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What the district learned when it left Frontline, tried another vendor, and ultimately chose to return.
Tucson, AZ
Sunnyside Unified School District doesn’t have the luxury of treating hiring like a side project. With more than 14,000 students across 21 schools, the district is in a constant cycle of staffing about 50 teaching roles a year, plus the steady stream of support positions that keep classrooms functioning.
With that kind of volume and pace of hiring, Sunnyside’s process needed to not be complicated. They needed candidates to move through it quickly, and HR needed a process that moved fast, stayed organized, and was manageable for applicants.
Sunnyside had been working with Frontline since 2017, but they still asked the honest question: “Should we switch?” Sunnyside explored a new vendor to see if there were capabilities or efficiencies they might be missing. The alternative looked promising on the surface, but the experience fell short once the district needed hands-on guidance.
Over time, Sunnyside’s application had ballooned to nearly 30 pages, and candidates were blunt: it took too long… sometimes about an hour. The district’s Data System Coordinator pointed out that, “We’re losing people because it’s taking too long to get through the application.” In a tight labor market, that kind of friction is an easy reason to close the browser and move on.
At the same time, integration snags with Sunnyside’s ERP were creating their own kind of slowdown. Payroll extracts weren’t coming through cleanly, payroll was frustrated, and progress was held up…until the right people got on the same call.
As the district’s Data System Coordinator explained, the ERP integration required cross-vendor troubleshooting. Frontline leaned in by getting on a working call with Sunnyside and the ERP team, walking them through what was happening, and showing the ERP vendor how to set up so Sunnyside’s payroll extract would come through cleanly. He explained that that breakthrough was so clear that, by the end of the meeting, everything was aligned and ready to move forward.
Because of the lengthy application and data syncing issues with the ERP, Sunnyside explored the move to another vendor with a simple goal: make it easier to apply and easier to move hiring data where it needed to go. At first glance, the alternative looked promising, “brand new and shiny,” as the team described it.
Sunnyside was more concerned about consistent follow-through than merely a first impression. They evaluated what would happen after the contract was signed: during implementation, when questions hit, when HR teams are under pressure, and when being told “good luck” is not an acceptable project plan. That’s exactly where things started going sideways.
HR Director, Gabriel Flores, expected structure: check-ins, a plan, someone actively shepherding the district through change. Instead, he said there were “no check-ins, there was no plan.” He explained that they were just given a handout and essentially wished good luck.
The conclusion the Sunnyside team reached was simple and honest: the decision not to switch vendors came down to customer service. Not price, not UI, not the feature checklist.
“Frontline has made their whole culture about the customer. They didn’t just escalate and disappear, they made sure it got in the right hands and they didn’t leave us hanging.”
Once Sunnyside re-engaged with Frontline, the focus changed from vendor comparison to genuine collaboration: How do we fix the parts of the process that are slowing candidates down?
This is where Frontline’s support showed up as more than troubleshooting. The Sunnyside team described calls where the goal wasn’t “fix it for me,” but “show me what you’re doing.” That distinction mattered because Sunnyside wasn’t trying to outsource responsibility. They truly wanted to learn how to navigate the software to get smarter, faster, and more consistent.
Frontline’s support helped them revisit the application flow page by page, stripping out unnecessary steps and rethinking what data truly needed to be collected and when. There were moments when it just clicked. For example, the Sunnyside team recalled realizing they were asking candidates for sensitive information repeatedly: “Do you really want to ask for a social security number multiple times?” They eliminated the redundancy and the order questions appeared on the application. At that point, it felt like “the lights went on.”
It wasn’t something they may not have caught on their own. The way the team used Frontline had evolved over years, and some of the extra steps had simply become normal. Walking through it together helped them see what could be simplified and make changes without feeling like they’d built it wrong in the first place.
“When I am reaching out to Frontline support, most of the time I’m not saying, ‘Just fix it for me.’ I’m calling to say, ‘Show me what you are doing.’ They walk me through it. They’re also teaching me the system.”
During the ERP integration challenges, Frontline stayed engaged and helped move the troubleshooting forward. The Sunnyside team pointed to the Frontline leaders who didn’t dodge responsibility, who helped move issues to the right experts, and kept Sunnyside from getting stuck in the dreaded “it’s not our system” loop. Frontline’s lead support involvement became a turning point: once the right troubleshooting and collaboration happened, the relationship shifted so dramatically that Sunnyside’s ERP team remarked, “We’d like you to join us in all of our client meetings.”
That response gave Sunnyside clarity about the kind of support they could expect going forward with Frontline and reinforced their decision to return.
The impact was immediate: candidates moved through the application faster, and the HR team saw fewer bottlenecks. What once took close to an hour now takes about 20 minutes. Less friction means fewer abandoned applications. Fewer abandoned applications mean a stronger pool of candidates. In a competitive market, that matters.
This reinforces why Frontline Recruiting & Hiring works for districts like Sunnyside. It supports the full hiring and onboarding process without adding extra steps for candidates or staff.
Sunnyside’s story isn’t “everything is perfect now.” They’re still refining, still integrating, still pushing toward smoother access and fewer disconnects.
But their vendor decision is settled, for a reason that senior K–12 leaders recognize immediately: when you are staffing dozens of roles across a large district, the software matters, and partnership matters even more.
Sunnyside’s decision wasn’t about convenience. It was about choosing a partner who would stay engaged, work through complexity, and keep improving the process over time. After trying another vendor, the team returned with a clearer sense of what mattered most: a steady support with a system they could keep refining.
Every district’s hiring challenges look a little different, but the need for a faster, more efficient process is universal. Connect with our team to learn how Frontline can support your hiring goals, improve your candidate experience, and help you build a stronger workforce.
