Background

The faculty hiring process is about to start in the ECST college. This process is fairly long and complicated. You can check out some of the documents at http://www.calstatela.edu/FacultyAffairs/faculty-searches and see how it works. In particular, please read the following:

The first section, Process Overview and Checklist, of Procedures for Recruiting Tenure-Track Faculty. This provides a good overview of the process.
Sample Candidate Evaluation Spreadsheet, which shows how candidates are evaluated.
On Campus Interview Form, which gives an example of the paperwork a search committee needs to prepare.

The goal of the project is to develop a web-based system to facilitate the faculty hiring process.

Data Requirements

The system must manage the following data:

Departments
Searches. A search is defined as the process of hiring a faculty for an announced position, and everything associated with it.
Search committees. A search committee is formed for each search. A search committee consists of a number of faculty from a department, and one of them is designated as the committee chair.
Various documents like Position Announcement, Recruitment Questionnaire, training certificates of the search committee members, reports, and so on.
- Some documents must be approved by one or more administrators in order for the search to proceed. For example, the Position Announcement must be approved by the college dean and then by the Associate Vice President of Faculty Affairs. To avoid creating and maintaining a complex organization hierarchy in the system, we'll assume that certain users in the system are designated as administrators, and they can access and approve any document.
- Some documents may go through multiple revisions. A new revision contains a new version of the document (usually in the form of a MS Word or a PDF file), and optionally, some notes or comments about the new version.
A log that records the recruitment and outreach activities by the faculty.
Applications, which include the information and files submitted by applicants (a.k.a. candidates) of the position.
Evaluations of the candidates by the search committee. Note that there are several rounds of evaluations: application screening and review, telephone/Skype interviews, and on-campus interviews.
Reports of reference checks.
Various email templates. The system will communicate with the candidates by email, e.g. informing a candidate that he or she has passed the initial review and advanced to Skype interview. There's lots of boilerplate text in those emails, and such text should be kept in the system to generate the emails.