Case Study:
Hennepin County, Minnesota

Hennepin County is the most populated of Minnesota’s 87 counties, with about 23 percent of the state’s residents and Minneapolis as its largest city. Hennepin needed a way to streamline its hiring process while ensuring the successful recruitment of highly qualified candidates. It looked to Monster Government Solutions’ QuickHire for the answers. The QuickHire enterprise hiring management solution was seamlessly implemented countywide, resulting in online efficiency, automated ranking of candidates for quality hiring and significant cost-savings.

Challenge: Hire Faster, Hire Better

In a typical year, Hennepin County has approximately 500 job openings and receives tens of thousands of job applications. The large scale of its recruiting process required an immediate and significant overhaul of outdated methods and practices. First, Hennepin County needed a way to save time, streamline processes and ultimately get higher quality candidates in the door faster. It realized that its paper-based applicant tracking and hiring process was labor-intensive and time consuming. Second, the County had to become a more citizen-centric and responsive government. Under the leadership of its HR Director, and as part of a countywide modernization initiative, it needed to move to an online job applicant system. Because of the diverse needs of the many organizations within Hennepin County, this system had to be both flexible and adaptable. Finally, Hennepin needed an efficient method to “mine” its applicant pool to understand the discrete capabilities of its job applicants. There was no way to slice-and-dice applicant data to identify the best candidates for each position. For example, foreign language expertise was a much-needed skill, but one that was very difficult to identify in the paper-based system.

Response: QuickHire Everywhere

Monster Government Solutions began to implement its QuickHire enterprise hiring management solution in select areas of Hennepin County beginning in June 2001 and, ultimately, expanded it countywide.

The QuickHire system allowed Hennepin County to accomplish the following:

• Quickly create and post jobs to the County’s website.
• Accept online and hard-copy applications.
• Prescreen applicants according to County criteria.
• Automatically rate and rank questionnaires based on County-specified criteria.
• Eliminate manual processing and input of applications.
• Collect rich data in response to job-specific questions.
• Track job applicants through the hiring process.

QuickHire also gave Hennepin County the ability to “brand” job announcements in a unique way for each of Hennepin’s diverse agencies — helping each to attract candidates that would be the best fit for their organizations. Equally important, a robust data-mining solution within QuickHire allowed Hennepin County’s HR professionals the ability to easily analyze and evaluate candidates.

Results: Enterprise-Wide Efficiency, Effectiveness and Citizen-Centric Responsiveness

When Monster Government Solutions’ QuickHire was fully implemented countywide, it created one of the few truly enterprise-wide IT implementations, and became a model for countywide modernization initiatives.

By streamlining processes and moving to a citizen-centric, online solution, Hennepin was able to more effectively attract quality applicants. Since implementing QuickHire in June 2001, Hennepin County has posted approximately 1,000 jobs, attracted 58,500 unique registrants and received 68,000 applications.

The county was also able to decrease its staff by 2 full-time employees, and has still been able to reduce the time from a vacancy announcement to certifying a list of candidates to 20 days. The County’s HR professionals have become more efficient due to a new set of hiring tools. Through automation, more applicants can be processed with fewer resources. Specifically, with the enhanced data mining, recruiters now have the ability to easily rate and rank candidates, and make better hiring recommendations.