Chad Lundquist/Nevada Appeal Nevada's Department of Personnel Director Jeanne Greene works on the launch of the new online hiring service at her office in the Blasdel Building on Monday.
Jeanne Greene is the state personnel director. She discussed the new online employee recruitment and job-placement system.
The state is installing a new job-recruitment system. When does it become available, and what will it offer?
It's an online recruitment system called NVAPPS, Nevada Applicant Processing and Placement System. It comes up Sept. 5, and what it will allow applicants to do is to be able to search for job openings online and submit their applications online.
How is that different from what the state does currently?
Currently, there's some automation. But from the applicant's standpoint, it's all paper. From the agency standpoint, they will be able to develop the (job) announcement online.
It will automatically be submitted to personnel online, and we can approve it online.
Where before we had a lag of about 10 days because we had to use state printing to do everything, jobs can be posted instantaneously, so we'll have job announcements coming up throughout the day. When you bring up the system, it will bring up all the new job announcements.
What about existing state employees who want to transfer?
A lot of times, the people we would be looking for would already be employed at the state. For current state employees, they'll type in their employee ID number, and all their employee information will be automatically be placed with the application.
Once they submit their information in the profile, they don't have to redo it. But they can go in and update it online.
How about after applying for a job?
Currently, we receive a lot of phone calls from applicants to see what their status is. This will relieve a lot of those phone calls.
And they can access it 24/7, rather than just 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
The applicant will be notified at every step of the process by e-mail: receipt of application, you've met the minimum qualifications, you'll be notified when you've been scheduled for a test. Then when your application has been forwarded to the agency and so on.
Applicants will be able to see which jobs they've applied for and see what status their application is at for each particular job.
The other thing the system does is, there's a self-screening portion in there. When somebody applies, they'll be asked specific questions: Do you have this, and do you have this? If they don't, they'll get an automatic e-mail notice saying, "Thank you, but you're not qualified for this particular job."
Anyone who submits a paper application won't automatically have all these added benefits. They won't get e-mail notifications, won't have access to check their status online. They'll get what applicants have traditionally gotten.
What's the overall goal of this system?
This makes it easier for the applicant to apply. And this will open us to a much wider pool of applicants - worldwide.
The hope and belief is this will make us more competitive with the private sector, particularly in the jobs we have difficulty recruiting, such as social workers and nurses.
The turnaround time now is so slow, by the time we get back out to applicants, they've already got a job somewhere else.
We eventually want to try get the majority of people who apply to do so online.