Interview with University of Pennsylvania Wharton School

By Faith Bliga

University of Pennsylvania Wharton School is an ApplicantStack customer in the higher education sector. Recently I sat down with Umi Howard and Kristi Ringen of Wharton for an interview about their implementation of ApplicantStack for their Lipman Prize Award. The following is a transcript of the interview.

Can you tell me a little more about the Lipman Prize Award for Wharton?

Umi: The Lipman Prize Award is a brand new initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. We are offering a $100,000 award to an organization providing leadership and innovation in the social sector with an emphasis on impact and transferability of practices. The award will recognize and amplify the work of organizations devoted to positive social impact and creating sustainable solutions to significant social and economic challenges– transformational and transferrable.

What is your role in the program?

Umi: I am the Director of the Prize and oversee all the moving parts of the program which include management of the committees and student volunteers who help to review and evaluate the applicants information. I also oversee the due diligence and communication with the organizations applying and all other stakeholders in the program.

Kristi: I am a technical consultant on the project and did review some of the application as well. I worked closely with the ApplicantStack Account Manager and Technical Team to customize their applicant tracking software for this particular project.

What were the challenges that led you to the decision to search for an applicant tracking system?

Umi: One of the biggest challenges was that we were uncertain about the number of applicants we would receive. We knew the process had to be online because the prize is global and we needed a way to uniformly access and evaluate the information in a fair and equitable way. We wanted to track trends and keep data over multiple years in an easy way. We needed a tool robust enough to handle a potentially high volume of applicants and reliable so we wouldn’t lose all of our information if there was a system failure.

Kristi: I would underscore what Umi said about accepting applicants from all over the world and they needed to be able to access the system from where ever they were located.

Any particular places you advertise the program?

Umi: We advertised in a great number of places and received a lot of referrals from the Wharton Network Magazine, school publications, and trade publications. We provided the ApplicantStack link in all advertisements so the applicants were all coming into the same database when applying and completing the same information.

What criteria were important to you when you were evaluating applicant tracking systems?

Umi: The most important criteria included strong 24/7 customer support, Web Server hosting and total redundancy. We had narrowed our choice down to two systems.

Can you recall why you chose ApplicantStack over other available services?

Umi: It came down to the sense of security we had that ApplicantStack could handle the volume of applicants with no threat of not being able to access the system in the future.

Kristi: We had most of our applications come in during the last day and even during the last hour almost all at the same time.

Umi: I actually have statistics that we had 141 applicants up to the last day and even up to the last hour. We received another 140 or so applications during the last hour of the deadline doubling our applicant total to 290.

Kristi: We had a couple of applicants who had user errors like internet connection problems and needed technical support but other than those few, we had absolutely no problems. We also held very tightly to the deadline requirements.

How has your process improved since you started using ApplicantStack?

Umi: The only point of reference I have was from my last job using a system we built in-house to run a similar program. We were totally dependent on our IT folks to customize things for us and run reports. With ApplicantStack we were able to configure the system ourselves and run our own reports. We were able to bring in the data in lots of different ways and we didn’t have to rely on any IT Resources to do things for us.

Kristi: I did a PeopleSoft implementation on a very large scale and ApplicantStack was much easier to work with. The best part is the reporting capability which is so easy and intuitive.

What would your response be to someone who asked you about using ApplicantStack?

Kristi: ApplicantStack is user-friendly, structured well and someone with little training can be a user. Given enough time to look around, anyone can figure out where everything is and how to use the system.

Umi: ApplicantStack is a robust system that allows you to do a lot in terms of customization. We were easily able to adapt the system to fulfill our needs and processes that it wasn’t built for. There’s enough flexibility and adaptability that we felt a great sense of control.

My final question, just for fun…..If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you like to visit and why?

Umi: I’d like to go to an Island in the South Pacific, lay on one of those hammocks, scraping my toe in the beautiful clear water.

Kristi: My first question is, are children allowed on the flight? Seriously, I would like to visit Rome. That’s where my father was born and grew up and it would give me some understanding into part of his heritage and history.