Facing the human capital crisis: successful recruitment program pilot at Edwards AFB - Best Practices

Defense AT&L, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Rachel Schwarz

Meet Edwards Nights

Next, "Meet Edwards" nights were held on campus and tour days arranged for professors and students to visit Edwards and learn about life at the base. The initial Meet Edwards event was well publicized with a goal for attendance of 25 to 30 engineering students. The final attendance count was 210 students, many from the Honor's Co-Op program. These efforts made a lasting impression on the professors and students who participated. As a result, Edwards Air Force Base now has great credibility at California State University Northridge. "I believe the relationship we have developed with Cal State Northridge is the most valuable part of the pilot," says Paul Tierney, chief, avionics systems integration at Edwards.

Edwards Scholarship Program

The next step to building a strong and continuing relationship at CSUN was establishing an Edwards scholarship program for students in the school of engineering. Edwards has plans to give up to eight students $2,000 scholarships when they participate in a paid summer internship program at the Air Force base. Not only will these students receive money towards their college education, they will also receive compensation for their summer work, gain experience in the engineering field, and make valuable contacts for job applications after graduation.

Edwards personnel invested considerable time and effort in building the relationship with CSUN, and the investment paid off. Mau and many professors and students from CSUN now genuinely believe Edwards is a good place to begin an engineering career. "The people at Northridge were pretty skeptical when we first showed up there," says Weiner, "but now that we've spent time developing a relationship with them, I think they really respect us."

Edwards Reaps Benefits

So how have all these changes impacted Edwards AFB overall? As of Sept. 30, 2003, Edwards had hired 23 engineers, and that number would have been much larger if not for the changing mission objectives related to Operation Iraqi Freedom, which delayed personnel hiring decisions. Edwards now has in excess of 7,600 engineering applicants being actively tracked against 102 positions, with nearly 600 applicants against open requests for personnel action (RPAs) for future hiring. Average days to fill an open position have been reduced by 46 percent. Average days for a new hire to start work have been reduced 33 percent. All of this was accomplished with a modest DoD pilot investment. In addition to faster hiring of better qualified applicants, the Knowledge Workers Applicant Tracking System and HRDashboard Metrics Reporting Tool have allowed Edwards hiring managers and engineering recruiting support staff to be more strategic in their hiring on base.

Jan Taylor, chief of affirmative employment at Edwards comments, "My team initially expressed concern that the new system would be more time consuming and would add to their current workload. But after training from Knowledge Workers, and as they have become familiar with the automated nature of the applicant work flow and database, they really like the system's ease of use and their ability to tell applicants their current applicant status." This is confirmed by Nancy Cox, engineering recruiting coordinator for the avionics systems integration division at Edwards. "Knowledge Workers tools and technology save me at least 50 percent of my day in dealing with applicants and hiring managers," she says. "I now have a system that allows me to track all applicants to the manager level and know in real time exactly what their status is when they call to ask."