How Saint Louis Public Schools Automated the Staff Selection Process
Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Clarissa Buckley, Interim Director of Staffing and Human Resource Information Systems, St. Louis Public School District
St. Louis Public School District (SLPS) is one of the largest school districts in Missouri, with 4,400 staff members supporting 23,500 students. The district struggled with an avalanche of documents stored on paper, microfilm, CD and microfiche. All processes used paper-based forms, making them time-consuming, inefficient and costly.
One such paper process was the staff selection process. This process involves the submission of a form detailing the proposed candidate for a staff position.
Before implementing Laserfiche, SLPS found it difficult to track all staff selections made by hiring managers due to high turnover in both HR and district leadership. Paper selection forms were emailed directly to an HR contact, who may not have been the appropriate contact for the school or department. This caused delays in extending employment offers and onboarding new hires. In addition, selection forms were submitted using a variety of methods, including hand delivered paper forms, email, fax, and interoffice mail, making it challenging to locate and respond to each recommendation for hire.
“We have had instances where selection forms sat in the email inboxes of HR team members who may have been out of the office or on vacation and could not reach out to a candidate to offer them employment. In some cases, we missed out on great, talented people because we did not have a centralized collection and response system before Laserfiche.” said Clarissa Buckley, Interim Director of Staffing and Human Resource Information Systems.
In order to save time and labor, SLPS automated the staff selection process with Laserfiche Forms.
“Now, alerts have been created to notify other staff members when employment offers have not been made after 48 hours. We hire between 400-500 staff per year and integrating Laserfiche has made this hiring process much more seamless.”
Current Process
After a principal or district administrator logs into Laserfiche Forms, their location is automatically populated from a lookup into the district’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
The administrator completes the form indicating the title of the position he would like to fill, the names of the individuals that have been interviewed for the position, and whether or not he recommends the listed individuals for hire.
After submission, Forms sends an email confirmation to the submitter, stating the name of the HR representative handling the request.
Forms routes the form to the appropriate reviewers. The request goes through multiple steps to ensure that the candidate has been extended an employment offer, has received new hire paperwork, and has been scheduled to meet with HR. At each step in the process, the appropriate staff member is notified of a pending task, which he can then complete from within the Forms Inbox.
Principals and department heads receive email notifications throughout the process, keeping them updated on the status of the form. If a selection form has been rejected, Forms sends an automated notification informing the initial submitter of the decision and why an offer of employment could not be made. After the final step has been completed, the form is saved to the appropriate folder in the repository.
Benefits of the Laserfiche
St. Louis Public School District has experienced the following benefits from the Laserfiche implementation:
- Transparency for the district has improved, allowing staff to see where requests are at each stage in the process
- Storage space has been reallocated for use as offices
- Staff time has been saved, allowing employees to focus on more relevant tasks
- Employees are empowered to make their own changes and improvements to the process
- The district can view a history of all staff requisitions as they are stored in a centralized location
