Employment office upgrades recruiting, hiring process

By D. Lyn Hunter, Public Affairs

09 May 2001 | The employment unit at Human Resources has implemented several new programs to streamline the filling of campus jobs and to enhance customer service.

“The hiring process has been a cumbersome one. The delays have, in some cases, caused us to lose top applicants to other jobs and left departments short staffed for too long,” said Edith Ng, director of the Staff Affirmative Action office and interim manager of the employment office. “With these changes, we hope to bring the best employees to campus in a more timely and efficient way.”

One innovation is an interactive, Web-based job vacancy form, allowing departments to list open positions online. The position is then posted on the job listings Web site within one to three days, Ng said — versus a seven-day lag time using the old paper-based system.

The Web-based job listings also include information — including salary ranges, title codes, affirmative action goals and department codes — that departmental staff previously had to look up manually. The system also automatically notifies departments when listings have been submitted and posted. Departmental hiring staff can go online to close, extend or cancel job listings, or to mark them as filled. Such changes will be reflected automatically in the job listings Web site, Ng said.

And applicants may go to the Web site to check the status of a job, eliminating the need for follow-up calls to the department or employment office.

Human Resources has also created a searchable database for job seekers, who can now search for positions by criteria such as salary range, work hours, job title, occupational area or sponsoring department. Up until now, online job listings were searchable only by broad categories.

“These improvements save time for departmental staff, provide applicants with up-to-date information and reduce paper work in the employment office so we can focus more on customer service,” says Ng.

The interactive job-vacancy listing form will be used until the Human Resources Management System is launched in early 2002. The employment office discourages the use of hard copies after the 2001 fiscal year.

The employment office has also implemented a new staff structure designed to provide “one-stop-shopping” for campus units with job vacancies.

Three teams — each consisting of a recruiter, an analyst and an administrative assistant — will work with specific control units and departments to help them with recruiting, selecting and retaining qualified employees.

The three new recruiters were hired because of their expertise in filling job categories such as information technology, administrative, executive, student service, library and research positions, job categories that have been difficult to fill, said Ng.