Tarleton State University

“We weren’t surprised when we couldn’t find any other talent management solution that fit higher education like PeopleAdmin.”

When Wendy Haynes, Manager of Compensation and Recruitment at Tarleton State University, approached her administrators about upgrading from PeopleAdmin 5.8 to the HigherEd Platform a few years ago—“to take care of the business that we needed to take care of,” she explained—they were hesitant to move forward with the upgrade. “The IT decision-makers said, ‘Why don’t you look at other solutions?’ because they understood we needed an integrated onboarding solution at the time,” Wendy said. “But knowing PeopleAdmin’s track record for excellent position management, applicant tracking, and performance management, we weren’t surprised when we couldn’t find any other talent management solution that fit higher education like PeopleAdmin.”

Wendy said that Tarleton, located in Stephenville, Texas, part of the extensive Texas A&M University system, originally chose to partner with PeopleAdmin because its solutions met its needs. “Affirmative action, reporting, meeting our compliance needs as a state agency and a federal contractor, being transparent — those are the kinds of things that really attracted us to PeopleAdmin.” Wendy said Tarleton is now in a good place to take advantage of other tools PeopleAdmin offers, including Employee Records.

After demonstrating Tarleton’s need for an onboarding tool, Wendy and her team pushed forward with the PeopleAdmin upgrade. Since then, the upgrade implementation and delivery on their onboard request have exceeded expectations.
“Our upgrade implementation was nothing but a wonderful experience,” she said. “PeopleAdmin really took us through the process step by step, leaving no stones unturned and not pushing too quickly or too fast so as to miss something along the way. They were always a step ahead. So that shift from 5.8 to SelectSuite was smooth and easy for us. That’s why it was just a no-brainer for us to look into the new onboarding option when it became available.”

In addition to that, PeopleAdmin has released over a dozen new HigherEd Platform tools and enhancements, all based on hundreds of conversations with customers like Tarleton and thousands of data points, making it the most comprehensive, easy-to-implement-and-use talent management solution available. As part of PeopleAdmin’s beta test program, Tarleton is one of a handful of institutions that have implemented Employee Records–designed specifically for higher education.

“Higher ed is probably one of the last industries to think about the onboarding process,” Wendy said. “We spend a lot of time trying to court and attract good talent but we forget that a lot of the talent coming into the workforce now are very tech-savvy. With the nicely branded applicant tracking process in [the HigherEd Platform], we put a wonderful first foot forward for Tarleton. There’s no reason to step out of the electronic process once we hire someone.”

Wendy says that was exactly what was happening when new employees arrived and were “handed a ragtag stack of Xerox forms.” Tarleton was committed to continuing to meet the high expectations set during the recruiting and hiring process throughout the employment lifecycle, beginning on day one.

“We had a lot of work to do to get off paper and into digital and that’s really been an eye-opener for us. With [Employee Records] itself, building the forms that we used to have on paper has been wonderful. “This solution is perfect for us,” she continues. “We were excited when we had the demo and saw what was there and what we could do with it. We have a very high expectation that we will be living in a completely paperless world and that we’ll know where everybody is in the process.”

Wendy knows it’s not all about the HR side of the onboard experience. “We are mindful of the new employee experience when we get them through onboarding, and want to make that a two-way experience where they can go in and see what they’ve got to complete and we can see what we have to complete. We’re also building other information into the process so that employees can be up and running faster. [Employee Records] lets us do that with an interface that feels comfortable and isn’t complicated for the user.”

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