Datatel Recruiter 2.0 Allows Move to and from SaaS Model

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/20/11

Datatel has updated its application for student enrollment. Version 2.0 of Recruiter includes a deployment option that allows customers to shift from the on-premises version of the application to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model or vice versa. Datatel Recruiter works with a college or university's student information system and automates the activities of the recruiting process being performed by enrollment and admissions teams.

The new release includes:

• The ability to run the program on-premise or from the Web. Institutions can move from one approach to the other to react to staffing and resource changes. The SaaS option lets an institutional user outsource software hosting and management.
• Constituent relationship management (CRM) functionality to identify and recruit students meeting a school's unique admissions criteria.
• Travel management features that enable tracking of recruiting events and trips and their effect on the admissions funnel, a new graphical dashboard, and additional reporting capabilities.
• Deeper integration with Datatel Colleague, the company's suite of enterprise resource planning applications.
• Integration with Datatel Web Content Management System, which helps schools to target online materials to prospective students.

According to Datatel Product Manager Dana Hamerschlag, the new SaaS offering will appeal to Datatel customers that have limited staff for supporting an on-site installation of the recruitment program. "Then in a couple of years, if they get internal staff and they want more control of their servers internally, we can migrate their data from the software-as-a-service deployment model to the on-premises deployment model," she explained. "It's the same product with the same user interface. There's no learning curve for end users."

Recruiter is built on Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 2011 platform. Thus, the customer will need licensing for both Recruiter and Dynamics CRM. The latter, said Hamerschlag, is typically handled through a campus-wide agreement with Microsoft. The SaaS version of the product is hosted by Microsoft on its managed hosting infrastructure. However, she noted, there is no separate bill for server use, rack space, or bandwidth.

When a customer makes the shift from SaaS to on-premise, Hamerschlag added, the school requests its Recruiter data from Microsoft, which will send CDs containing that data to the institution.

Although one Datatel customer, Southern Adventist University, isn't using the SaaS version of the new release, the Collegedale, TN institution has become a fan of Recruiter overall. "Every additional application that leads to the enrollment of a qualified student generates more revenue. With the average yearly undergraduate tuition at $17,000 per student, increasing enrollment by just two percent could mean a revenue increase of over one million dollars," said Ryan Herman, assistant director of admissions. "Before, we would get lists with thousands of names, but we were unable to work them effectively. Recruiter allows us to easily import the lists, test scores, and other data automatically and use it like it is supposed to be used, so we can more easily identify students who are right for our institution."

Automation of much of the recruitment and admission work has allowed Southern Adventist U to save about 400 hours in a single semester, Herman estimated. "We communicate with students much more effectively than we had been able to in the past. We are realizing that it comes down to the personal touch and not just mailing out general pieces that hit the high points of the school, but more direct and personalized communication," he added.