Customer Success Story: Morgan State University

How MSU’s partnership with PeopleAdmin is furthering the goal of a centralized digital system.

When Nicole Credle first joined the staff at Morgan State University in 2017, the human resources team had just transitioned to PeopleAdmin’s Applicant Tracking System. Credle, who is now Morgan’s Interim Associate Vice President of Human Resources, says that the university was still using paper applications for all its job searches up until the 2017 implementation of ATS. The paper system was both outdated and troublesome. “We’ve closed a gap,” says Credle. “There was too much room before for administrative error. Now, there’s an efficient system that takes the unnecessary burden away, freeing up time to focus on strategy and recruiting efforts instead of paperwork.” Credle estimates that ATS has cut the HR office’s application processing time in half.

The team has benefitted so much from ATS that in 2019, Credle petitioned Morgan State’s leadership team to add the Employee Records and Performance Management Modules. With their approval, the HR office is now moving closer to their goal of a completely centralized, electronic system.

Easing the COVID-era Transition

Having the Applicant Tracking System in place before the sudden remote shift brought on by COVID-19 was a huge help to Credle and her team. Since they’d already migrated away from a paper system, they were able to seamlessly transition out of the office without sacrificing fast response times, good customer service, or necessary compliance activities. The team was able to continue running background checks and responding to inquiries, with little trouble. Job inquiries and applications are an important first impression of a university for a candidate; Credle says that a visually clear and user-friendly job portal is an important factor in attracting quality candidates. For MSU, PeopleAdmin rises to the occasion of making sure that systems and processes align with where the workforce is today.

The Benefits of a Single System

Credle wants to extend that user-friendly accessibility into the onboarding process, which also has been manual (until the soon-to-be-launched Employee Records system takes effect). The human resources department alone has several disparate systems already, so when planning the digitization of the inefficient onboarding system, Credle knew she wanted to build on the existing partnership with PeopleAdmin. “I’m glad to keep the processes together under one vendor, rather than having to maintain multiple relationships,” Credle said. “We’re taking the systems we have and building on them, rather than going back to old processes.” Credle was also pleasantly surprised by the Higher Ed Platform’s single sign-on option, which she called a dynamic and useful tool.

Sustainability

Sustainability is an important goal for Morgan State University, and PeopleAdmin’s Higher Ed Platform is helping them to take further steps in the right direction. MSU’s administrative functions are now 95% electronic. The university just opened a brand-new, sustainable administrative building, and the HR office has more space than ever now that they’ve digitized their paper files.

Data Collection and Reporting

As a state agency, MSU deals with many reporting requirements—all of which must be completely accurate and as up to date as possible. Currently, Credle’s office handles all of this reporting and data collection by hand, with paper evaluations and manual metric measurement. This is made even more complicated because each different campus group, like union employees, faculty, and administrators, are evaluated according to different criteria. As it stands, with the many variables and the precision needed to collect and report all the necessary numbers, the MSU team began collecting evaluations on June 1st to be ready for the reporting deadline in September. The Performance Management module is going to change all of that, according to Credle, by collecting and sorting the data automatically. “The dashboard is crucial,” says Credle. “PeopleAdmin can do in milliseconds what it takes us months to do. It provides the flexibility to have different evaluations for each campus group and automates the reporting process.”

A Vision for a Centralized System

“What I value about PeopleAdmin is that I provided the vision and they provided the direction,” Credle said. Her biggest tip to anyone considering PeopleAdmin is to go in with a vision of what you want your processes to look like. There is so much opportunity for customization and the PeopleAdmin team are the experts on shaping the platform to suit the needs to a department or university. Credle also recommends being ready to act fast. “PeopleAdmin has a full team ready to implement and configure the platform right away,” notes Credle. “That kind of urgency is what we need in the workforce right now, because things have changed so much.”

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