New improvements implemented as part of York’s Service Excellence Program (SEP) will empower CPM (Confidential, Professional & Managerial) hiring managers and ensure they can fill vacancies on their teams simpler and faster.
In 2020, York launched SEP to provide higher quality and more efficient services to students, faculty, instructors and staff, and to support the priorities set out in in the new University Academic Plan. As part of its work in Human Resources, the SEP has introduced a streamlined Job Summary and Evaluation Form (JSEF) and a CPM Job Creation Guide to support hiring managers. These tools address a variety of long-standing challenges, reduce effort, timelines and increase user satisfaction, making the hiring process more efficient.
Over the last several months, the HR workstream has been listening to HR professionals across the University to understand concerns with the current process. They heard that there was an opportunity to reduce complexity, streamline documentation and shorten the timeframes associated with CPM job evaluation prior to posting a new position and that hiring managers were looking for clearer guidance to feel supported throughout the hiring process.
As a result, the HR workstream has unveiled a model to enhance hiring in the two most common scenarios at York.
- In an optimal scenario, the use of pre-existing, evaluated and approved job summaries for new postings should be prioritized. With the use of existing job summaries, the job evaluation step can be removed from the hiring process, resulting in a time savings of five to seven weeks.
- In a scenario where the use of existing job summaries isn’t possible, the HR workstream has rolled out two resources to streamline the process – a new simplified Job Summary and Evaluation Form (JSEF) and a CPM Job Creation Guide.
The JSEF consolidates two documents that hiring managers were previously required to fill out – the job summary form and the job information questionnaire – into one simple and streamlined form. It reduces the written content required to create a job by approximately 50 to 75 per cent, saving considerable time and effort.
During a pilot phase for the streamlined JSEF, the HR workstream received positive feedback.
“The new form makes very quick and easy,” said Irina Ovis, a human resources business partner (HRBP) in Athletics & Recreation who participated in the pilot phase. “I have shared my positive experience using the new form with fellow HR business partners and look forward to using the JSEF to complete a job summary from start to end on my own as soon as I have the opportunity.”
To further support hiring managers in the job creation process, the HR workstream collaborated with Talent Acquisition & Development (TAD) and Compensation to develop the CPM Job Creation Guide. The guide provides question prompts, guidance about best practices and tips for creating a job summary. By removing the guess work from the process of developing a new job summary, the CPM Job Creation guide will increase quality, reduce effort and time lost to rewriting and encourage flexibility, so hiring managers can attract top talent and fill open roles on their teams faster.
These improvements to CPM hiring are a direct response to community feedback about the hiring process. Reflective of SEP’s commitment to ensure solutions are designed with, not for, key community members were engaged throughout the development and implementation of the improvements – including TAD, Compensation, hiring managers, HR business partners and other management professionals across the University.
Looking ahead, the HR workstream is already scoping and designing the next improvements. In the future, the team plans to roll out a CPM Job Repository, which will house a collection of pre-approved job summaries for the most common roles across the University to reduce duplication of effort and maximize time savings for hiring managers.
For more information about the work to make CPM hiring simpler and faster, visit the HR workstream page of the SEP website.