Over the last two years, I have created a central hiring portal for my department's four student employee teams using Asana, a project management software. This hiring portal includes an online application for students interested in working for one or any of our teams, and allows the candidates to attach their résumé, indicate their team of preference, and apply for any or all teams. Additionally, it has automated much of our correspondence with candidates and streamlined our application review and interview process.
Prior to this project, each of our four student teams received emails from interested students to their respective team inboxes. As a result, students often applied to multiple teams simultaneously, causing confusion among the hiring managers. Additionally, many potential student workers didn’t even realize our department had four different groups, leading some of our less student-facing teams to experience application and employee shortages.
Aside from the central application, I integrated Flowsana into this project to automate much of our initial communications with interested student candidates. Upon any application submission or notice that a team is not actively hiring, candidates receive an email notification with any updates or action items, all at the press of a button by the hiring manager. These automations are coded into the project by ensuring specific criteria are met with each candidate and sending the appropriate information based on the editable templates we made. As a result, this project has saved our hiring managers hundreds of emails each quarter and streamlined the hiring process.
In addition to increasing efficiency, this project has created a repository of all students who apply to work for our department and indicates teams of interest. For certain quarters where a team might experience a shortage of applicants, a hiring manager can review any previous applicants for other teams and easily review if the candidate may be interested in their team and is qualified based on their application and résumé. This has resulted in less student employee shortages across our four teams and allowed our teams to easily re-route a student candidate to a more appropriate team as needed.
Finally, this hiring portal has expanded into a management tracker of the status of each active student employee. Once a student is hired, they move into each team’s management project, where someone can see the status of an employee’s onboarding, reference their labor codes and HR paperwork, or determine what access and privileges specific employees have been granted. All of this information is easily editable for the hiring managers based on our templates and has provided a drastic increase in transparency with our department leadership on student employee data.
