How the City of St. Albert Kept the Hiring Process Moving

In mid-2016, recruitment coordinator Diana Rankin was tracking 27 open positions for the City of St. Albert. These ranged from casual jobs that hiring managers moved through the city’s hiring processes to full-time positions that called for extra applicant tracking effort.

Managers want open positions filled sooner rather than later, or they would not have asked that they be filled in the first place. That’s why Rankin leans heavily on her talent acquisition system.

In a hiring environment that consists of several computer systems plus folders full of paper, tracking 27 concurrently open jobs would be a challenge. Rankin wasn’t using disparate computer and paper silos of information, though. She tracks open positions using her recruiter dashboard in Njoyn, the city’s applicant tracking system. Through the ATS, Rankin can quickly scan all the jobs she needs to track and each job’s candidates. It’s a streamlined process that lets her save time as she checks for updates on positions and keeps processes moving.

“I have all the city’s jobs posted to my dashboard so I can follow progress,” she explains. “When a job closes, if it’s casual and we’re not involved, I contact the managers to see if they have any questions or need any help.”

“Hiring managers love to see the jobs that they have,” Rankin continues. “I check in with them periodically to see what the status is.”  Rankin can also shorten the hiring workflow by skipping stages of the process when they aren’t needed.

“We do it to mimic our old system,” she says, noting that Njoyn doesn’t force organizations to change processes that work for them.  For instance, certain applicants may be moved directly to the interview stage without having to go through prior stages. The city also can skip the “offer” stage and move right to “place.”

“It’s a convenient function,” Rankin says of a feature that helps the City of St. Albert effectively serve its residents.

Read more about the Challenges that the City of St. Albert faced  and how they were solved by implementing an Applicant Tracking system in their case study.