- Challenge: “Painfully slow” hiring processes — mostly due to an outdated recruitment platform with an unintuitive user interface and a lack of advanced applicant-tracking and candidate relationship management capabilities — deterred Noble Network of Charter Schools from attracting, engaging, interviewing, and hiring high-quality candidates at the desired pace.
- Solution: Turning to Jobvite’s Talent Acquisition Suite opened up the eyes of Noble’s executive team, including its TA leader, to numerous recruiting and hiring inefficiencies — all of which the organization was able to address head on and ensure their recruiters could more capably connect with qualified candidates and leverage real-time insights to improve their sourcing, outreach, and conversion efforts.
- Results: Instead of spending 80% of their days screening and sourcing candidates, the Noble recruiting team can now allocate just 30% of their time to identifying and speaking with top-of-funnel candidates, opening up more resources for the TA team to build relationships with top talent of interest and advance prospects in their pipeline with greater ease and speed.
Noble Network of Charter Schools has been serving students throughout Chicago since 1999.
An open enrollment, multi-campus charter public high school, Noble has grown to a network of over 1,400 teachers and administration. While their impact and reach have expanded in recent years, Noble employees remain true to their mission and values.
To better serve the faculty and students, Michele Ybarra, Noble’s Manager of Selection and Hiring, recognized the importance of streamlining their recruitment efforts across all campuses — beginning with a new, user-friendly applicant tracking system.
“The first thing I realized when I started at Noble was that the system we were using was painfully slow,” said Ybarra. “Our principals lead the hiring efforts at their individual campuses, and they have such busy lives. I couldn’t imagine being a hiring manager having to use that interface. For two years, the feedback we received on the platform we were using reflected the difficulties I was experiencing.
“Once it became an issue for our principals, who are truly our most important customers, it became a problem we couldn’t ignore,” Ybarra added. “When we recognized that the ATS was stopping us from doing our jobs as well as we could, it became a necessary course of action.”
Moving to the Jobvite Talent Acquisition Suite, they immediately began to see their issues — and ones they didn’t even know existed — completely transformed right away.
“The candidate experience in our old system was more time intensive, requiring a login and password,” says Ybarra. “With an applicant drop-off rate of 6%, we were losing thousands of potential candidates and gaining no data on who these people even were. The barrier to entry and apply should not have been our applicant tracking tool.”
Recruiting inefficiencies and slow hiring processes eliminated, thanks to Jobvite’s ATS
After recognizing the huge benefits Jobvite was providing right off the bat, Ybarra and her team jumped into utilizing the reporting function to better understand and leverage data from their annual hiring analysis.
“This year’s annual hiring analysis was much easier than the last due to the Jobvite reporting function,” says Ybarra. “Being able to sort the applicant pool through various reports to utilizing the search function filters by years of experience or scores helped make our work much more comprehensive. Being able to measure the average score of a new hire helps us predict who will be hired and allows us to make more than an educated guess on who will be the right fit.”
Noble also began to leverage Jobvite CRM to source candidates from previous applications, nurture their talent pool, and integrate their recruitment and hiring efforts into one platform.
“Rather than re-formatting Excel sheets to process our data, which can be a cumbersome endeavor, Jobvite’s reporting function has been able to save our team ample time and effort,” explained Ybarra.
“In all areas of recruiting, it’s important for us to have transparency with our info and to be able to process it to fit our specific needs,” Ybarra continued. “For example, through Jobvite CRM, being able to quickly see when a contact is converted into a candidate has been extremely helpful.”
To hire for their core values, Noble looks for personality and communication to shine through when processing a high volume of applicants.
“As teaching is something so strongly based on classroom personality and communication abilities, we had been doing video interviews to gain insight into one’s teaching persona,” says Ybarra.
“Without the Jobvite Video tool, we had to use a secondary platform making it difficult for hiring managers to easily access and view candidate videos. We know that video interviews are incredibly valuable, but since they existed in a separate place, hiring managers rarely watched them. Jobvite Video has streamlined our process which was definitely a big win.”
Noble realizes strong recruiting ROI and hiring results with our applicant tracking system
Pulling from their annual candidate experience surveys and reflecting on the past year, the Noble team has seen significant changes throughout their entire pipeline.
The overall candidate satisfaction with the job board navigation jumped from 50% last year to 90% today — increasing even more for those hired (from 65% to 100%).
“Overall, the change from the previous year to now blew our mind. We knew it was going to be a big increase in internal efficiency but didn’t anticipate just how big the impact would be on user experience,” said Ybarra.
“We value the experience of all our candidates, in particular those who transition to employees, and were excited to see they appreciated the shift from an applicant point of view too. One of the key reasons we switched to Jobvite was explicitly to improve the candidate experience, and we’re so happy to see it paid off.”
Having hard data to support the way the team has felt since switching to Jobvite has led to Ybarra’s overall satisfaction at work — and her ability to make a difference for the most important part of her job, the students.
“Looking back to life before Jobvite, we would spend 70-80% of our day screening applicants. Today, that has dropped by at least 30%,” reflects Ybarra. “Now I can focus on critical work that can move the needle for Noble, allowing my time to be more strategic and impactful.”
