New office created to recruit UW employees

By Bob Roseth, News & Information

With UW offices facing the tightest employment market in memory, Human Resources has reorganized to provide expanded recruitment help, with the creation of a new office whose primary task is helping to fill vacancies and generally to raise the UW’s profile in the community as a desirable place to work.

“As we go out in the community, we find surprising stereotypes about the UW,” says Marilyn Dahl, recruiting and employment manager. “For example, many people are surprised that we have jobs for people other than faculty. People think of the UW for its educational mission, but that doesn’t necessarily help to identify us as one of the region’s largest employers.”

In order to correct stereotypes, and to make people more aware of the range of job opportunities on campus, Human Resources will be signing a contract soon with a major advertising agency to promote the UW in a variety of media - radio, newspapers, bus billboards and perhaps even television. “Our goal is to reach not only those people actively seeking jobs,” Dahl says, “but to tap the passive job market - people who might be encouraged to seek employment here, and to impress upon them what a good place this is to work.”

Human Resources also plans to gauge the effectiveness of different media for filling different kinds of openings - especially Internet advertising. “Up until now, the use of Internet ads has been driven solely by the employing departments,” Dahl says. “We haven’t really developed a strategy. We need to become more sophisticated, to evaluate different sites and to hone our efforts.”

One key to filling vacancies quickly is to learn about potential openings as early as possible. The new Service Teams created by Human Resources will aid in this process.

Each unit on Upper, Bothell and Tacoma campuses now is assigned a team, composed of a senior Human Resource Representative and an Employment Specialist. (Service Teams are being formed very soon to serve Medical Centers and Health Sciences units.) The team will provide all the services that the unit may need, bringing in specialists in benefits, training, recruitment, temporary services, compensation and classification, work/life and other areas as appropriate.

“The Service Teams will provide one-stop shopping,” says Mary Ann Bill, Manager of Human Resources Operations for Upper Campus, UW Bothell and UW Tacoma. “One of the team’s most important jobs in working with clients will be to define employment needs as early as possible,” she says. “The sooner we know about an opening, the sooner we can begin to ask important questions, such as, ‘How should the opening be advertised?’ and ‘What community agencies should we include in recruitment?’ We can begin to involve the recruitment team immediately. Our aim is to make the process appear seamless to our clients.”

The goal of this approach is to make the work of the employing officials easier. “Our new approach is consultative and assisting,” says Bill. “We’re not the gatekeepers: we’re here to work out difficulties and facilitate the employment process.”

While the recruitment specialists will be available to any unit that needs help, they plan to focus on areas of high need and high turnover. The first three that have been identified are technology (especially computing), accounting/finance, and the trades.

“We’re working to develop an information base that will enable us to anticipate employment needs in specific areas,” Dahl says. “For example, we know generally that we could have a ‘bow wave’ of retirements as PERS I employee reach 30 years’ service, but we don’t have good information now on where those people work. Also, by working closely with Service Teams, we’ll develop additional information on units in which major reorganization is occurring.”

In areas with great recruitment needs, Human Resources will partner with units to develop new ways of reaching prospective employees. Recently, Computing & Communications and the recruiters jointly staffed a booth at the Pacific Northwest High Tech Career Expo.

“We were very pleased with the interest in employment at the University of Washington,” says Susan Lawrence, C&C’s manager of administrative services. “We talked to several hundred individuals wanting to know more about the University’s information technology positions. It is too early to tell what the outcome will be, but it was great to get out there and meet the folks at the Expo.”

“Along with our increased focus on marketing the UW as the employer of choice,” Dahl says, “we are directing efforts to increase our recruitment in diverse communities and working closely with community groups and organizations. We will supplement our image marketing campaign with targeted marketing toward diverse populations.”

Dahl believes that one largely untapped resource is current employees. She says that they are potentially the single most important outreach tool - thus, there is an important connection between recruitment and retention.