Centralizing Employment: How Millersville University overhauled their student hiring process.
At Millersville University in Pennsylvania, student employment is a huge part of the university ecosystem. However, until recently, the student employment process was a pain point for everyone involved: the students, the hiring managers, and the human resources office.
“I joined Millersville in October of 2019, and from my previous experience with PeopleAdmin, I could see that there were opportunities to expand its use at Millersville,” says Andrea Hauri, Assistant Director of Human Resources. She attended PeopleAdmin’s Certified Admin Training to gain a deeper understanding of the platform in order to take Millersville’s student hiring to the next level. “That’s how I realized we could add performance evaluations and a student employment section,” Hauri noted. And that was the start of some big changes.
Student Employment Processes
When Hauri joined the Millersville HR team, the student hiring process was not standardized or centralized. “Student employment was left to the devices of any department that had the budget to hire a student,” says Hauri. A hiring manager would email the human resources
department with information about an employment opportunity, which the team would then share in their newsletter. Job descriptions, information requirements, and application processes varied widely. Some applications required only an emailed resume, while other hiring managers built their own applications. The variety of processes made it difficult for the HR team to track new hire paperwork and ensure that everyone completed a full onboarding. In addition, the scattered processes sometimes saw students filling out and filing paperwork and clearances without ever applying for a job, resulting in unnecessary fees and administrative work.
Detangling student employment was a challenge Hauri, with the help of PeopleAdmin, was ready to tackle.
The Implementation Process
Hauri and her recruiting team worked with the PeopleAdmin team to implement a student employment module that would standardize student hiring across departments. One priority was to make the process as simple as possible, to ensure easy and frictionless adoption by everyone involved.
“The implementation process was fabulous,” says Hauri, “The key was that we spent time testing before our meetings so that our implementation rep could make changes on the spot when we met.” The team decided that live testing would be the best way to figure out how the student employment module would be most successful was to test it out live on a small scale.
“We started with a single open student role, creating a live application in partnership with one department and making tweaks as applications came in until we closed the role,” Hauri shared. She recommends this “soft opening” to anyone going through an implementation process. Small-scale testing allows for real-time, actionable feedback, ironing out the process before debuting the module to hundreds of people at a time.
Streamlined and Simplified
The student employment module has been a huge success. The streamlined process has been quickly and easily adopted by hiring managers, who are thrilled by its simplicity. Now, paperwork is digitized and formerly manual actions, like notifying payroll or asking HR to run a background check, are automated. Fewer emails and less paperwork mean less room for error, no missed forms, and standardized onboarding. In addition, with one centralized location to share and manage job applications, it’s easier for students to find and apply for open positions. Different departments, including admissions, can now direct students seeking employment to a website where all openings are listed.
Thanks to PeopleAdmin, the Millersville HR team was able to take control of the complex student employment process, digitizing everything and making it more accessible to every user.
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