TEA Winner: St. Charles County, Mo

• Industry: County
• Location: St. Charles County, Missouri
• Number of Employees: 1,250
• Population: 405,262
• Tyler Client Since: 2008
• Tyler solutions used: Enterprise ERP [powered by Munis®], Content Manager, Time & Attendance [powered by ExecuTime]

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Challenge

For St. Charles County, hiring was time-consuming for human resources and hiring managers. The process included hand-delivered paper forms that needed to be signed by many people, and entering new employees into the system and updating employee records were cumbersome.

“In order to hire a single applicant, it took far too much time,” explains Kelly Grote, St. Charles County applications analyst.

The county was using a method where job applicants submitted their resumes and cover letters through a system that only allowed HR to see submissions. HR would then organize all the information and submit the qualifying candidates to hiring managers. Since this process was time-consuming, it limited the amount of times HR could send candidate information to a hiring manager. Hiring managers were unaware of the number and quality of candidates until HR could send the information, which was either after the job posting closed or on a weekly basis.

All information was sent via email between HR and the hiring manager, and new hires were not fully entered into the county’s Enterprise ERP system until two weeks after their hiring date.

Solution

In response to its hiring challenges, St. Charles County leveraged applicant tracking and onboarding functionality in the Enterprise ERP Human Resources Management application to decentralize recruiting and onboarding, changing the way the county does business.

“We came across the self-service functionality for hiring managers when we were actually at the Tyler conference in Dallas in 2019,” says Grote. “We were already long-term Enterprise ERP clients. So once we saw that at the conference, we knew that would be a great opportunity to use as part of our recruiting and onboarding redo.”

Through the use of Tyler’s Human Resources Management, a hiring manager can request a job opening, review candidates, and select an employee without filling out any paper forms. The solution has enabled applicants and hiring managers to perform many tasks electronically through self-service portals.

Automatic emails are now sent out based on candidate status in the job opening. Self-service applications now use kick-out questions to eliminate applicants who are not qualified.

Employee tasks were set up to eliminate large packets mailed out to new hires, and employees can now log in to Employee Access to complete W4s, direct deposit, read county policies, select benefits, update emergency contacts, and more.

Results

Thanks to upgrading its hiring processes, St. Charles County has realized many benefits:

• Reducing phone calls to HR by 50% in the six months following implementation
• Elimination mailings of 18 different forms to new hires, saving $1,000 in reduced mailing and printing costs in the first six months following implementation
• Providing hiring managers with insight throughout the application process

“I think the biggest win has been that the hiring managers now have all the information at their fingertips,” says Grote. “They don’t have to write to human resources to send them information. They don’t have to call human resources and ask them to dig through applicants. It’s all available via self-service in the application.”

Reducing phone calls and emails has made hiring managers and HR staff more efficient.

To date, the county has saved more than 100 hours in staff time, allowing staff to do more with the same number of employees.

Finally, the time it takes to hire individuals has been reduced, streamlining the journey from applicant to candidate to employee. “It’s just a lot quicker to get a new hire in,” says Grote. “We used to have all paper processes that, if you needed something signed, we put it in an envelope and mailed it to the various people who had to sign off. And it could have been a couple of people. So, now it’s all through workflow. You can click a button, and everything can be done within minutes.”