-->PONE-D-24-15807-->-->A Decentralized Talent Recruitment System with Resume Traceability and Privacy Protection Using Consortium Blockchain and IPFS-->-->PLOS ONE

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PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. -->

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Partly

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-->2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

Reviewer #3: Yes

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-->3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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-->4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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-->5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #1: The paper presents the growing issue of unemployment among teenagers and college graduates and the challenges companies face in talent acquisition. Students face the risk of privacy breaches during job applications, while companies deal with high costs, inefficiency, and security concerns related to previous experiences. To address these issues, the authors propose using consortium chain technology and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to create a decentralized talent recruitment system that allows encrypted data to be securely uploaded and accessed on the blockchain, mandating student authorization for resume access. The proposed system meets different blockchain requirements and performs well in several aspects, such as communication cost, computing cost, throughput, and transaction delay.

First of all, I would like to admit that the paper presents a useful application of consortium chain technology in the talent acquisition process, and good implementation can address the existing challenges to some extent.

However, the current shape of the paper, its readability, and the level of contributions are not strong enough to make the paper acceptable for publishing.

To be more precise:

- The research objective and research questions were not clearly defined.

- The paper doesn’t discuss real-life applications of blockchain technology to address similar issues in other fields.

- The study could profit from stakeholders’ opinions to understand the challenges faced as well as the needs of the system.

- The paper is poorly structured and needs thorough textual revisions. Sometimes, it is challenging to understand what the main value/novelty added.

Therefore, considering the reasons mentioned above, I recommend rejecting the paper in its current form.

Additional comments

- Title: Don't use abbreviations in the title

- Abstract: Refine the structure of the abstract.

- Introduction: Refine the structure of. Add statistics about the implications of unemployment and the effect of forging certificates on companies/government/society. Add a clear argument as to why we need blockchain. Clearly state the objective of the study and separate it from the methodology. For the section description, clearly state the topics to be discussed in Section 2.

- Proposed scheme: Add a short paragraph to about the elements of the system architecture.

- Notation: Provide a short paragraph to explain the notation are from where or what.

- Initialization phase: If this is a detailed description of the steps mentioned in the figure, then it is better to move it or merge it with the section above. or rename it as a different section. It seems random. Also, the size of the font is wrong for this subsection.

- Registration phase: as per the comment above.

- Company Recruitment Announcement Phase: same as the comment above.

- Student Job Application Phase: same as the comment above.

- Announcement Results Phase: same as the comment above.

- Analysis: provide a short paragraph introducing the section.

- Verifiable: “This paper achieves several verifiable goals through the architecture of the blockchain”. The sentence is confusing. Are the goals of the paper verifiable through the use of blockchain, or is the feature of verifiability achieved through blockchain?

- Man-in-the-middle Attack (MITM) and Sybil Attack can be merged under one section discussing cyber attacks. Also, why are only these two attacks discussed?

- Discussion: add a short paragraph describing the performance measures or KPIs you will discuss.

- Related Works Feature Comparison: the sentences are not well connected. needs restructuring.

- Conclusion: make sure to indicate the contribution in a paragraph. Add limitations and future work. Remove the duplicated paragraph.

Furthermore, thorough textual revision is needed. It contains many errors and typos.

Reviewer #2: In this manuscript, the authors proposed A Decentralized Talent Recruitment System with Resume Traceability and Privacy Protection Using Consortium Blockchain and IPFS

• This paper is an overall good.

• Implementation section is week, Authors need to include more results to validate the proposed approach and also include comparative analysis of the proposed approach with the existing approaches.

• The presented manuscript is well presented but lack supportive references. In fact, one should expect a reasonable number of references in order to support the claims by literature.

Some of the latest work can be cited as below:

• Introduction to Data Analytics ( https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-3609-0.ch001)

• Data Ethics and Privacy (https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-3609-0.ch011)

• ArMor: A data analytics scheme to identify malicious behaviors on blockchain-based smart grid system

• A data analytics scheme for security-aware demand response management in smart grid system

• RAKSHAK: Resilient and scalable demand response management scheme for smart grid systems

Reviewer #3: The proposed work is good, but it needs the following revisions

1- The paper is quite important and relevant, but I found the technical contribution of this paper is needed to be relooking.

2- Title is needed to relook and make it more appropriate in the view of contribution.

3- Further, The paper's abstract should focus on the importance of addressing this issue. The highlights of the results and how the reader might benefit from the paper's material should also be included.

4- The Introduction section needs to relook to improve its quality and readability.

5- It is also suggested to elaborate the mathematical term in details.

6- Further¸ it is suggested in Related works Section, need to add the existing work and make a comparative table to address the various key gaps in existing work which are going to address through this paper. There is not much recent literature is included in this manuscript, some of the recent literature are listed below. Rather than some other related works are there can be included:

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/14/6376

https://www.techscience.com/cmc/v74n3/50945

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2542660523002925

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10189750

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10584093

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/13/2/691

https://www.mdpi.com/2224-2708/11/3/55

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7502325

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7492748

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7490948

7- Authentication phase for (3.6 Student Job Application Phase) and for the proposed protocol need to be relooked and explain in more details.

8- Justify the security analysis to offer some formal security analysis of the proposed scheme.

9- Further the used Sample and Procedure need to be validating in the respect of measurements of Communication overheads comparisons.

10- Include a brief statement about possible applications that could profit from the suggested methodology in the conclusions section.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Secure and Efficient Graduate Employment: A Consortium Blockchain Framework with InterPlanetary File System for Privacy-Preserving Resume Management and Efficient Talent-Employer Matching

PONE-D-24-15807R1

Dear Dr. Chen,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Shadab Alam, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.-->

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

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-->2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. -->

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #4: Partly

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-->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #2: A thorough proofreading/restructuring/grammar/sentence formation and spelling checking of this article is essential.

Reviewer #4: Manuiscript is well written and presented a research in BVlockchain with Hyperledger fabric. Data provided for the results and comparisions are sufficient. Integration of Consortium Blockchain and IPFS: They have developed a novel

framework that combines the strengths of consortium blockchain for secure, tamper-proof record-keeping with IPFS for efficient, decentralized data storage. This integration addresses both data integrity and storage efficiency challenges in

graduate employment systems.

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-->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy .-->

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #4: No

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