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Features
2006 Campus Technology Innovators: eRecruitment
7/23/2006
Challenge Met
With more and more prospective students and applicants using the web to obtain information about a university, making eRecruitment as efficient and effective as possible is a top priority at Ryerson University (ON). Specifically, the Toronto-based university, with 21,000 full-time students and a nearly $200 million (US dollars) capital expansion in the works, wanted to increase the level of personalized attention to interested students, and to streamline its recruitment practices in the process.
Ryerson joined with two vendor partners whose products the university was already using to spearhead a software integration that is revolutionizing the recruitment management process at the school. The solution combines the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capabilities of Azorus’s suite of eRecruitment software with knowledge management capabilities from IntelliResponse. By harnessing the two tools, the university can seamlessly learn more about individual applicants and their interests as they access links and ask questions throughout the Ryerson portal. Armed with this knowledge—a virtual record of the student’s footprints throughout the dynamic environment—the school can automatically respond with immediate, relevant content tailored to the student’s interests.
The integration allows Ryerson to collect “an immeasurable amount of market intelligence on prospective students,” according to Susan Vercruysse, assistant registrar of student recruitment and communications, and liaison, Office of Undergraduate Admissions/ Liaison. “Information can be gleaned on both the macro and micro levels, from a systemwide basis down to individual students.” By automating interactions, the new solution also allows the Admissions/ Liaison office to satisfy requests for information about Ryerson much more quickly and efficiently.
How They Did It
The seed for the innovative approach g'es back to Ryerson’s initial decision to purchase solutions from both Azorus and IntelliResponse. “The collaboration was something we thought about when we first started to look at each product,” says Vercruysse. The university launched both applications in September 2005; work on the knowledge management integration began in March 2006.
In order to communicate and coordinate what was needed, Vercruysse and others at Ryerson worked with both vendors, along with stakeholders at the university who would be impacted by the solution. “I told them what we would like to see; what would make a powerful tool and would help us do our jobs,” Vercruysse says,“then put it into the hands of the technical folks on both sides.”
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