levels, which would dynamically evolve trust levels
Other nice-to-haves
1) remuneration schemes for “successful” referrals of candidates
2) instantiate this same UI for the upstream workflows: allowing clients to register jobs directly with the vendor. Establish trust chains with more dimensions to allow clients to make better choices about a particular vendor.
By Jeremy Chan on Dec 19, 2006