UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Over the next several months, Penn State Human Resources is launching a new effort — the Recruiting and Hiring Experience Initiative (RHEI) — with the goal of streamlining the University’s recruiting and hiring process.
“This new Recruiting and Hiring Experience Initiative is part of a broader effort by Penn State Human Resources to have policies and procedures that are streamlined and easy to use,” said Jennifer Wilkes, vice president for Human Resources and chief human resources officer. “This initiative will provide hiring managers with improved tools to build successful teams. We’ve heard from our employees and stakeholders there are opportunities to improve on our processes, and we’ve taken that feedback to invest in a better, more efficient solution.”
Lori Gondak, senior director for talent acquisition for Penn State Human Resources, said, “The ultimate goal is to make recruiting and hiring faster, smoother and more efficient for hiring managers and candidates. We expect the revised hiring process to reduce manual duplication of effort, offer greater ease of use for the people involved in the process, and decrease the time it takes to fill positions.”
The goal of RHEI is to improve all the activities governing the hiring process, including job requisition, position approval, application, interviews, offer letters, background checks and hiring.
Gondak said Penn State HR is beginning with the first two steps of the hiring process: job requisition and position approval. She said the RHEI will seek to leverage the full capabilities of the Workday platform to help streamline the hiring process and build consistency across the institution, and added that Human Resources will continue communicating about updates to the hiring process.
As part of this, the Hiring Exception Request and Staff Position Description – currently separate processes — will be eliminated and folded into Workday.
“Until now, units seeking to post a job vacancy needed to fill out the Hiring Exception Request and Staff Position Description outside of Workday, which could often be a slow and cumbersome process,” Gondak said. “With these updates, the first thing people involved in the process will see is a reduction in the entry of duplicative information and duplicative approvals. Secondarily, we’ll have standardized language for job postings within Workday that will not only provide consistency, but will take out a lot of the guesswork for managers because information about full-time positions will be stored within Workday and will not have to be reentered every time a hiring manager needs to post an open position.”
She added that the changes to the job requisition and position approval will launch in early May.
As part of the transition, Penn State Human Resources will be providing initial training to human resources personnel, financial officers and budget administrators over the coming weeks. Others involved in the hiring process, including hiring managers and employees with the manager recruiting support role will receive email invitations for training sessions in April on the new processes.
“Ultimately our goal is to make the hiring process easier and faster for all those involved, both inside and outside of Penn State,” Gondak said.