‘Being able to get rid of those processes really put us in a better place. Managing promotions and transfers is much easier now’
College and university leaders often find that cumbersome, paper-based position management processes negatively impact the entire talent management life cycle, but several higher education institutions are using technology to turn that around.
“Before implementing Positions, we were using some old and outdated processes,” said LynnAnn Brewer, Employment Manager at Texas State University in San Marcos. “Being able to get rid of those processes really put us in a better place. Managing promotions and transfers is much easier now.”
Texas State uses PeopleAdmin’s Position Management solution to maintain accurate, up-to-date job descriptions, classifications, and position frameworks that support an effective talent management strategy. LynnAnn says the solution also helps her institution comply with the Texas Public Information Act, which allows the public to request government records, such as those at Texas State.
“We’re subject to things like open records,” she explained. “Now, we can go back and look at the history of a position or transfer or promotion and show exactly what happened.”
That ability comes from Position Management’s History tab—a feature that’s also popular at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
“Instead of trying to find this piece of paper, you just click into the system, and voilà! You have this whole History tab of where a request is currently sitting, who approved it, and the time frame it spent in each area,” said Anthony Cross, HR consultant at Rutgers. “It’s a great tracking tool.”
For Gina Ferraro, Human Resources Executive Assistant at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts; however, the most impressive benefits are the ability to make on-the-fly updates to ensure position descriptions reflect current processes and saving time by empowering supervisors to view position descriptions.
“If someone requests so and so’s job description, I simply let them know that we keep them up-to-date under the Positions module and they’re able to look it up in the system,” she said. “And the responsiveness of PeopleAdmin is outstanding — any question I ask is always answered promptly. And if they don’t know, they tell me they don’t know and they get back to me. So it’s just very good, A-plus.”