Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Developing Top-Notch Employees
Arizona State University’s human resources department has developed a strategy and adopted tools to attract and retain top talent at one of the largest public universities in the United States. ASU offers employees leadership and workforce development programs and tuition reduction. Additionally, HR recruiters highlight ASU’s innovation and influence and its universal learning program for applicants to complete their education while working.
Hello and welcome to our Top of Mind Podcast. In this program, we will sit down with two higher education technology thought leaders and discuss the innovative projects they are working on now and into the future. I'm your host, Katelyn Ilkani, vice president of client services and cybersecurity research at The Tambellini Group. I'm joined today by Kevin Salcido who serves as the vice president of HR and chief HR officer at Arizona State University as well as Pamela Brooks, the senior organizational development consultant at the university. Over the next few minutes, we're going to hear how ASU attracts and retains top talent. Let's get started. Welcome to the program, Kevin and Pam. Thank you
Speaker 2:Katelyn, I'm glad that you invited us today and they're giving us an opportunity to share what we've been working on at ASU to improve our, um, attracting and if you will, retaining and education of our top talent here at ASU
Speaker 3:Morning, Katelyn. Appreciate the invitation to participate.
Speaker 1:Thank you both for joining us. Kevin, let's start with you. How would you describe ASU, his philosophy on hiring and developing your faculty and staff?
Speaker 3:Well before I could do that question direct it. Can I give you some background on ASU and our size and scale? Uh, Arizona State University located in Tempe, Arizona is one of the largest public universities in the United States. We have, uh, over 115,000 students who connect with us from pretty much every state, every country on the globe. We have over 12,000 full time benefits eligible employees and uh, probably another 15 or 16,000 part time employees. As I mentioned, we operate in the Phoenix, Maricopa County area with four campuses and other smaller locations. But we also have operations in other States. For example, we ended up, we have the McCain Institute in Washington DC and we have operations along the West coast and California where we do a lot of our student recruiting. We also have international reach. We have a variety of partnerships with governments and NGOs and corporations and countries such as Vietnam, China, England, Mexico. I can go on and on. Um, so basically what I'm trying to convey here is this, the sheer scope of ASU, how large we are and how broad our reach is. Another thing I think is important for your audience to understand is that the universities have a very unique structure. Uh, they tend to be, well, they don't tend to be, they are in fact very decentralized. So look at a university as a collection of organizations, whether it be a collection of academic units such as a college of engineering, which has 22,000 students in this large, they're most universities in the country or the college of business or the college of nursing. The, these organizations have their own independent administrative structures. And we also have a, an infrastructure role to play as far as supporting the university with financial services, human resources, budgeting, uh, business operations, uh, police department. The list goes on and on. So what I'm trying to again say is we just have a very far-flung operation. It's very complex. We're very proud that it operates as smoothly as it does considering our size and scope. So I hope that helps set context for what our challenges are. Moving on. Um, uh, one of our primary goals is obviously is to operate in a very lean way and we are a public institution and, uh, there's a lot of pressure on the cost of public education now and we will not go into that cause that's a separate podcast. But our focus is on, uh, running a lean, innovative organization. Uh, we try to do that by hiring the best talent possible. We do know that we are in a very competitive labor market right now and, uh, in many situations we cannot pay private sector or technology sector type of wages. So we try to focus on other ways of making the employment, um, relationship enjoyable and productive. Um, primarily through our offering of, uh, development opportunities to here at ASU. So, uh, we, uh, even though we've gone through many ups and downs as far as reorganizing of the organization, we've never really taken away our investment in our leadership and workforce development initiatives. So a leadership and workforce development is very high on our list here at the university. As you may imagine, uh, we support this through internal programming, which Pam will discuss in a few minutes. I'm sure. Uh, we constantly remind people that we have a tuition reduction program. Uh, we tend to hire people earlier in their career. Uh, so we take it on as our mission to, to develop these folks as soon as they come our way. So we put a very big premium on, on development. Pam, you want to add anything on that?
Speaker 2:In terms of hiring and developing, we're always looking for people that are also inspired to work in a higher education setting. And especially here at ASU, we've got the classification for number one in innovation now for the fifth year running and what does that mean as an institution? And we have attracted people to this university based on the fact that we not only have influence on our students, but we have influences on our community and we have influence at a global scale. So we get a lot of thought leaders and a lot of people interested in being a part of something that is much larger than themselves, so that's, that's part of it. But then the second part in terms of developing is as much as we are trying to become what we call universal learners and develop universal learners in our students. The initiative in the past couple of years is to create that universal learning amongst our staff as well so that they feel like they're a part of not only the, if they came in and didn't have their education, like we provide Starbucks, the ability to finish it, they can come here, go to work and get that education finished. Um, but to also like enhance within this university, it's, it's larger than some cities. The ability to say I started in one department and I really kinda liked the university, but I want to grow, I want to develop how do we develop them so that they can cross over to another aspect of ASU but still stay within, if you will, the family of ASU.
Speaker 3:Right. And to build on Pam's point, as I mentioned, we do run a very lean operation to do the level of, uh, development that the organization demands and always responds to, we would have to have many, many more people, physical bodies in our leadership and workforce development departments. We just don't have that. Also to kind of build on what Pam said, we're very cognizant of the fact here that people learn in different ways that a different modalities that, people are busy, that people don't always have the time to go to a training room on Tuesday at 11:15. Uh, that people are in far-flung areas that people need to be able to learn, at their pace, at their convenience, at their location, at the time of their choosing. So we're trying to be as flexible and as adaptable as we are in these areas of learning. Not only what the students, but with our faculty and staff.
Speaker 1:Great. Thank you. Both. What types of technologies support these efforts?
Speaker 2:Well, obviously we have PeopleSoft, which is our tracking. Uh, it keeps employee information and records in a secure manner. We've also been using Kenexa BrassRing in terms of tracking applicants. And then this last July we went into our soft launch of Cornerstone, which is going to give us the first time ever to have access to the ongoing training so that we actually know where all the training is happening on campus. And it also allows us to have transcripts so that each individual person as they are continuing their education can now go,"Hey, yeah, I took these courses, look at this, I've completed these things. There's some things that I've, I've been very interested in completing." We're also going to be rolling out what's called Edge Conversations. We've called our platform, ASU Career Edge and edge stands for"E" engagement,"D" development,"G" growth. And then finally empowerment. That if we can create an engaged learning environment that will empower our people to do better. So the platform that we're using is Cornerstone. Again, we're calling it ASU Career Edge. That tracking allows now for managers to go, Hey, my, my personal, we've always had the ability to take 16 hours of training, but no one's been able to go, how many hours do you have? Where, where do we know that? And so this is giving us in one swoop, the ability to see who's accessing training, who needs what kind of training, and to even work with some of those individual departments like engineering, um, business school that have different needs, how can we take tailor training specifically for them to bring their people up to speed or as we know, things change and there's gaps like the upgrades and technology. I just met with a gal this last week and she said, Pam, you know, gosh, Cornerstone coming on with your, with your training that you've been able to pull on. It just came in time. And I'm like, Oh. And she goes, well, my boss told me I needed to learn Excel. So I looked into Excel classes. Then it was going to cost me like$300 to$400 to go to this Excel class. And you've got this thing launched. I got on there and two weeks I had the training I needed, I could do what he asked me to and now they are going to be able to upscale themselves and find and fill those needs themselves in a way that we have never been able to bring out to scale at ASU.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And to just kind of expand a little bit as well as, as interesting as it is that we've been able to track student performers—you know, obviously through the transcripts—colleges have been keeping transcripts for decades, if not centuries. We didn't have as that capability to trace, uh, the training activities of our staff, faculty and staff. So the Cornerstone product is now giving us that ability to create a personal training profile for everybody who participates in our training programs, which is something that we, uh, that was major gap that we were able to close with Cornerstone.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned a soft launch of the Cornerstone solution. Which Cornerstone product are you using and what is the implementation been like?
Speaker 2:We're currently using the Learn portion and we call it a soft lunch and that we've launched it in the summer before everybody comes back to school in August. And we just wanted to make sure as we brought the product up that we didn't have any issues in the background of something that turning on or working right or people like getting the access they need. And it's been wonderful. I think we only got 90 calls of things on incidental things. A product is launched very, very well and now that school is in session, we're in the process of rolling out more pieces of it. So the Learn is the primary one. Um, we also have a contract with LinkedIn Learning, which allows, um, all training taken from LinkedIn Learning to be embedded onto the transcript. And that has allowed us to launch 14,000 trainings from business savvy to tech, even to art. So our arts department was already using some of the training for like photography and, um, Adobe, um, of different kinds. So there's a wide variety of training which meets the needs of the 23,000 people that we have that have variety of needs. So, um, the next thing that we're going to be working on is the connect feature because again, being such a large university, it's hard for different campuses to get the same people together in one area that they can communicate and share best practices and knowledge. So that's, that's the one that we'll be moving into. Um, we also have the succession planning piece, which we're getting ready to turn on, which allow us to do some more tracking of people again as, because we're so vast and we have people that literally will change to differ from one department to another to attract that type of stuff. Um, to see where potential is in allowed departments to go, Hey, I really need somebody with X, Y, Z experience. And to be able to look into a system and say, Oh, we've already got some people here. Cool. Maybe they might be interested.
Speaker 3:Right. And as a guy who's been in HR for a long time and it, it was launched, uh, more than a few broad, um, software industry lives. Uh, I can tell you that my experience has not always been positive. In fact, it's more often negative and positive. It's almost like coming over the precipice of a drop on a roller coaster. You just kind of grab it, hold on and hope things work out well. That was not the case of Cornerstone. It was a very, very smooth implementation, a very pleased with how it rolled out. Very pleased how it was a, uh, fully operational day one, uh, no technology problems that I'm aware of, nothing that we had to do to work around. Um, so it, it was one of the rare situations with an HR software implementation that, uh, actually met the deliverables. And, uh, I would say my expectations have actually been exceeded.
Speaker 1:That's wonderful to hear. Why did you select Cornerstone and did you consider other solutions?
Speaker 2:When we first came together, this is that part when you bring a whole bunch of people in to decide what to do. Part of the group looked at and said, Oh, we just need this as a registration place. And so our first initiative was to find the stakeholders on our large campus and find out what their needs were and to go, it's not just about registering for a face-to face-course or that we have a place to put our online required training, whether it's title nine or fire safety or the many lab trainings that we have. Um, it was that ability to come in and go, no, we need a, we need a system that's robust enough to handle 23,000 people to handle the fact that we have so many different departments. And it's going to be easy to use. So we came up with, I think somewhere between 45 key and 80 different parameters or questions of things that we were asking or looking for in products. And because we're a university, we have to go through a request for proposals. So we put out this is the parameters of what we're looking for. And companies get to bid in and say, yes, we'd like to be in the bid process and we have to then pick the top three. So we had probably at least a dozen different groups that tried to get into our final selection process and I really don't want to put out the competition so to speak. But we vetted at least 12 different ones before I'm centering in and deciding on Cornerstone. And one of the key factors with it was when we got our technology people in the process. So again, pulling in stakeholders, not just what do we need out of HR, but what does it look like to implement this? What does it look like to integrate this system with the existing systems? Our technology group came back and just said, we like Cornerstone. And so we listened, you know, they met all the other criteria and that was one of the key ones that we looked at and said, okay, and that's probably why we've had such an easier time getting this one rolled out.
Speaker 1:Totally. In a nutshell, how would you say that Cornerstone is enabling your mission to hire? And retain top talent?
Speaker 3:Well, again, the way we put a focus here on, on learning and development and it's been a force multiplier for us. Uh, as far as uh, you do, we've been able to convert well. We've been able to offered training at such a scale at such a broad scope that we would never would have been able to do with our existing staff. So, you know, I think we have five or six people that are looking in our leadership and workforce development department and for them to satisfy the training demand for university as big and as far flung as ours would not have been possible. So Cornerstone again to use a military term I would consider to be a force multiplier. It just takes what we have, and it's been able to multiply by 10, if not a hundred, to as far as how we can offer training to folks.
Speaker 2:And in the process of being on the committee, I've done a lot of, I want to say research. What are organizations besides ASU doing, looking at other universities. I'm also looking at other large corporations and as a part of what I do, I really have to understand generations cause we do have, I want to say that retirement factor coming in and we're going to be pulling in a lot of new generation people that may not have experience. And how are people meeting that demand? How are you able to get that gap? And by being able to bring this system in along with the LinkedIn Learning, with the extra trainings, we're going to meet that next generation because they expect it. They expect to have hands-on training when they want, where they want, whether it's off a phone or a tablet or their computer or whether at home or whether they're taking a commute into work. They want ready type training. And so part of the shift to this is to meet that demand of the next generation coming in. Um, but it's also from the standpoint that like with LinkedIn, what they've been trying to do is to look at the gaps in training. Where is it that we have an older sector that needs training on something to keep them up to speed or changes just within the particular industry and what's going on. I mean, I look at leadership and workforce development for us to reach what we're doing. I came in and was doing face to face training and I reached 1800 people. But now with the system, we can pull Zoom in and now I can reach all the campuses when I run one training. Anybody from any campus can now get on a Zoom portion of it and allow us to bring that training across the other campuses as well in ready time. So that's just something we have not had the capability to do before.
Speaker 3:So exciting. Yeah, and part of the thing that makes ASU unique is we have a very, uh, very dynamic leadership team headed up by Dr. Michael Crow, an internationally recognized as a thought leader in higher education. And he has a very dynamic executive team as well. A lot of continuity there already been in place for awhile. We understand our mission, which is different from other universities. Uh, we measure ourselves by who we include and not by who we exclude and how well those people do while they're here. Uh, we've seen our graduation rates increase, our retention rates increased. What I'm trying to get to here is we, we have something unique at ASU that you won't find at other big public institutions. However, this team has been together, plays for a long time and uh, so executive team will last forever. Uh, so we need to start thinking about how we're going to perpetuate this culture, perpetuate our mission and vision, uh, when the current executive team, uh, phases out and new people come in. So we're always looking at ways to fill our leadership pipeline and inculcate those leaders in how ASU operates and we plan on using Cornerstone very aggressively and fill that gap.
Speaker 2:Have you already seen measurable differences in your hiring or development metrics? It, we're hoping to like have some really cool stats coming out within six months to a year. But we have had all of our required training put on the platform. So we've got close to the 22,000 that have jumped on. And getting in and just taking their required training. Um, with the soft launch, we haven't pushed the LinkedIn Learning right out of the gate, but we're starting to ramp that up and within one month we've got around 900 new users on there and they're staying on for about an hour to an hour and 45 minutes to do training. And to know that we have reached 900 people in a month when I as one individual could have only run a class and maybe reached two to 300 people is already a quick sign to know that there's going to be an interest. Um, I think the other thing about LinkedIn and having the, the way it's going out is this is going to be something where as people start to understand it, it's going to be friends reaching friends and it's going and not like any mass marketing is going to get somebody to go in and do it. But like I stopped by a computer area and the guy was on his thing and I could tell he was perplexed and I said, what's going on? And he said, well, I'm trying to figure out this new software, whatever. And I said, Hey, did you know about EDGE? And he's like, what's EDGE? I put them on the platform, showed them LinkedIn and he's like,"Oh my God, you just saved my day." You know, that's the kind of transfer that this is going to take over the course of this next year. So if we can see what we see in one month escalate and it'll probably be more x-potential as people discover what it is and what it can do, it's going to roll out. And one of the areas that we will be focusing on is to help departments with their onboarding practices. So you look at, um, we go through the school year and we have cycles. So at the beginning of this year there's departments hiring two and 300 student workers. Cause we are really big about bringing students in to help run things and they have to get two to 300 students trained in through things very quickly. And this platform, all of them were just like, Oh my gosh, this is going to be a time saver. This is going to help us automate and provide needed information that's very valuable in a very timely fashion. And so there's some of, I want to say, the data that we won't be able to see for a year from now, but just what we're seeing in a short time has been pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 3:Right. And we've been getting really good feedback from mom, people that visited the system and um, people who see it love it and they've been using it. And, um, again, it's probably one of the most positive HR programs that we've rolled out here. Um, Oh, since I've been here, which is 12 years now. So very happy with it.
Speaker 1:What kind of advice do you have for an institution thinking about modernizing their recruiting, onboarding and development?
Speaker 3:I guess my best answer to that is that the universities have to be able to rely on creative staff to support the research and instruction mission. And our university is typically viewed as comprised of faculty and students with staff being more in a support role. I think what we try to do here at ASU was make sure that we remind people that whether you work in front of a classroom instructing on chemistry or whether you work in the admissions office, we all have to be pulling on the same rope to make sure that our students have a great learning experience here. So might recommendation to other university leaders is to always be mindful of the role that staff plays and to not take your eye off the ball when it comes to staff development. Uh, because we are bad at our heart, we are service org organizations, we exist to serve students and more often than not as a person in a staff who's doing that. So I would recommend a universities go after great faculty to go after Nobel Nobel prize winners and go after faculty that can bring in research grants and interesting projects. But I also would like to encourage universities to go after the very best staffs you can find and then develop in which you have them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm involved with several different initiatives on campus and we have been hailed again as, as being the most innovative university, but it's almost cliche. You ask a student and they don't know anything about our university. So they, they're like, what's innovative, that this is like common practice. Right. Um, and we have always shared, you know, amongst our faculty, we share all the time readily what innovative ideas and things that they're coming up with and the global challenges and problems that they're solving. And it's really dynamic. And yet you look at our staff and our staff is kind of going innovative. How are we innovative? And so this platform, along with some initiatives that we're working on, is going to allow our staff to be able to be, if you will, self innovative, where we can start to explore things and empower them to explore things on their own. And so, as an institution is looking to recruit and retain, they have to think about what is it that's going to be important for the staff as much as any of the others because especially with the university our size, if our staff disappeared, it's really cool that we have great faculty and it's really great. We have all these students but the system wouldn't keep functioning without the staff there. And, um, we do run very lean. I think the recent research says that most universities run around 40 staff or people employed per 100 students. And I think ours is right around 12 to 14 per 100 students. So we have a very lean university, but in being lean, we need to make sure that we also provide our people with what they need to be very efficient to get the job done, that they feel like they have the resources to tap across and work with others to keep, um, things moving ahead, if you will. And so for example, this platform for us, it's giving us an opportunity to bring people up to speed faster. So instead of having a training staff of 25, we can get by with the training staff of five because we know how to target and reach out to the other departments and develop them and set things up so that they can run themselves. So, but investing in it is some, I think that people look at it and go, wow, it's a big investment, but when you start breaking down, especially for us on what it costs per head, we couldn't match this with people with the ability of what we're going to have to reach.
Speaker 3:That's correct.
Speaker 1:Thank you both so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed learning about your innovations at Arizona State University.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having us, Katelyn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been a pleasure to talk with you.
Speaker 1:This concludes our Top of Mind Podcast. Please check back with us next month for another great topic. And don't forget to subscribe to the Tambellini Top of Mind blog and podcast series so you never miss an update.