Kentucky Community & Technical College System

The challenge

Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) is a group of 16 community and technical schools throughout the Kentucky area. The Colleges came together to form a school system in order to improve the experience of its staff, its community, and its students.

With a highly decentraliseddecentralized structure, each college has its own unique identity. For the central talent acquisition team, creating a unified employer brand, applicant experience, and recruitment process has been a challenge. Chase Dodson, Manager of Strategic Talent Acquisition, knew that building a recognisablerecognizable, consistent experience across the campuses was crucial to success.

We have 16 entities with independent leadership resulting sometimes in 16 variations of how to do things. When we sought a new provider, the primary focus was consistency, while also overhauling and modernizing the overall candidate and user experience.

– Chase Dodson
Manager of Strategic Talent Acquisition

In a competitive talent market, KCTCS had also noticed a drop in applicants —both in volume and quality. Without proper analytics, the team couldn’t pinpoint what was working, and what wasn’t —making it difficult to pivot their strategy.

Our career site presence needed work and we had no insight into analytics, so we couldn’t see what was working and what wasn’t. The whole hiring process, for both our own teams and the applicant, needed to be improved if we were going to be able to compete.

The focus

Chase and the team knew the impact a modern tech stack could have on recruitment processes. When their previous ATS provider announced it was sunsetting the product, the team at KCTCS wanted more than a replacement solution —they wanted one that would help take their processes to the next level.

A key focus when choosing a new solution was the career site. Chase wanted candidates to receive consistent imagery and messaging no matter which school they applied to —while empowering the schools to personalisepersonalize the sites by sharing specific imagery or stories relevant to their campus.

It was crucial for this consistency to extend through application and beyond: they were looking for an end-to-end solution to reduce unnecessary admin, and progress candidates more quickly through the journey.

The solution

KCTCS partnered with PageUp for a Recruitment Marketing, ATS and Onboarding solution.

With PageUp ATS, KCTCS has seen unmatched configurability. Now, the team can build out unique workflows, custom templates and automate repetitive tasks — to modernisemodernize and uplift the institution’s applicant processes.

When implementing the ATS, we created a recruitment process, applications, offer letters, communication templates, and more to be used by all 16 locations so that all applicants across all campuses have a consistent experience.

This improved experience also extends into onboarding — it’s all but eliminated manual workflows and paper processes. No more first-day headaches: now, new starters are job-ready from day one.

The onboarding module made a huge impact not only on candidate experience but for our hiring teams. All of those tasks were being managed manually –it was very time-consuming. Now we have customisedcustomized onboarding workflows set up for colleges wanting to send personalisedpersonalized communication to welcome new starters.

With Recruitment Marketing’s no-code career site builder and self-service CMS, creating consistent branding, messaging and templates across the sites was quick and easy to do. Chase and the team were able to build out and brand 16 career sites for the separate colleges —each with its own landing pages, job search pages, and job pages. The individual school can easily include specialisedspecialized content, images and calls to action to engage their target audiences —while the overall branding stays consistent.

The solution is backed by powerful analytics. With these insights, Chase and the team can see crucial data around pipeline health and pinpoint jobseekers’ activity throughout the hiring journey. Armed with this information, Chase and the team can reduce reliance on external advertising through job boards and maximisemaximize return on their talent pipelines.

“It’s had a huge positive impact on our staff experience through reduced administrative burden and increased access to reporting. It’s given us profound insights into jobseeker activity: who’s visiting our site? Have they started or completed an application? It’s a game-changer for optimizing activity at the top of the recruitment funnel.”

Using PageUp’s end-to-end solution, KCTCS gained:

Total control over career site branding through a no-code career site builder and self-service CMS
A streamlined and consistent applicant experience with an 82% application completion rate
Supercharged talent pipelines with over 5500 warm candidates to nurture
Clear visibility of their best sourcing channels and jobseeker activity to continually optimiseoptimize their approach
A stand-out new hire experience with seamless supportive onboarding processes