Recruiting a great team makes business growth so much easier. Unfortunately, sorting out good from bad job applicants can be extremely complicated, costly and time-consuming. With greater staff mobility and increased job applications due to the downturn, it is becoming even more difficult to find star employees.

There are hundreds of applicant tracking systems and recruitment software solutions out there but most fail to address the central problems of recruitment. Most recruitment software offer basic automation of the recruitment process but a 2008 Gartner study showed that most recruitment databases fail to address these key challenges:

Recruitment Systems and the TRIS Recruitment CRM
Informatica Qatar is proud to be affiliated with Australian company Recruitment Systems. Recruitment Systems develop and sell the TRIS Recruitment CRM which was the world’s first fully-functional Recruitment CRM and is the world leader in this category of recruitment software. Recruitment Systems and Informatica Qatar will be attending GITEX Technology Week this October and have several free passes available. Contact Us for more information.


• Candidate quality
• Candidate sourcing
• Acceptance rates of top candidates

To address these challenges, we recommend applying the principles of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to your recruitment and staffing processes. Recruitment CRM software give your recruiters and HR staff powerful new marketing, financial management, sales and candidate management capabilities. Recruitment CRM can help focus your team on building and nurturing relationships with top candidates.
Recruitment CRM will assist you with the key roles of recruitment management:

• Planning - Recruitment CRM help you develop and implement plans for business growth. These systems should scale with you as your plans progress and your business grows.
• Organising - With a Recruitment CRM, all contracts, resumes, candidate contact details, notes, and communications across your organization will be securely and logically filed. With a quick search you can quickly locate essential information within these documents.
• Monitoring - Recruitment CRM make it easy for you to access simple reports like KPIs as well as highly sophisticated business intelligence.
• Controlling – Recruitment CRM allow you to recruit using the methods that work best for your industry. Your HR staff and recruiters will be guided through the whole recruitment process with a logical workflow.

Artificial Intelligence to Separate Good from Bad
To help you handle thousands of resumes and quickly identify the top quality candidates, some Recruitment CRM use artificial intelligence. Through artificial intelligence it is now possible for systems to read and interpret CVs for your consultants. This technology will pick up all relevant information about a candidate and parse it into your database for easy searching. As well as saving recruitment and HR professionals an average 45 minutes per job in data entry time, your database will be enriched with much more valuable information. The result is less job advertising costs and higher HR productivity.

What do you do about your WAN connection bandwidth being consumed by low-priority applications? For example, sales people are logging orders at the branches, and the ERP application is slow to respond. Do you know that streaming music or radio can consume 128kbps? If your WAN connection is 2Mbps, then each music listener consumes 6.25% of that bandwidth. It would only take 4 employees to eat up 25% of precious bandwidth, literally QR 12,000 to QR 15,000 per year!

The most practical way to control the bandwidth is to prioritize the data at the branch gateway connection. By installing an appliance like the StreamGroomer, you can give higher priority to certain applications such as ERP or CRM software. The effect will be that music listeners and video watchers will get degraded performance on the music and video feeds, but the priority applications will be fast.

It might also be necessary to lower the priority of email. When users download large email messages, they should not utilize the entire bandwidth for that reason alone. The StreamGroomer can allot a smaller bandwidth to the email messaging.

If a StreamGroomer or similar appliance is installed, the resulting benefit is two-fold: (1) you get the most out of your current bandwidth (ie, increased ROI on monthly WAN connections fees), and (2) you don’t need to upgrade your WAN bandwidth to solve the problem.

A spike voltage that hits a PC or server will probably stop working, and even fry some of the internal components and circuitry. You can protect against such spikes by using a surge suppressor – a device designed to protect electrical devices from voltage surges. If there is a power cut altogether, then an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will ensure constant electric power to the equipment.

Additionally to this, a UPS will “smooth” the voltage variations (increase or decrease in voltage) to guarantee that the electronic devices receive a uniform voltage that is acceptable for them to function properly. The internal battery in the UPS allows you to continue using a PC (or any other connected device) when there is power failure. Some advanced functionality of UPS’s allows you to connect them to a server via USB, and if there is a prolonged power outage then the UPS will signal the server too gently shut-down.

The bottom-line of all this, is that if you haven’t already invested in a UPS for your electronics, then it might be time to do so now. It just depends on how important it is for you to protect your data and servers.

• Vodafone: Saved over 13,500 flights per year through videoconferencing, reducing carbon emissions by over 5,000 tons. Realized ROI in one year.
  
• HSBC: CIO’s 14 direct report are equipped with desktop video as part of the company’s worldwide environmental initiative.
  
• Scott Co., TN: Distance learning program increased number of students with access to resources, saved $19,000 in fuel costs, and 3,124 tons of CO2 annually.
  
• Swedish Customs Service: Holds 60 videoconferences per month, for “a direct reduction in C02 emissions by 7 tons each and every month.”

It’s easy to imagine that implementing video to reduce travel will reduce cost, but there are many productivity benefits that come along as well. We can just talk about a few scenarios here.

1. Video allows you to get your best and brightest all together in one place when you need them, without waiting for them or materials to arrive. That means you can make decisions faster.
   
2. You may have remote expertise in one area of your organization. Why send them out into the field if you can enable them with video to provide remote diagnostics, repair, or just advice.
   
3. Keeping everyone in the organization on the same page is another benefit of video. You can share information on new policies in real time, maybe a town hall meeting, right down to the desktop.
   
4. And finally, work/life balance improves when people don’t have to travel. That means you have an easier time recruiting and retaining employees. And they are more productive as a result.

Getting Started

No one is perfect. This is a long road and we are certainly not there yet either. Based on past experiences, we wanted to share with you some suggestions of how to move forward. We hope that videoconferencing can play one part in your action plan for environmental responsibility.

• Meet or beat environmental regulations for your industry
• WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment)
• RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances)
  
• Build programs for facilities and operations
• Recycling
• Printing/purchasing
• Travel reduction/telecommuting
  
• Get a baseline audit
• Consultants, Academics
• EPA Climate Leaders, CERES
• Build a team and find a champion
• Publicize your success internally




]]> http://i-qatar.com/going-green-with-tandberg/feed/ http://i-qatar.com/your-network-is-as-fast-as-your-slowest-link/ http://i-qatar.com/your-network-is-as-fast-as-your-slowest-link/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:45:07 +0000 Admin http://i-qatar.com/?p=29 Speed up your network by optimizing the slowest component.
Part 1: Storage

While you are hard at work trying to meet a submittal deadline, the file server works against you by not pulling up the documents fast enough. Why was this thing fast when it was first installed, but now it is bogging down? (1) More people are on your the network, (2) more employees access saved files as a routine part of their job, (2) documents keep getting larger. In the end, it is usually the increased usage that affects file save/retrieval performance.

You may not need to upgrade your entire network, just the slowest part. In the case of storage, it could be as simple as the hard drives. A dedicated files server, cluster or SAN is a significant investment, so management is reluctant to replace it. Your file server could be running on 5000rpm or 7200rpm hard disk drives. However, the performance of new hard disk drives has improved over the years. Upgrading the drives could be a relatively inexpensive approach to significantly increase performance. The data can be backed up, drives replaced, and data restored.

Storage Solutions
A SAN can be created by connecting one or more servers to a fibre channel (FC) or iSCSI switch, and connecting the external storage systems to the FC or iSCSI switch as well. The new FC/iSCSI network is the network portion of the SAN.

IQ supplies the following storage products compatible with SAN’s:
• HuaweiSymantec OceanStor S2600
  (upto 12TB)
• HuaweiSymantec OceanStor S5000
  (upto 120TB or 240TB)
• HuaweiSymantec OceanStor N8000
  (upto 7,680TB or 15,360TB)

Again considering increased usage, you may have a file server that is also functioning as a database/ERP engine. Thus the server is now accessing the hard drives for two drive-intensive uses. If the load is heavy enough, the server has to wait as it finds open processing time slots to process queries/saves, and retrieve/save the data, be it files or database records. In this case, the business is ready for a second server dedicated to storage. The business operation might need two new servers:

• One to house the database (database storage server), and
• One for file storage (document storage server).

In this example, you would end up with three servers, one of which is the original server running the database engine. In effect, the approach is to distribute the load between data access (storage) and data processing.

Any software running on the server could potentially slow it down. Some tips on minimizing their effects: (1) Run only what is required for the business operation and security, (2) schedule automatic updates and backups outside business hours, or during off-peak hours if the business is 24/7, and (3) perform any maintenance operation during off-peak hours.

There are also hardware failures that can lead to degraded performance. Bad sectors on hard disk drives may slow down a system as it constantly tries to re-map or re-write the data. It is advisable to run a disk diagnostic utility to see if that is cause. On many systems, a basic test can be run as easily as rebooting, entering the boot menu (often F12), and running the diagnostics tool.

Lastly, the problem could be the server itself. It may not have a fast enough hard drive controller to handle the load. This requires a new disk controller upgrade. There is a likelihood that the new controller is not compatible with the existing hard disks, which would then require upgrading the hard disks as well. Thus management should weigh the cost of a new system entirely against the cost of upgrading an older system.

This article is by no means a comprehensive guide, but covers some of the basic points related to storage server performance. The best advice we can give is be certain of the cause of the lag in  performance before purchasing new equipment. You will be able to deploy a solution that actually addresses the current issues, while putting in place a plan that helps address a recurrence of the problem.

]]> http://i-qatar.com/your-network-is-as-fast-as-your-slowest-link/feed/ http://i-qatar.com/wolframalpha-a-new-type-of-web-engine/ http://i-qatar.com/wolframalpha-a-new-type-of-web-engine/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:34:43 +0000 Admin http://i-qatar.com/?p=28 Wolfram|Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com) is a new type of web engine. Not a search engine like Google, but rather a computational knowledge engine. It generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. The ultimate goal is to allow users to enter questions rather than simply typing keywords.

It has a wealth of information, for example you can type in Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and get the basic biography of His Highness the Emir. However, you can also type in How old was Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani when Barack Obama was born, and get the exact answer (which is 10 years, 8 months, 3 days).

The engine also constantly updates its answers, for instance type in moon and it will tell you the distance from the Earth to the Moon. But it’s not just the average distance you would find with a search engine, it’s the actual distance right now, which varies from hour to hour.

One of the big differentiators with this Fact Engine is that its content is peer-reviewed rather than user generated - like Google or Wikipedia. Consequently, it becomes a wonderful online tool for students, scientists, researchers, teachers and journalists. The data is quite current; for example, try h1n1 or swine flu and you will be told how many cases and deaths there have been, either numerically or graphically (linear or logarithmic).

The beauty behind the system is that it is able to take vasts amount of factual information and then break them down to their simplest level; and then rebuild it based on users’ input and requirements. The theory behind this lies in the cellular automata systems in which a set of simple rules and data can be used to generate surprisingly diverse patterns. Consequently, there is no top-down hierarchy. Instead, the basic building blocks interact only with other nearby parts, and thus complex global behaviors emerge.

But aside from the philosophical and theoretical aspects from this pseudo-artificial intelligence system, Wolfram Alpha is still just fun to use. The practicality behind the system is also deceptively useful, as it applies to all walks of life and trade. Give it a try: http://www.wolframalpha.com.

]]> http://i-qatar.com/wolframalpha-a-new-type-of-web-engine/feed/ http://i-qatar.com/hello-world/ http://i-qatar.com/hello-world/#comments Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:19:22 +0000 Admin http://i-qatar.com/?p=1 Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
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