Columbia University

The Challenge

Founded as King’s College in 1754, Columbia University has been providing a world-class education to its students for almost 250 years. Located in New York, the institution has grown into a globally renowned Ivy League establishment, with 17 schools across 5 campuses, supporting 11,500 staff.

The University operates under a highly decentraliseddecentralized hiring model. Associate Vice President for HR, Liz Braden, and Director of Talent Acquisition, Demi Williams, work in Columbia’s central HR faction. This central unit supports the school and department hiring teams in sourcing the best quality candidates to fill their open roles. But, in the current climate, finding the right candidates in a timely manner has been more challenging than ever.

In the past having a large applicant pool for our open positions was never a challenge for us. However, since the pandemic, our schools and departments have had more open positions, and we’re experiencing a significant decrease in applicants. For our higher ed specific roles, we’re down approximately 30% in application volume.
—Liz Braden
Associate Vice President for HR
Columbia University

Historically, Columbia was able to leverage its name, benefits, and reputation to attract the best talent. But, when the pandemic hit, it struggled to compete. With the Great Resignation and the rise of remote work, applicant volumes dropped. Jobseekers flocked to employers offering large corporate paychecks, or greater flexible working opportunities.

The focus

As applicant numbers dropped, the central HR team realisedrealized they needed to do something different to support the departmental hiring teams. While their PageUp ATS helped them to streamline hiring post-application, they needed a solution to help attract jobseekers at the top of the hiring funnel.

“We needed something that could help us better promote Columbia, and would enhance our candidates’ experience,” says Liz. “We wanted to be proactive in our approach by connecting with candidates —even if they didn’t apply at first. That way, we could build pipelines for our hard-to-fill and high-volume positions.”

The University also needed access to deeper analytics to help evaluate its approach. That way the team could pinpoint what was working —and what wasn’t —and adjust their strategy to match.

The solution

Columbia partnered with PageUp to put in place a comprehensive top-of-funnel approach. Recruitment Marketing gave the team a no-code career site, a powerful CRM and comprehensive analytics. What’s more, the team was able to launch the project in just 60 days.

This was an incredibly fast implementation for us,” Demi says. “We are a university that requires a lot of consensuses, a lot of conversation, a lot of buy-in. So to do this in 60 days has been really incredible.”

Post-implementation, the team was able to take full control of Columbia’s career site: no more waiting on IT or marketing to action site requests. Without any prior IT experience, they’ve been able to create content and build on-brand landing pages to target their key talent segments.

The team saw an immediate rise in activity within hours of going live with their upgraded career site. Now, with custom communication flows and in-depth analytics, the institution can ensure an outstanding experience for both jobseekers and its internal hiring teams. What’s more, Recruitment Marketing works seamlessly with their ATS, allowing the team to track and evaluate every stage of the journey.

Using Recruitment Marketing Columbia was able to:

Build an on-brand, highly configurable career site with custom calls to actions — no coding required.
Use the CRM to build talent pipelines.
Automate candidate engagement and streamline communication workflows.
Take control of their career site management —no more waiting on IT.
Dive deep into analytics to track and evaluate what’s working and what’s not.
See where jobseekers were coming from and understand sourcing channel effectiveness.

“I can tell you with full confidence and humility that I walked into this project with zero skills. I say this to you to really underscore how user-friendly the system is. If I can do it, anybody can do it. Lean in hard to your PageUp team. They will help you set it up, and you will see the results immediately.”
—Demi Williams
Director, Talent Acquisition
Columbia University