Raymore-Peculiar School District

The Challenge

One of Raymore-Peculiar School District’s goals is to maintain a high-quality workforce, which means that the HR department’s first priority is to recruit, hire and retain high-quality staff. Then, once the right employees are in place, the goal is to streamline processes so they can focus their time and energy on students, instead of administrative tasks.

Before using Frontline Recruiting & Hiring, Ray-Pec HR staff selected 10 to 15 applications from a pool of 125 to 200 for each position, made paper copies and sent them to a principal when they had an opening. Candidates were scored during the interviews, but there was no formal procedure in place to remove them from the pool if they did not meet Ray-Pec standards of quality. Clearly, they needed a better way to find and select the top candidates.

The Results

Using Frontline’s solutions has profoundly changed the way Ray-Pec collects and monitors data — from screening and hiring quality staff to monitoring substitute fill rates, staff overtime, professional development hours and evaluation timelines. The automation of tasks previously done by hand has enabled a small HR team to efficiently manage behind-the-scenes details, allowing educators who work directly with students to give their full attention to teaching and learning.

The Solution

Automating processes and data collection – from recruiting and hiring, to employee absence and attendance management, to professional learning and evaluations – keeps staff members across the district focused on students rather than paperwork.

1. Identifying top-quality applicants.
   Raymore-Peculiar School District actively seeks out talented individuals to help educate and support the children they serve. One of Ray-Pec’s strategic goals is to continually select top candidates — a goal they have reached using the prescreening assessments and Fit scores within Frontline Recruiting & Hiring.
   
   Originally, the plan was to have all new hires score a seven or higher, but Hatfield found that including sixes increased applicant pools for hard-to-fill positions. Once completed by applicants, the screening assessment produces a scorecard used to ensure that only the highest-quality candidates are interviewed.
   
   Data from Frontline Recruiting & Hiring delivers actionable insights that help guide the hiring process, and has also proven to be an invaluable resource in resolving complaints. The district can provide specific criteria used in candidate selection to support hiring decisions, objectively addressing concerns regarding why one applicant was chosen over another.
2. Keeping track of employee attendance.
   At every Ray-Pec school, the office staff depend on Frontline Absence & Time to meet their day-to-day needs and ensure that every employee is in place to support student learning. They start first thing in the morning with a look at the Daily Absence Report in Absence Management to make sure all open positions are covered.
   
   In the past, classified employees kept track of hours worked using paper calendars. But this paper-based process made it difficult to ensure full compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act, so Hatfield decided to add Time & Attendance to their Frontline Absence & Time solution, based on their satisfaction with Absence Management. With Time & Attendance, support staff can accurately log their work hours each day and supervisors can approve timesheets online.
3.  Monitoring educator growth.
   Ray-Pec uses both the Professional Learning Management and Employee Evaluation Management applications within Frontline Professional Growth to track and monitor educator growth. Ray-Pec’s evaluation process includes a focus on ongoing, deliberate, meaningful and timely feedback. To ensure that educators receive actionable feedback that leads to meaningful growth, principals rely on Frontline Professional Growth to document formative evaluations on a regular basis and keep an eye on professional development data.

Why Frontline?

Ray-Pec’s HR director investigated several other solutions before deciding to work with Frontline. In her opinion, customer service always comes first. She was impressed by the Frontline representative who first introduced her to Frontline Recruiting & Hiring. She said, “He was amazing. He’s not just a sales person. He was truly a resource and a support… which made me much more open to looking at additional products.”

In the overall selection process, three factors stood out. Reasonable price, ease of use and a high level of customer service and responsiveness from the company made Frontline the best choice.

“I will say the one downside to all the new things we’ve implemented is that we probably don’t use any of them as fully as we could,” noted Hatfield. She says her support staff take advantage of Frontline’s short training videos, and she sends them to certification courses to learn about additional ways to leverage the solutions.