March 13, 2003
More choice, faster service is hallmark of HR’s new job placement unit
Just one year after a merger between two Human Resources units, the new Recruiting and Candidate Services seems to be hitting its stride.
The office of in-house staffing experts got leaner, eliminating three FTE, and partnered with Volt Services Group. Those two moves allow the office, comprised of the former University Temporary Services and Recruiting and Employment Services, to charge below market rates for a pool of potential employees that is bigger and more qualified than ever, according to one staffing coordinator in the unit.
“We think we’ve got the best pool of University of Washington-qualified candidates at rates that just can’t be touched on the outside,” said Jill Rinehart, the HR director for the unit.
Recruiting and Candidate Services’ pool of potential employees is literally a small city. Employers can choose from almost 100,000 potential employees, Rinehart said. That’s up from a pool that lagged between 3,000 and 4,000 under the old University Temporary Services office. And the type of employee available has changed too.
In the past University Temporary Services was known for having employees who could help with filing or answering the phone. Today the group places employees who do that and everything from work as mid-level managers to maintenance and repair of refrigerators. The changes have been well received by hiring managers on campus.
“The biggest benefit I’ve noticed since the merger has been the speed of getting a new employee,” said Beth Holand, a parking supervisor in Parking Services. “Before, I’d turn in the form and it would take two or three weeks. Now I can fill out the form a week before I know I’ll need someone and sometimes they’ll have a name the next day.”
Holand uses temporary workers on a regular basis for special projects within Parking Services. She raves about the job the office does.
“The people at Volt and at Recruiting and Employment Services are wonderful. They’re helpful, they want to make sure it’s the right fit. The couple of times it hasn’t worked out they immediately rectified the situation.”
The merger has meant that the employees who recruit for direct staffing positions now also do temporary staffing. That keeps costs down and increases efficiency by limiting the number of contacts a potential employee needs to make on campus. Rinehart says most workers in the temp pool are also interested in permanent positions. So it makes good sense to have Recruiting and Employment Services employees fill both temporary and permanent positions.
“We needed to lower our rates to get more competitive with the agencies out there,” Rinehart said. “We really took a look at the workflow within our own staffing unit and the overhead that we had here and decided that consolidating the workflow was the right thing to do.”
A markup that ranged from 46 percent to 50 percent, comparable to the rate charged by outside agencies, has been reduced to the mid 30s. That markup now ranges from 31 percent to 38 percent whether the employee comes through the UW office or from Volt.
The unit has also focused on improved responsiveness. Rinehart said that ASAP orders will get an almost immediate response from her staff.
Make a 10 a.m. call asking for an employee the next morning and Rinehart said she can guarantee that her staff will be on the job and in touch with the person who made the request by 11 a.m. They’ll work on the assignment and continue to provide regular updates throughout the day. And in those rare situations when, at the end of four hours they haven’t been able to meet the request, Rinehart said someone from the unit will call the person who made the request and tell them they should consider other solutions, even offer suggestions.
She thinks the changes are working. And that’s more than just a gut feeling.
“Actually, I don’t need my gut at all to tell me,” she said. “It’s the individual responses that I’ve been getting from hiring managers. It’s the fact that our usage, the orders that we receive, have almost doubled in the last year. That tells me that something is working. We’re getting repeat business and you don’t get repeat business if you fail.”
The unit will begin a rigorous evaluation of the changes sometime in the next six months.
