As the consultant for Midstate University Business Placement Office B case, I have researched the history of the interview-scheduling process to determine how the process might be improved. Since their old manual sign-up system was based on students standing in lines for long periods, which resulted in a near riot (Case Study III-11, Exhibit I 540), it was heartening to see that they later made efforts to computerize the process (Case Study III-11, 539-544), although it was still based on the unwieldy manual process that they had started with. Now that the process is Web-based (Case Study III-11,544-547), it is considerably less cumbersome than before and more responsive to the needs of employers and students. However, I would like to makes some observations and propose some changes that they might want to implement to simplify the process even further.
The first observation is that most universities do not attempt to use any type of a bid system for assigning interview slots to students; they just assign them first-come/first-served. It is the bidding that makes the interview scheduling process so complex at Midstate; merely matching up interested parties to available time slots is not particularly difficult, and there are secure commercial applications such as AppointmentQuest that can do the job easily without inordinate cost. AppointmentQuest can handle not just interview scheduling, for which it has built-in capabilities, but also many other types of scheduling, such as admissions, class, workshop, seminar, exam, health center appointment, and computer/equipment repair scheduling, thus making it more functional than the homegrown system Midstate is currently using (ôAppointment Scheduling for Higher Educationö).
My understanding after speaking with university officials is that the primary reason they opted for a more complicated bid system was to give each student a fair chance to obtain the desired interviews. This ...