The long lines of students bearing hiring paperwork in Beardshear Hall in August should be getting shorter. Moving to the Workday business platform this summer will streamline onboarding and managing hourly student employees.
More than 14,000 students worked as university employees during the 2017-18 school year, including nearly 11,000 undergraduates -- 1,346 of which were work-study positions. There were twice as many student workers as total faculty and staff. The annual rush of students starting new campus jobs often brings a queue outside the university human resources (UHR) service center on the third floor of Beardshear.
That's because hiring students has been a paper-based, manual process, said Tricia Stouder, an adviser in the student financial aid office who coordinates work-study employment. After students were selected for a position, they completed a paper form provided by the department and took the form and needed identification to the UHR service center. Then they returned the form to the hiring department.
"It's literally a piece of paper that gets moved by the student. When it leaves us, we don't know where it goes. We don't know where the student is at in the process," Stouder said.
After Workday goes live July 1, selecting students for campus employment won't change much. Hiring departments have different methods of filling positions, often beginning with a posting on the student job board. But the post-selection steps are all moving online to Workday. The only reason students would need to stop by the UHR service center is to show their identification for the federal I-9 form, which verifies worker eligibility.
Once the manager selects a student to hire, they'll hire the student in Workday and provide key information such as pay rate, job title, manager and workplace location. The students will be able to begin working immediately and will receive onboarding tasks in their Workday inbox. Managers will be able to monitor their students' onboarding progress.
"Has the student completed this training? Have they met with the person we asked them to meet with? We'll be able to see that as managers," Stouder said.
Units are identifying individuals to provide job management support (JM support), local roles outside of the improved service delivery service teams. The JM support roles were created to assist with hourly student employment transactions such as hiring and separating workers, transitioning students with multiple jobs to their primary job and updating compensation.
“We recognize that many areas hire a lot of student workers, and we want to ensure we have accurate and timely records,” Stouder said.
Student employees will record their working hours with Workday's time-keeping function and can receive a heads-up when they are approaching the 20-hour weekly limit.
The changes also will make it easier to analyze student employment trends to improve students' experiences, Stouder said. Under the current system, it's difficult to study or collect data on student employees. With Workday, trends will be easier to spot and additional information easier to solicit, which could help in figuring out how to create better environments for learning valuable on-the-job skills.
"It's not just about task completion," Stouder said of students working on campus. "It's really about development."
For more information on how Workday will impact student hiring, consult the computer-based Workday training session "Managing HCM Processes for Student Workers," available through Learn@ISU. For more information about student hiring in general, check out this document on student employment guidance.
