Job Applications Go Paperless

People who want to work for colleges -- whether as professors, administrators,

ALSO SEE: Paper vs. Online Applications at One College

or groundskeepers -- may soon be able to skip the trip to Kinko's for printed résumés. Some institutions are starting to make job applicants apply online. Paper applications, the colleges say, will not be accepted.

California State University's Channel Islands campus has hired all 30 of its faculty members through an online-application system since the university was established two years ago and is in the process of hiring 25 more. Montgomery College, whose main campus is in this Washington suburb, has started a pilot program that requires applicants for faculty and staff positions to apply online. And other institutions, like Syracuse University and the University of Kentucky, have recently begun requiring potential staff hires to apply online.

Officials at the institutions say online applications streamline the hiring process by cutting down on data processing and document shuffling. Applicants benefit, too. Montgomery College's system lets applicants keep computer accounts with the institution and update their applications as new positions open or as their skills change.

Hiring managers say the online-application systems don't diminish their pools of qualified candidates. But some officials worry that relying completely on online systems excludes would-be applicants for some staff jobs who don't have access to the Internet or don't feel comfortable using computers. The institutions try to prevent that by offering applicants one-on-one help and allowing them to use computers on the campus.

New Efficiencies

At institutions that have converted to an online-application format, officials say the hiring process has become more efficient. For instance, it's easier to share an application with multiple departments, and managers don't have to decipher an applicant's messy handwriting.

"Our hiring process just takes so long, and we had to come up with a way to speed up that process," says Vivian M. Lawyer, chief human-resources officer for Montgomery College. "All of the data entry would take a lot of time."

The system the college is testing allows applicants to search for jobs and fill out applications over the Internet. The online-application form includes questions for all types of positions, from professor or administrator to janitor. The applicant fills in the information by making selections from lists of qualifications, such as having experience teaching accounting and having spent time as a bricklayer. The applicant is expected to fill in the appropriate information and can skip the irrelevant questions.

Applicants can also upload their résumés or have the system create résumés for them using the answers to the application questions. And by keeping accounts with the college, would-be employees can update their information for subsequent job applications if they're not hired the first time around.

Montgomery College officials can search the applicant database for candidates with the necessary qualifications for a particular job -- experience teaching French, for instance. The college hires between 25 and 50 new full-time faculty members during an average fall semester. With the new system, copies of promising applications can be distributed electronically.

The online system also makes it easier for human-resources officials to determine whether another advertisement for a position should be submitted to the newspapers. Officials can count the number of applicants in that job category more quickly and determine whether the hiring pool is too small.

Paula D. Matuskey, an instructional dean at Montgomery College, says the online system is also designed to make sure applicants don't forget to fill in crucial information, like how to reach them. The electronic application can't be submitted until all the required entries are complete. "You'd be surprised how many paper applications we'd get where they'd forget to fill out some places, or they'd forget to sign," she says.

Montgomery's system will cost about $300,000 for the first year and a half of operation. That covers initial start-up costs. The price is expected to go down in later years.

Ms. Matuskey says the college will save money through increased efficiency. But most important, she says, the institution will be able to hire faculty members easily if enrollment in the community college were to boom unexpectedly.

"It's not necessarily a question of cost savings, but about not having to shut down a section because we don't have enough faculty," Ms. Matuskey says. "As an open-enrollment institution, it's about student services."

One drawback is that the college's online-application system doesn't work on the Apple Macintosh. Applicants have to stick with Windows. They do have the option of using Internet Explorer or Netscape, though.

Montgomery purchased the hiring software from a vendor called Alexus International, in nearby Gaithersburg, Md. Alexus usually sells its human-resources software to organizations and companies not affiliated with higher education.

A few colleges and universities have developed online-application systems in-house, but most go with commercial vendors. One company, called PeopleAdmin, in Austin, Tex., sells the online-application software exclusively to colleges and universities and has about 20 clients. Prices for online-application services vary widely. Commercial vendors like Alexus sell software and services for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

PeopleAdmin's software costs less than $50,000.

Some vendors, including Alexus and PeopleAdmin, offer a service that allows applicants to submit a paper application that the vendor's staff will scan into the computer database. But few colleges are using that service.

Stephen J. Otzenberger, executive director of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, says the number of institutions that are requiring prospective employees to submit applications online seems to be growing.

Although he has no hard data on the growth, he says, he has anecdotal evidence of it. "More and more institutions are trying to use it as a vehicle to try to reach better applicants," Mr. Otzenberger says.

Other institutions that are requiring at least some of their applicants to apply online include Auburn, Mercer, and Texas A&M Universities.

Attracting Job Applicants

The Channel Islands campus, the newest institution in the California State system, has done all of its faculty hiring through online applications. The university started teaching students this fall.

Ira Schoenwald, associate vice president for academic affairs at Channel Islands, says he believes the university has enticed more applicants with the online system than a paper system would have reached. That's because applying online is so easy, he says.

Of the thousands of applicants, only a few complained about having to apply online instead of using the tried-and-true paper method, he says. "Out of 2,300, I'm talking like five to seven, and I talked to them all personally," Mr. Schoenwald says. "More people are Internet-savvy, especially in the academic world."

And what about the Luddites? "We appreciate that," he says. "We're just not interested in hiring those faculty."

Louise Lutze-Mann, a biology professor at Channel Islands who is chairwoman of the Academic Senate, says faculty members generally don't have a problem with requiring applications to be submitted online.

Ms. Lutze-Mann was required to apply online herself. She found the process simple, and she doesn't consider herself to be a technology expert. "I use the computer all the time," she says. "But I'm definitely not one of those people who's innovative with it."

And now that she is selecting faculty members with the online-application system, she doesn't find that the quality of applicants is diminished.

In fact, Channel Islands gets significantly more applicants for each opening than its sister campuses in the California State system. Mr. Schoenwald says that Channel Islands had an average of 148 qualified applications per position in 2002. The next highest was at the system's Monterey Bay campus, he says, with 45 applications per position. The average for the Cal State system was 31 applications per position.

In May, Syracuse University started requiring applicants for staff jobs to use an online system. Applicants for faculty jobs still use the old paper method, however, because the online system Syracuse uses isn't set up to let an applicant include additional information, such as a curriculum vitae, says Jack Matson, director of staff relations and recruitment.

While some other institutions allow faculty applicants to upload documents with electronic applications, Syracuse is still exploring the best method for that.

Officials at Syracuse hope to create an online-application system for faculty members soon. "That's something we're planning on in the coming year," Mr. Matson says.

One Bite at a Time

In November, the University of Kentucky started requiring all applicants for nonfaculty jobs to apply online. Eventually the university wants faculty members to submit online applications as well.

"Instead of taking the entire cake in one bite, we'd start with a couple pieces," says T. Lynn Williamson, director of human resources for the university.

Institutions that are requiring online applications want to make sure that they aren't missing out on the perfect employee because that person couldn't get access to the Internet. "There's some concern about that," says Ms. Lawyer, of Montgomery College. "You don't know who doesn't have access, because they're not applying."

Any applicant who comes to the campus here can get not only access to a computer but also one-on-one help with the application process. Some other institutions, like Kentucky, have even arranged with county-government offices in their states to let applicants use computers there, avoiding the necessity of a campus visit. Many public libraries also have public-access computers.

But if an applicant is out of state -- or really out of touch with technology -- is he or she out of luck? Maybe. But that might be just as well. "I can't imagine," says Mr. Williamson, of Kentucky, "that there's anybody who's out of state that we would want to recruit that can't figure out how to get online and fill out an application."