Reengineering the Recruiting Process
The oldest and most prestigious university in the United States, Harvard University, identified a need to create a uniform hiring procedure and centralized administration system and approached Exeter Group to build a solution. The university's decentralized structure mandated that each school handled its own recruiting separately; there was no way to match candidates and openings across schools and schools frequently competed against each other. Without a common system it was cumbersome to collect and track applicant data for affirmative action reporting purposes. Every position filled incurred a steep cost in time and money - with approximately 900 non-faculty job postings open at any given time, the need for an efficient, university-wide recruiting system was critical.

Exeter Group sought Harvard's participation from the very beginning. During an initial Joint Application Design session, Exeter worked with key personnel to determine essential system requirements. This collaborative approach, combined with early prototyping, ensured consensus on requirements, assisted in building organization-wide support, and enabled knowledge transfer between our consultants and client staff.

To be successful, the system had to target the needs of a large and diverse organization. Exeter accomplished this by fusing the central administration with school-level security, as well as establishing school and department-level security measures that encourage lateral movement through the organization and at the same time provide for data sharing under certain conditions.

Exeter Group delivered re-engineered processes including immediate job posting, applicant acquisition, acknowledgment and tracking, candidate self-identification, management reports, and complete AA/EEO compliance. Exeter Group expedited workflow by successfully knitting the separate phases of recruitment into a single, integrated process flow.

The system utilizes a broad range of technologies: Oracle 8 PL/SQL objects, Advanced HTML (Dynamic & Cascading Style Sheets), JavaScript, Perl, VB Access modules, Access, OLE control, and an OCR scanning system (Input-Accel).