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Case Study

People-focused HR: How Tehama COE Simplified Hiring and Onboarding

Noelle DeBortoli and Lourie Larcade count on Frontline to help them attract candidates, onboard new hires faster, and ultimately allow HR to focus on retention.

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Tehama County Hero Image

District Background

Before Frontline

Hard-to-fill classified roles due to low job visibility.

Cumbersome paper-based hiring and onboarding processes.​​​​​

HR overwhelmed with manual tasks, ​​​limiting focus on retention.

After Frontline

Increased applicant visibility with a streamlined hiring platform.

Digital onboarding and automated workflows reduce paperwork.

Freed-up HR time for wellness programs and staff development.

​​​​​Tehama County Office of Education in Northern California supports 13 local districts and two dependent charter schools. Its 300+ employees include special education teachers, bus drivers, preschool staff, and many others who provide services and collaborate with districts.

Over time, Tehama COE has faced growing HR challenges, such as a competitive job market and manual hiring processes. With around 40 children enrolled in its special ed program at any given time, Tehama COE competes for a tiny pool of special ed teachers and aides.

“We’re all recruiting basically in the same shallow pool,” says Noelle DeBortoli, Director of Human Resource Services. Because of the relatively small number of students, the COE doesn’t benefit from word of mouth and parents wanting to work in the organization like other districts may. Because of that, Noelle and her team must find creative ways to interest new hires who might otherwise look at the local districts. If that isn’t enough pressure, TCOE also manages hiring for its own central office and programs. This leads to a lot of paperwork, phone calls, and data entry — time that staff would rather spend helping new employees settle in.

Challenges with Hiring and Onboarding

Limited Awareness of Classified Jobs

The COE posts teaching positions on a well-known education job board in California. But, she says, recruiting classified staff is more challenging, since the board is not well-known by people seeking non-certified roles. And because it is built for teachers, Noelle says they were looking for a different hiring solution. “We’re excited to bring in, hopefully, a simpler, streamlined process even just for the classified side of the house.”

Paper-Heavy Processes

For interviews, Tehama COE previously used manual rating sheets. During onboarding, HR staff had to chase down forms, scan them, and store them by hand – a time-consuming process.

The COE uses between 75 and 100 forms for various internal purposes. “[Our old system] is very clunky,” Noelle says “It’s basically a glorified, fillable PDF. It’s very static. It’s not user-friendly.” These forms caused data entry mistakes. Once Tehama COE digitized them, people often used inconsistent naming conventions. “We probably have a million documents in there, and it’s sometimes very difficult to find what we need.”

HR Team Stretched Thin

Noelle and her colleague, Business Services Specialist Lourie Larcade, wanted to spend more time on retention, wellness, and professional development, but routine tasks took up most of their day. “People forget to calculate the human hours involved in particular processes,” Noelle says. “They tend to think because people are here, they’re free.” In reality, staff had to juggle paperwork and record keeping when they could have been focused on programs that keep employees engaged.

Eventually, Noelle says, they reached the point where a change was needed: “We were at a crossroads of saying, ‘Okay, we can continue to do this heavy person-intensive process, or we can look for another solution.’”

Why Frontline Made Sense

Tehama COE Already Trusted Frontline

Tehama COE knew Frontline well because it already relied on Frontline ERP for California (formerly known as Escape) and Absence Management. When Tehama COE saw how Frontline Recruiting & Hiring and Frontline Central could connect with these existing modules, they grew excited.

“We saw the other modules,” Noelle explains, “and we said, ‘Oh my gosh, we could do all these things!’ And it’s all connected with Frontline ERP.”

When considering software, she adds, “We always want to start with Frontline and see what they have first, because we’ve already established a really strong connection. Frontline has yet to disappoint us, so why go get something else?”

Noelle DeBortoli Photo

“Frontline has yet to disappoint us, so why go get something else? You can’t beat the interconnectivity. You can’t beat how committed you are to continuing to grow and improve that. Why would we go somewhere else?”

Noelle DeBortoli
– Director, Human Resource Services

Solid Relationship and Support

Years of experience with Frontline solutions gave Tehama COE confidence to expand. “Honestly,” Noelle says, “we always start with trust. We have had a very good relationship since 2008, and so we start with that really solid foundation of relationship and trust.”

Flexible and Easy to Use

Frontline Central isn’t just a database of forms. It lets Tehama COE design modern forms with much more functionality than static PDFs. “We were looking for a lot more flexibility in how the forms are developed,” Noelle says. Tehama COE can create workflows without needing heavy back-end help. Employees can click through forms online, with clearer instructions.

Rolling Out the New Solutions

Discovery and Demos

Before finalizing its decision, Tehama COE brought in staff who would use and manage the software. “We had our tech director come in,” Noelle says. “We did a demo with Frontline, and he asked questions, and was satisfied.”

Lourie Larcade Photo

“Every time we saw it, it just got better. We brought Technology in. We brought in our person who deals directly with the forms and got their understanding and acceptance of what the program can do. That helped us move our decision forward.”

Lourie Larcade
– Business Services Specialist

Testing and Stakeholder Buy-In

After Tehama COE confirmed the platform’s ability to integrate with Frontline ERP, they tested common workflows. They wanted to see how real Tehama COE documents would look in the new system. HR prepared managers for the shift by explaining how interviews and onboarding would soon feel smoother.

Step-by-Step Implementation

Tehama COE started with Frontline Central to streamline onboarding and manage personnel files. After that, they added Recruiting & Hiring to simplify job postings, applicant tracking, and interview scheduling. They plan to gather feedback after each phase and refine their process as needed.

Early Wins and Expected Improvements

A Simpler Hiring Process

By using Frontline Recruiting & Hiring, Tehama COE expects to cut the manual steps for posting, screening, and scheduling. Instead of wrestling with mismatched or incomplete applications, they can see candidate status on one dashboard. And especially for those who may not know where to look for classified jobs, Recruiting & Hiring should help Tehama COE guide those applicants. They also anticipate better communication throughout each hiring stage.

Better Onboarding

With Frontline Central, new hires can complete each form online. Tehama COE can insert help videos along the way. “We are hoping for a better onboarding packet, an easier-to-understand onboarding packet,” Noelle explains, highlighting the ability to link to how-to videos to guide new hires through the process. “‘Hey, you’ve reached the I-9 process, and this is why this is required, and this is what we’re going to need.’”

That kind of guidance should reduce delays, since employees won’t get stuck on complicated sections. Once the forms are done, the data feeds into Frontline ERP automatically.

According to Lourie, “Once those forms are completed, that basic demographic information will then upload nightly into Frontline ERP. That keeps us from having to manually enter all that information and reduces data entry errors and paperwork.”

Centralized digital records will be a major improvement too. “We’re super excited to have something that’s built more like a personnel file,” Noelle says. “You look up a person, and you can see the different tabs and attachments.”

More Time for Staff Support

By cutting out tedious forms and chasing paper, Tehama COE can focus on programs that make employees feel valued, like wellness and professional growth. “We’re excited to start a really robust wellness program, robust training, surveys, and getting data,” Noelle says. “That is going to allow us the time to do that. Right now, we’re just so bogged down in processes that we don’t really have time to do anything else.”

They plan to run surveys for new hires, checking in after a month or so. “We want to do some surveys and ask, ‘How was your onboarding experience? How were your first two weeks? What can we do differently? What can we do better?’”

“We’re excited to start a really robust wellness program, robust training, surveys, and getting data… That is going to all us the time to do that.”

Noelle DeBortoli
– Director, Human Resource Services

Data-Driven Retention

Tehama COE wants to track turnover data, highlight which roles are hardest to fill, and learn what keeps people on board. Noelle hopes to use that data to show job seekers how they can grow at Tehama COE. “We would like to do a six-month survey and a twelve-month survey, and then use that data when we’re recruiting to say, ‘In the first two years they work here, 50% of our people move to a higher-paying role.’ We want to be able to have some data that shows upward mobility.”

Noelle also notes how special education can be stressful, and that Tehama COE wants to find people who see the rewards in that field. “We need people who are passionate and want to do that work,” she says. “How can we involve people who are already here? How can we help them understand how valued they are, and make them feel valued, so that they want to stay?”

Looking Ahead

Tehama COE’s leadership sees Frontline’s potential beyond hiring and onboarding. They want to add professional growth and evaluation tools. “Being able to focus on retention, what keeps people here, what’s causing people to leave,” Noelle says. “The next one we’re looking at is Frontline Professional Growth and growing our management group to be better and more effective managers, understanding that people tend to leave managers, not necessarily organizations.”

Tehama County Office of Education faces some big responsibilities. It serves multiple districts, hires for a range of positions, and competes for a limited pool of candidates. The old way — paper forms, manual data entry, and scattered information — slowed everything down. It stretched HR thin and left less time for staff development and retention.

They are looking to Frontline Recruiting & Hiring and Frontline Central for a fresh approach. Tehama COE can now guide applicants through a clear hiring process, store digital forms in one secure place, and automatically sync data with Frontline ERP. New hires see exactly what they need to do to get started in their roles. HR staff can focus on bigger goals, like creating a better workplace culture and following up with new employees.

By removing busywork and giving HR the tools to keep people engaged, Tehama COE can support the educators and staff who bring learning to life for thousands of local kids. And that’s a win for everyone.


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About Frontline Education

Frontline Education is a leading provider of school administration software, connecting solutions for student and special programs, business operations and human capital management with powerful analytics to empower educators. Frontline partners with school systems to deliver tools, data and insights that support greater efficiency and productivity, enabling school leaders to spend more time and resources executing strategies that drive educator effectiveness, student success and district excellence.

Frontline’s broad portfolio includes solutions for proactive recruiting and hiring, absence and time management, professional growth, student information systems, special education, special programs, Medicaid reimbursement, school health management, inventory control and asset management, payroll, benefits and financial management, and analytics solutions that help district leaders tap into their data to make more informed decisions for the benefit of their students and communities. Over 10,000 clients representing millions of educators, administrators and support personnel have partnered with Frontline Education in their efforts to develop the next generation of learners.