Applican

“Are they are applican or an applican’t?”

Applican is a resume/job position tracker for use within small-company intranets. Applican allows members of your team to track potential hires through the hiring process, while making the voting and management as easy as possible.

Applican cannot tell you who to hire, nor can it find you potential hires, nor can it write your interview questions but it can help you track your hiring decisions across multiple positions and multiple applicants.

Applican is written in Ruby (v1.8.6) and is built atop the Ruby on Rails framework (v2.1).

This software is currently considered “in development”, which is to say: it runs on my machine, it runs on our internal network at the office, and in both cases it works but further testing has not yet been done. And the v1.0 feature-set has not yet been fully implemented.

Installation

It’s a Rails app requiring Rails 2.1 or later. Install as per usual, run “rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=’production’” and ideally off you go. I recommend running it on Passenger if you can; it appears to work extremely well.

Workflow

It goes a little something like this: reviewers have positions that have applicants that move through hiring stages via votes.

Screenshots

That’s a fine looking chart, to be sure, but charts suck. Here’s the actual application.

Positions Index

Displays all the currently-open positions as well as a brief from the position description and a list of everyone who’s responsible for reviewing applicants.

Position Page

This screenshot shows the actual workflow for a position, in this case “PHP Developer”. The logged-in user (“Chris”) is one of the reviewers for this position – he’s been assigned to vett applicants.

So far there have been two applicants for the position: Bob and Lucy. Bob is doing quite well but Lucy not so much.

In this particular instance Chris must have voted ‘yes’ to Bob in the Letter stage, voted ‘yes’ to Bob in the Resume stage but has yet to vote on Bob in the Phone Interview stage. We can also infer from the fact that Bob is up to the Phone Interview stage that the other two reviewers have also voted ‘yes’ to him at the previous stages.

We can also see that Chris has voted ‘no’ to Lucy in the letter stage (likely because she ended her letter with “lolz!” Don’t do that.)

From the vote counts on Lucy we can see that neither of the other two reviewers for this position have yet to vote on Lucy – if they had her vote count would total three.

Applicants Index

Displays all the applicants in the system, in alphabetical order. It also displays a brief summary of their contact info and lists the positions they’re currently being considered for.

Users Index

Users are people in your company who have permission to access the application. Only admins can add or edit positions and applicants.

Vetting Stages Index

Vetting Stages are the points in the hiring process at which evaluations about an applicant are made. It obviously denotes a sequential process; in this particular case an applicant must make it through six vetting stages starting with their introductory letter (do we want to even bother looking at their resume?) all the way up to the “hire” decision.