Professional Aptitude Council

The Challenge

For multi-national companies looking to quickly expand their technical staff in India and China, a key problem was how to find top talent. Because they were such desirable employers, any openings they publicized resulted in a flood of resumes -- the majority of which were from people unqualified for the positions.

PAC quickly established itself with a set of technical aptitude and knowledge tests served through a PHP based platform wrapped around a third party test engine.

Unfortunately, this platform was inflexible and couldn't provide the end to end candidate management that customers wanted.

Our Contribution

As the CTO of PAC and then as an outside advisor, Steve led a rapid effort to hire a technical team and replace the testing engine with a flexible, Rails based solution. Over a 10 month period, several major releases resulted in a completely new site that smoothly imported all legacy data, enhanced the testing engine, and extended the functionality into a complete testing and candidate reporting solution.

The modular design of the new Rails application allowed it to co-exist with the legacy PHP code so that sections of the site could be incrementally replaced. In addition, the new system was able to handle the same volumes with 1/4 of the server capacity PAC had been using for the old PHP system.

Technologies: Rails, PHP Integration, Prototype, RSpec, MySQL