August 5, 2004
UW hiring enters the digital age
The University gets about 6,100 job applications and resumes every month, each one representing the career hopes of a would-be employee.
Those applications come in response to between 250 and 400 job listings posted monthly, each representing a UW hiring manager’s need — sometimes urgent — for a skilled worker.
This traditional process is time- and paperwork-intensive, too, because hiring managers must fill out a personnel requisition for every position. These often get routed to one or several departmental managers for approval, and can suffer delays along the way. The old process also means staff time spent processing the paperwork and getting it where it needs to go, then back to the HR department.
But on Aug. 4, the end of that paper trail came into sight, and the UW’s hiring processes entered the digital age on the Internet.
That’s when the University of Washington Hiring Resources and Employment System, also known also as UWHIRES, was activated, making job-seeking at the UW more of a smooth, online experience — for applicants and hiring departments alike.
Exactly what is UWHIRES?
“It’s a Web-based employment system that does applicant tracking and allows candidates to do online searches for positions,” said Jill Rinehart, the HR Department’s director of recruiting and candidate services. She said the change will mean a lot of time and effort saved at a number of points along the way.
“We’ll be accepting applications online and making the candidates’ resumes available to the hiring managers immediately,” she said. Until UWHIRES, those managers often had to wait to get copies of application materials. “Expediting this for them is very, very important,” she said.
It’s important for the University, too. In human resources as in other fields, time is money. Rinehart said filling job vacancies more quickly will save University resources.
Other features of the new UWHIRES system, as described on the HR department Web site (http://www.washington.edu/jobs), include:
- Enhanced online job search capabilities, by keyword, title, date and more.
- A new candidate profile feature, which gives the same information as a job application, but in data fields that are easy to access and search.
- A way for candidates to track their application status in real time.
- Instant updating for candidate resumes or profiles.
There also is an employee portal to the Web site built exclusively for UW staff. Using the employee portal guarantees recognition as a current UW employee, which is an important factor in many recruitments.
The UWHIRES system was designed by RecruitMax, a Florida-based recruitment company, and adapted for use at the UW by the Computing & Communications Department, Rinehart said.
Rinehart said the new program applies to staff employment at the UW Seattle as well as Tacoma, Bothell, the University of Washington Medical Center and Harborview Medical Center. Though UWHIRES is ready for all-online applications this month, Rinehart knows that in reality it will take time for some applicants to feel comfortable with the new system. That’s OK too, she said. “We hope candidates who are not familiar with online employment applications will take advantage of our help desk, which is available to provide assistance over the phone, e-mail or in person,” Rinehart said. “Candidates can even make an appointment with a help desk team member to walk them through creating their candidate profile.”
The advent of online job applications comes as good news to Betsy Raleigh, an administrator in the School of Business and one of the hiring managers to whom Rinehart refers.
“The Business School has had quite a few openings over the years, and we tend to get a large volume of applications for every job we open,” Raleigh said. For example, she said, the school received 75 applications for a recent program assistant job that came open, and about 70 for an assistant director position.
“We tend to hire using committees and it makes it much more efficient getting information out to committees,” Raleigh said.
“It’s really exciting. It brings the hiring process closer to the hiring officials — they’ll have the information right at their fingertips 24/7. For the University it’s an opportunity to realize we can become much more efficient and effective, streamlining the process and saving us resources.
“I’m very thrilled about it, actually,” she said.
