The secret to better recruiting — Tips from Aims Community College

Ranae Covel, HR generalist at Aims, explains how her team modernized their recruiting processes and improved employee satisfaction.get it on iTunesWant to learn more?
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Kevin Keenmon: Welcome to PeopleAdmin’s higher education podcast. Today’s episode will cover how Aims Community College streamlined their student hiring process.
Now, for those of you who don’t know PeopleAdmin is the leading provider of cloud-based talent management solutions for education.
My name is Kevin Keenmon, and recently, I had the chance speak with Ranae Covel, HR generalist at Aims Community College, and she explained how her college’s director of financial aid manages the student hiring process.
Ranae Covel: When students apply for financial aid through the grant of the government or whatever, they have to meet certain criteria. So our director, she goes through all of those motions with the students and those who are interested in work study then, you know, she will encourage them to apply to the postings that are available either internally within the college itself, or we’ve also reached out to community partners if they want to hire work-study students as well.
Kevin: To help her manage this process more easily, she requested to use Hire — PeopleAdmin’s applicant tracking system — which the human resources team was already using.
Ranae: We had a different program previously that we were having the students make applications to for the job postings. It was not the smoothest process. So when she learned about what we had with PeopleAdmin, she thought it would probably make more sense to have this all in one system.
Kevin: With the process set up in Hire, Aims is able to support cross-departmental workflows that allow them to streamline the student hiring process.
Ranae: Oh, well, many more of us are involved, and the work-study students of course are part-time. And so we’ve sort of divided up the HR hiring process into: certain people do full-time, certain people do the part-time hires. But the process is simplified now.
We can all see, and we can all assist with whichever if need be. The work-study students that … they’re directed to go online and to search for the postings. And we trained all of the supervisors on how to use the system so they could actually post their own positions with HR just doing a quick overview and making sure that all of the boxes are filled appropriately.
And we set up the position type for work-study. So the students, as they go through the financial aid office and they learn about what the work-study program is and how they can get paid while they’re working as a student, then they’re directed on, “here’s a quick guide on where to go in the system” and how to apply and what they need to do on their end.
Kevin: Aims also allows outside employers — known as community partners — to use Hire to recruit students as part of the work-study program.
Ranae: For the community partners outside of Aims, we set up a division called “off campus work-study employers.” We gave the financial aid director access as the division rep for that division and then each employer is set up as a department.
And whoever doing the employment for that employer is the supervisor. So they can set up their own postings as well. We give them the same training: how to navigate through the system, how to select the applicants and how to hire them.
So the financial aid director, she’s really the one monitoring the financial aid for each of those work-study students, whether they’ve hit their maximum allowed moneys for that program or whatever. So, and then she keeps in touch with the outside employers as well as the internal departments that are hiring the work-study students.
So as far as HR is concerned, we just ensure that the background checks are done, that the person is appropriately hired, and that the paperwork is done as far as HR is concerned in employing those students.
Kevin: Overall, Ranae believes the Hire applicant tracking system has improved the student hiring process for HR, financial aid, supervisors and students.
Ranae: Transitioning it over, it’s been working out much more smoothly.
Kevin: Well, there you have it: Best practices in higher education talent management. If you’d like to learn more, please visit PeopleAdmin.com. Thank you for listening.