Bates College

The challenge

A leading international liberal arts college, Bates College, has made it its mission to create an academic community that reflects the richness of the world into which its students will graduate. Founded in Maine in 1855, Bates College has always admitted students regardless of race, religion, background or gender and was the first coeducational college in New England.

While an institution recognisedrecognized for innovations in teaching and learning, Bates College was yet to investigate leading-edge HR technology. The college eventually looked for a system that could help them automate, analyze and improve their process for finding, developing and motivating their talent.

Melani McGuire, Director of HRIS and Project Management and Melissa Benoit, Manager of HR Partner Services and Deputy to the AVP of Human Resources at Bates College faced significant challenges with a previous technology solution. Despite their confidence in the potential of HR technology, the team had no other choice but to revert back to their manual, paper-based methods to get the job done.

The focus

Creating a seamless experience for finding and onboarding new hires, as well as keeping track of performance objectives for all employees was critical to the college’s EVP. With two different tools to track and measure performance, the team sought a single solution that would be easy for both HR administrators and employees to use.

For us, performance management was much more than just a box-ticking exercise. We had clear objectives to create excitement for our employees, as well.

Melani McGuire
Director of HRIS and Project Management
Bates College

The other missing piece to the puzzle was the need to automate an exceptional recruitment and onboarding experience to welcome newcomers to Bates College and get their people up to speed quickly. Best-of-breed technology that could tick off compliance requirements and give Melani, Melissa and their team the ability to optimiseoptimize each step of the talent lifecycle was key to their decision-making.

One of the biggest pinch points for US higher education HR functions is getting multiple stakeholders to collaborate effectively on position description documents. Position descriptions play an important role in the college’s overall recruitment process, offering total transparency and ensuring their job postings are compliant with the law. The team needed to “ensure hiring managers and committees were aware of the position requirements needed,” says Melissa. “It’s about getting the right questions into the system to identify top candidates and ensuring that our hiring decisions are based on the position requirements.”

The solution

With the help of PageUp, Melani, Melissa and their team are already seeing the benefits of having a talent system that’s “streamlined and feels much more complete from a talent lifecycle perspective,” says Melani. The team engaged departments across the organisationorganization to create a tailored talent management system that would support their institution and empower the people who use it. Not only are they enjoying their one-stop talent system, they’ve become early adopters of our user-centred solution for position description management.

The job description module is slick. We particularly love being able to quickly filter those candidates and remove bias from the hiring process.

Melissa Benoit
Manager of HR Partner Services and Deputy to the AVP of Human Resources
Bates College