The challenge
The Department of Human Resource Management (DHRM) is a central state agency for the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is responsible for developing the talent strategy for over 200 unique agencies under the Commonwealth. Operating under a decentraliseddecentralized model, each agency has its own HR office with oversight from the central DHRM team. As part of this, DHRM is in charge of providing the technology and systems needed to support the effective management of people-related data and processes.
During the pandemic, the state government experienced many tenured employees entering retirement. Today, DHRM is focused on supporting state agencies with talent acquisition and retention of current employees. One of the biggest challenges faced within the public sector is attracting candidates to work within the state government when the private sector is often offering greater compensation.
DHRM had been using the same talent management system for years and faced a series of system limitations, including a lack of reporting capability and compliance tracking, difficulty screening applications, and no interview scheduling tools. They were bogged down by manual manipulation of data to build statewide reports and time-consuming processes to extract important information from their system. Across the state, agencies used different recruitment management systems which presented challenges in interfacing job posting with DHRM’s system due to different vendors being used.
The focus
The state knew it had outgrown its current talent management system and wanted to implement a modern solution to resolve its current challenges and system limitations. A new software needed to be highly responsive, load quickly, and provide immediate access to critical information.
Under a decentraliseddecentralized HR model, DHRM wanted all agencies on the same page with a single system that provided greater screening capability and reporting functionality. Allowing agencies to gain visibility across the recruitment processes with ease, to be able to make data-driven decisions and to achieve better hiring outcomes. The system also needed a level of customisationcustomization for each agency to be able to tailor certain criteria within their job applications based on their unique needs.
DHRM was looking for more than a software provider, but a long-term partner that would be able to support their future growth and development to further enhance their talent acquisition effectiveness.
The solution
DHRM implemented the full PageUp Talent Acquisition solution including recruitment marketing, ATS and onboarding capability, with over half of the agencies under the Commonwealth of Virginia now using the PageUp platform.
We caught up with the Director of Policy and Talent Management, Ponette Smith, who was responsible for implementing and stabilisingstabilizing PageUp at DHRM on the impact of their new talent acquisition management system.
By implementing one unique workflow for the whole system, DHRM were able to introduce cohesive systemwide reporting and provide visibility to key recruitment metrics across agencies. PageUp has provided direct access to real-time data, saving a significant amount of time and reducing the amount of requests going to DHRM to pull reports. This has empowered the state agencies to be able to identify what is causing issues and inefficiencies in their recruitment processes.
“State agencies did not have visibility into what was driving their time & numbers to be as high as they were. They now have real-time metrics and visibility into the recruiting process”
said Ponette.
In a true partnership approach, the team at DHRM was able to customisecustomize features and tailor the product to suit the structure of the state government. An example of this included each of the agencies being able to build their own customisedcustomized library of application questions to suit their unique needs.
“There is a lot of flexibility to build an ATS to meet your needs. As a state government with a central HR agency, there is customisationcustomization available to be able to account for the different businesses within the state agencies”.
The team at DHRM wanted a partner that would continually evolve with them and are always looking for ways they can leverage more functionality and better use the system.
“We are still learning new functionality, which is exciting! And because PageUp is a software as a service, they are constantly improving – which I love! So you’re not stale in a system like we were with our previous provider.”
“My favorite thing is PageUp’s willingness to listen to all of my ideas. If they can’t do it now, you know why. I like the community feedback forum, where you can put ideas out there and have the ability to vote for them for future product releases. I appreciate the customer success emails that show what they are working on and what’s coming.”
When it comes to their new careers site and application process, DHRM has received exceptional feedback from candidates coming from outside of the state government on the modernisationmodernization and ease of their new application process expressing, “the state has moved into the 21st century”.
Ponette had overwhelmingly positive feedback on how the customer support has been since the implementation and how efficient PageUp support has been in addressing their team requests and keeping them informed about upcoming product releases.
“On a scale of 1 – 10, I would give them 15. They have been very responsive to our requests and the chat is really easy to answer your questions. Even if I submit a ticket it is responded to relatively quickly, within a couple of hours, if that. It feels like we are our Customer Success Managers only client, and I’m really appreciative of her and the whole support team”
With PageUp’s suite of Talent Acquisition solutions, DHRM has been able to unite its agencies under one system, streamlining processes and providing agencies with direct access to essential reporting. DHRM is looking forward to continually rolling out PageUp across further state agencies and leveraging greater functionality into the future to enhance their recruitment efforts.
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