After my case study of Landscape Ideas i shifted my focus towards some of our in-house products to see if i can write a case study on any of them. Gloscon has a pretty decent line of products such as Jaldibol - an online citizen journalism site, Gujjuweb - Gujarati community website, Gujaratstartups - startup resources site.

Finally i decided to write a case-study on Kinchuk - a city centric job portal giving a totally different outlook to the online job finding business. Kinchuk was unique in the sense that it was built from scratch and very few contributed modules were used for functionality. The key features of the site are done through custom modules.

Kinchuk also included certain new features such as review of a resume in ipaper or finding the trends of jobs posted through tagadelic feature.

I am posting my case study about Kinchuk for the readers who can appreciate the effort that has gone into building this site.

Kinchuk is a job portal built on Drupal 5.x platform along with MySQL. Kinchuk is focused on the targeted job search market which is already crowded with many job portals. So what is new in Kinchuk that separates it from its competitors.

Kinchuk is focused at closing the existing gap in job search portals of not providing targeted search of jobs. By Targeted search, Kinchuk will provide city specific job listings apart from the usual job search based on different types of categories. This makes it easier for a user in a city like Rajkot to get job listings which are specific to his city of interests. This saves time which could have been spent in browsing through jobs that were located in far flung cities.

inchuk has also several Web 2.0 features such as uploading Videos of Interview for the companies to analyze different candidates based on the interviews conducted. There is also a new option for the job seekers to find out the status of their application. These features are currently not there in any of the site.

Kinchuk also provides other premier services such as Resume related services and other useful resources for job seekers. Kinchuk also provides a unique platform for job seekers and job providers to interact on a common platform through forums. Different topics can be created by registered users where they can invite experts or fellow users to post their views.

Kinchuk is built on Drupal Content Management System but owning to its requirement, variety of custom modules were built. Apart from some very innovative features such as location specific search the website also employed new techniques such as ability to view the uploaded resume in 'Ipaper' without downloading and viewing it.

Kinchuk is very different from what today's job portals function such as providing status of a job application, Videos page that shows the video's of both the employers as well as job seekers.

The different Custom Modules that were built for Kinchuk are enlisted below:

1) Company -> Allows employers to create their companies.
2) Job -> Allows employers to post jobs.
3) Job Application -> Allows jobseekers to post job application.
4) Resume -> Allows users to create their resume.
5) Kinchuk custom blocks -> To reach extra functionality.
6) Ajobfrontpage -> Define location block, advanced search block and employers block.

A City-Centric Job Search

Kinchuk provides sub-domains based on city such as delhi.kinchuk.com, mumbai.kinchuk.com. This feature will allow all the jobs related to delhi to be posted in that city only. While searching a job, the job-seeker will not be confused about a job since he would be very clear about the location of the job.

Job Search Feature

One of the Key Areas of Kinchuk is its exceptional "Job Search Feature" - which can be used to search jobs based on different categories. Jobs can also be searched based on the resumes posted by the job seekers. This facility is available only for the employers.

Search feature provided on the front page is a Custom Search tool which populates results based on different criteria like category, location, terms, etc. The result screen provides a result of a list of job that are posted along with the job details such as posted date, location etc.

Resume Seach Feature

This Search feature provided on the inner pages is a Custom Search tool which populates results based on different criteria like category, location, terms, etc.

The result screen provides a result of a list of resumes that are posted along with the details such as posted date, location etc.

Modules Used: Kinchuk Search Module (Custom)

Roles

Since Kinchuk provides a platform for Employers and Job Seekers to interact, the site can be viewed on the basis of different roles.
1.Employers
2.Job seekers
3.Anonymous

The case study has been divided on the basis of differnet roles and how the different roles can use "Kinchuk" to their advantage. Details of features in each role is followed by a short description of how that feature was achieved. Also different custom modules are explained at the end of each "Roles" to give more clarity.

Employers

Employers will find Kinchuk's features to be a departure from the regular features that they experience when using a different job portal. Kinchuk offers a whole new set of features in posting, analysing traffic for a post or finding the status of job applications.

Features

Post a Job

mployers can easily post a job using the "Post a Job" Button, which takes to a page where details of the Job are to be mentioned. This includes Job category, option to select a company for which the job is to be posted, location, compensation, salary range and an option to either paste the resume directly or upload the resume document.

Modules Used: Job Module (Custom)

Job Statistics

This is a unique feature that is available for the Employers. Once the jobs are posted, the Employer can have a complete control over the Jobs and can easily track which posted jobs are Active, Expired, Cancelled or filled.

An Employer can categorize a job a job based on whether a job is Active, Expired, Cancelled, Filled. Employer can also have Statistics for a job that is posted which will give us an Idea of the Activity of particular Job post. http://192.168.0.245/kinchuklive/node/25/stats

Modules Used: Job Module (Custom)

Add Companies

After a user creates an account, he/she can directly start posting a job on the site. The user is also given the feature to create multiple companies and manage multiple jobs in those companies. So Jobs can be categorized both on the basis of types of jobs and types of companies in which those jobs are posted.

Modules Used: Company Module (Custom)

Assign Editorial Roles

A user can also assign "Editorial Roles" to different users for a company. This would allow the flexibility for multiple users to edit "Job Post" of a company.

Modules Used: Company Module (Custom)

Job Applications:

Kinchuk provides a unique "Action Menu" which can categorize different job applications based on unsorted, Maybe, Shortlisted, Rejected.
Employer can give feedback for a particular job application along with taking an action for the application. There is also an option to directly contact the job seeker and also download the job seekers resume.

Employer can either download the document or view the uploaded resume in Ipaper of a potential candidate.

Modules Used: Job Application Module (Custom), Ipaper

Miscellaneous Features

Along with an option to view the job and its details, there is also an "Application Feature" which shows the no. of Job applications received from job seekers for a particular job along with the details.

There is also an option to "Email a Job" to a consultant or a person who can suggest some candidate for the job. There also an option to Print a Job when posted.

Ipaper - Ipaper module allows an easy interface to display any uploaded documents such as Cover Letter, Resumes without the need to actually download them.

Interview Module (Custom) - Interview module provides a facility for the company to upload videos of interview's conducted. This also helps as a ready reckoner to provide insight into the details of an interview and why a promising candidate was accepted or rejected.

Company Module (Custom) - Company module is used for give facility to employer to create their company. So that employer can post jobs for their company. It also gives list of all companies.

Job Seeker

Kinchuk has unique functionalities for a Job seeker such as creating multiple resumes, facility to view uploaded resume in Ipaper and Tracking status of their uploaded resumes.

Resumes

Kinchuk provides a facility to Job seeker can maintain multiple resumes for different jobs and submit these resumes accordingly. For eg. Joe can have resume for Web developer as well as for SEO Expert can have those resumes posted in different job posts.

Tracking an application becomes very easy with Kinchuk as it provides a unique "Status Window". Status Window shows the no. Of times a resume has been viewed and the no. Of applications which has been done for a particular resume.

Modules Used: Resume Module (Custom)

Applications

This section gives a summary of the jobs applied along with their details such as date of application, Location applied for, the status of the job application and feedback provided by the employer.

Modules Used: Job Application (Custom)

Other Important Modules

OpenX Adserver Integration - Integrates the OpenX (Openads) adserver into drupal

Subdomain manager - This module allows us to create new subdomain through drupal. It has settings page there all information related to cPanel will be stored. Initially it allows you to create and delete subdomain.

Domain - CCK - 5.x-1.6-1 Allows administrators to define new content types. Content, content copy, Fieldgroup, Number, Option Widgets, Text, User Reference

Core - optional - 5.7 - Comment, Contact, Help, Menu, Path, Profile, Search, Search 1, Taxonomy Upload

Event - Calendaring API, calendar display and export

Flashvideo - Provides a way to attach Flash video to a node.

Views - The views module creates customized views of node lists.

Forward - 5.x-1.x-dev - Forward this page module

Pathauto - 5.x-2.0 - Provides a mechanism for modules to automatically generate aliases for the content they manage.

Rolesignup - 5.x-1.x-dev - Enable users to sign up for a role.

Quick Tabs - 5.x-1.4 - Create blocks of tabbed views and blocks.

Printer-friendly pages - 5.x-1.1 - Allows users to create printer-friendly pages for nodes and profile pages.

Tagadelic - 5.x-1.x-dev - Tagadelic makes weighted tag clouds from your taxonomy terms.

Kinchuk also has features such as "Resume Trends" which shows the trend of a job-seekers resume, its activity. A job seeker can have the opportunity to refine the resume based on this trend. Similarly "Job Trends" provides an opportunity for an employer to find activity of its jobs.

Kinchuk was developed by a group of development team over the past couple of months. It is now currently under Testing phase and we invite people to test the site and let us know how we can improve it.

Cheers!!!

Rajat :-)