Global Village Consulting Inc. (GVC) Announces Release of the Online Job Application Program for the State of Oregon, Department of Agriculture

VANCOUVER, CANADA, September 9, 2002: Global Village Consulting Inc., a leading developer of object-oriented web based applications, announced today that it has released the Online Job Application Program, a pilot project for the State of Oregon Department of Agriculture. Global Village Consulting Inc. and a team from the Oregon Department of Agriculture worked closely together to determine the vast needs such a program would require.

The Online Job Application Program was designed for the Department of Agriculture to provide a secure, user friendly method for the public and state employees to apply for posted employment positions with the state department. The program developed allows the Human Resources division of the Agriculture branch of the state government to create, organize, and manage all aspects of a job announcement.

The goal of the project for Global Village Consulting Inc. and the State of Oregon Department of Agriculture was to create a secure web based program that would allow access regardless of the user's location. In order to facilitate the wide variety of users accessing the developed system and the need to permit certain functionality to specific users, user groups were incorporated into the security design. This way, users could be assigned membership into specific groups and the functionality presented to logged in users would be based upon their group membership.

The Online Job Application Program is divided into two areas: administration and public. The administration area permits defined department human resources employees to create job announcements. While creating these anouncements, users could use previously generated postings as templates for new ones. In order to take advantage of the knowledge and expertise of employees outside the human resources division, administration users can assign users from other divisions to complete specific tasks for a given job announcement. To organize the variety of people involved in the job announcement creation process system workflow was incorporated. However, users from the human resources division maintained review, edit, and monitoring abilities for all elements of an announcement. By making use of Report Mill, the information for job announcements can be previewed and, once posted to the website, viewed in pdf format. As well, administration users view submitted applications in this format in pdf format.

The public area of the application permits users to create an account within the system. This way, registered users can store all relevant information that could be used when creating an application. When the user sees a job announcement posted they wish to apply for, the information stored in their account is called upon to complete an application. When creating an application, the user can then choose to use or not use recorded data as well as fine-tuning stored information for a specific application without changing their profile. Users can preview, store and view submitted applications in pdf format.

With increased environmental awareness, the State of Oregon is attempting to move towards 'paperless' processes. Thus, the Online Job Application Program will be used as a pilot project to demonstrate how this area of the state government could incorporate this change. It is hoped that the success of the Online Job Application Program by the Oregon Department of Agriculture will be used to encourage the adoption of the program as a state-wide application.