Start Over Options

This post looks at the considerations when you choose to force a candidate to start over. There are two main areas to think about – how long before the candidate has to start over (allowable in process time) and whether their previously completed requirements must be recompleted.

The allowable in process time should be linked to either the recertification time or to an analysis of your candidates’ certification timeline. The first option harkens to my previous post – the reason for making the candidate start over is to ensure their qualifications at time of certification is relevant. Relevancy over time was already addressed as part of recertification policy so it makes sense to correlate the allowable in process time to that has well.

The second option ties the start over option to an understanding of your candidates’ motivation. Essentially, you want to find the length of time after which an impending forced start over will motivate your candidate to complete their certification.

In either case, we’ve generally seen the start over period in the 3-5 year range.

The relevancy issue is the foremost factor in deciding how to deal with previously completed requirements. Is an aged requirement still valid? If the candidate passed an exam 4 years ago, have they retained competency of the material? What about a document where they have outlined their relevant work experience? Perhaps the document is ok because they merely needed to prove a minimum level of experience in the field (and this job experience hasn’t grown weaker). However, perhaps the candidate needs to reprove that they have the knowledge and pass the exam again. A final item to review is if the program requires an affidavit where the candidate has attested to statements around their criminal background, adherence to program ethics, etc. Most likely the candidate should be required to recomplete this requirement.

Candidate satisfaction is another consideration. Candidates will feel differently about having to recomplete an exam that requires payment vs. merely submitting updated documentation. This will impact whether they are likely to start over.

Next posting – Some unique considerations in the start over process

Forcing Candidates to Complete

The next series of posts focuses on the issue of candidates who pursue their certification for an inordinately long time. These candidates start the certification process and, unlike the disengaged candidates from previous posts, they stay engaged. However, they take a long time to get certified. Or, they stay just engaged enough to stay active but never put in the effort to finish the certification. The first topic I’ll explore is the question – should the candidate be forced to start over from the beginning?

The primary reason that most programs allow the candidate an infinite time to complete the requirements is a desire to keep the candidate happy. If a candidate starts the certification process and then goes a length of time with no further activity, it doesn’t really matter if you make them start over because they have already disengaged. For example, if they fail the exam and you see nothing else from them for 3 years, most likely they are no longer pursuing your certification so nothing you do to their record is of much importance. However, if they are remaining active (continuing to take exams for example), this type of policy can frustrate candidates and lead to complaints to your customer service team. This is why many programs do not have a deadline for a candidate to complete their certification.

In addition to customer satisfaction, as long as a candidate is actively engaged, most likely they are continuing to generate revenue for you. If you make them start over, it is possible that the candidate will disengage in frustration leading to the loss of that revenue.

Finally, usually the activities at the beginning of the certification cycle are most impactful in terms of your staff’s time. If a candidate is merely continuing to take exams, they probably are minimally impacting your customer service team. However, if the candidate starts over, they might need to recomplete an application and resubmit documentation – activities which generally require a good deal of review time from your staff.

In contrast, the main business driver for forcing a candidate to start over is to ensure that their experience is relevant at time of certification. If you have an application process where the candidate provided industry experience or background information, then a candidate who takes a long time to get certified might no longer be one who should get certified based on what has transpired with them since time of application approval. For example, many programs have applications where the candidate completes a personal affidavit where perhaps they attest that they haven’t been charged with a felony. If the candidate takes six years to attain their certification, is this affidavit still valid? Or, if your program requires two exams for certification and the candidates passes them five years apart, have they truly demonstrated mastery of material at the same time? In either case, you increase the chances of certifying a candidate who does not truly meet the requirements for certification. A related example to think about is if your program requires recertification. If your program requires a candidate has to demonstrate proficiency every 4 years to stay certified, does it make sense that a candidate would have longer than those 4 years in which to demonstrate initial competency?

Two supporting reasons for enforcing a start over policy are:

1) Some candidates need a push – its human nature to procrastinate and some people just need a deadline. They want the certification and you want both that revenue and the additional person in your certification pool. The start over policy just gives the candidate a target to aim at.

2) It’s helpful for your program monitoring to know your pool of active candidates that are still pursuing certification and who might respond to marketing. Ones who are not making progress toward certification could be moved to a “Start Over” status.

Next posting – Options for the start over rule.

Keeping Certified Candidates Engaged

Continuing the candidate engagement thread, its time for a discussion on how to keep certified candidates engaged. Again, as with candidates pursuing their first certification, the trick here is to motivate candidates to stay connected. A great method for this is to organize a set of tiered certifications that progressively challenges your candidates’ expertise—as a candidate’s knowledge and experience grows, so does the challenge that your program offers. Having an entry-level certification, a senior certification, and an advanced certification provides a certification path that mirrors a candidate’s career path.

Another option is to have ongoing requirements that force a candidate to stay engage. Recertification is the primary means to do this. Many clients require candidates to submit continuing education (CE) in order to maintain certification. In these cases, its important that you have a site that the candidate can report their CE immediately upon completion rather than forcing them to wait until the end when they have completed all of the CE credits and are about to recertify. This way, they have periodic engagement with you as they login and record their progress rather than the single submission at the end of the recertification cycle.

A final option to consider is engaging your certified candidates as judges of who is qualified for certification. There are a couple of strategies you can use to engage your candidate population this way—as judges or as mentors. As judges: consider introducing a practical requirement to you certification path. These work products must be evaluated and graded to ensure they meet the rubric of your program. Senior certified professionals are your subject matter experts and take pride in vetting the next generation of colleagues—many are enthusiastic to volunteer their time to this effort. As mentors: in many trades and professions, mentorship is integral to maintaining professional standards. In some, the relationship is valued highly enough to formalize in the certification and licensure process. The mentor would ensure young candidates are performing the right tasks in the industry while internalizing and practicing the behaviors that are essential to success, thus incubating a truly professional society. As Judge or Mentor, your candidates take on a material role in defining the tenor and quality of your future professionals and you build a culture of connected and engaged candidates.

What do you think?

Keeping Candidates Engaged

As discussed in my last post, the best method for engaging disconnected candidates is never to let them disengage. We’ve seen a variety of methods for this, however the basic approach is to keep your program top of mind for the candidate. If they are thinking about their certification often, they are likely to interact with you, your website, and your program’s initiatives on a regular basis. For this post, I’ll focus on engagement for candidates who are in process of getting their certification.

The easiest method to keep in-process candidates engaged is to bound the time they have to get certified. If their pursuit of certification is open ended, it’s more likely that candidates will drift through the certification process without actively pursuing the requirements. We have clients where the candidates have a timeframe, 3 years, to earn their certification from the time they started the process by completing the application. If the timeframe elapses without the candidate certifying, the candidate must start over. Usually this means they have to recomplete the application and pay the application fee. A simple deadline is often enough to keep a candidate focused and on task toward completion. The energy and expense associated with starting over is a motivator for candidates to finish their certification in a timely manner. This timeframe has the additional benefit of ensuring that the process you designed and approved for the candidate is the one they actually experience and is still relevant. (I’ll discuss this relevancy issue more in a later post.)

Another option to motivate candidates is to have visual, incremental steps in your program. If the candidate sees that they are making measured progress toward certification, its probable that they feel successful and will continue to pursue your certification. You can use different statuses for each step in the process to give the candidate a visual demonstration of progress. After each step, let them know how far they have come and how little they have left to do.

A final tool is to find candidates who are in danger of disengaging and market to them quickly. These candidates are at risk of leaving your program. If they take this step, they are unlikely to come back. As such, incentives and discounts may make sense as reduced revenue earned from these candidates may be better than the nothing you’ll get from them if they disconnect. However, finding these candidates takes some sophisticated reporting. Adding the incremental statuses as mentioned above can help with this as it provides greater insight into the progression of your candidate population. You’ll need to do some trend analysis to determine the inflection points where candidates are unlikely to continue if their progress stalls. We’ve had some fun investigating this with some of our clients and its been exciting to see analysis results that generate actionable data to drive a marketing project.

I welcome your thoughts.

Next posting – Keeping certified candidates engaged.

Engaging Disconnected Candidates

A hot topic at our annual user conference last week was how to engage candidates who haven’t connected with you recently. For example, this might be a person who got a certification a few years ago and hasn’t had any contact with you since that time. From time to time, you want to connect to your candidate’s for various marketing campaigns or operational initiatives. These “disconnected candidates” are at risk of missing the message because their contact information may be out of date. Here are a few ideas on how best to reengage with candidates in this situation:

1) Direct contact via email or physical letter – this is the easiest but the success rate decreases with the time since last contact with the candidate.

2) General marketing with incentives – candidates may be interacting with your organization and merely not connecting. For example, they might be visiting your main website for information but just not accessing their certification record. A general marketing message on your website that offered an incentive for the candidate to connect should increase your success rate with cases such as these.

3) Seek help – professional marketing people either within your organization or at an outside firm spend a great deal of energy trying to solve this problem of reaching unconnected people and getting them to reengage. Use their expertise.

4) Validate that its important – contact for operational an operational reason may be less important than for specific marketing and communications issues. For example, getting notice to disconnected candidates that you have transitioned their certification record to a new system probably isn’t as critical as marketing to them to come take an updated exam. The risk in the former case is that they may stay disconnected and have customer service issues if they ever resurface. This pales in comparison to the lost revenue opportunity in the latter.

5) Never let them disconnect – Of course, this is the best answer but deserves its own discussion.

Has anyone had experience with any of the above? What options have worked for you?

Next posting – How to keep candidates connected and engaged.

Candidate Expectations When Going On-line

Another consideration for moving from paper to on-line is how going on-line changes candidate expectations. With clients we’ve worked with, we’ve seen 2 changes in expectations that have impacted clients a great deal – access to information and immediate feedback.

First, when you move on-line, candidates now have a tool that provides them direct access to their records. As with many things, the first taste of this whets candidate’s appetites and they want more. So, even if you start with something small such as an initial rollout that allows candidates to merely change their demographics, candidates immediately start to want more. They want to be able to see their test results on-line, track their progress toward certification on-line, submit continuing education credits on-line, pay by credit card on-line, etc. The move away from paper empowers the candidate to do more and they thrive on it and push the boundaries. In addition, candidates expect on-line information to be pervasive in your organization. Candidates get frustrated if they have to enter information more than once, use multiple systems to accomplish tasks, etc. Thus, if you have disparate systems that don’t share information, you’ll need to think about how you might be able to mask this from candidates.

Second, once you move on-line, candidates expect the pace of your operations to match the standards of the on-line world. When all applications are done via paper, they accept that processing and approving an application might take weeks. When a candidate can complete these on-line, they know that much of the time lag inherent in paper processes has been removed and therefore expect much faster turnaround time for your team to approve an application. Waiting weeks for their exam results, days for resolution on a question, or weeks to process their continuing education credits also become unacceptable for the candidate.

Both of these changes in candidate expectations means that your current processes will be tested and need to be reviewed for possible adaptation. For example, in an on-line world where candidates expect to communicate electronically where they set aside the “more legal-like” aspect of dealing with official paper documents in exchange for speed and access to information, does it make sense to replace a process where official notification of exam results is done via mailed paper letters with perhaps email notification and posting of scores to the candidate’s record on-line?

Are there other expectations that people see from candidates when moving on-line? Or, what other process changes have you made to adapt to these changing expectations?

Next posting – I’ll keep responding to the Going Online topic but we’ll switch gears in the next post and start a different topic for discussion.

My Candidates Won’t Go On-line

Continuing our thread about moving from paper to on-line, I thought I’d address a common concern from clients who are going through this transition – “my candidates don’t deal well with computers” and “we’ll struggle to get them away from paper”.

First, know that this is a common response. I’ve heard this concern countless times from clients. I’ve heard it described in various ways:

• My candidate population is age-shifted to those who are less comfortable with computers
• My candidate population contains a higher than normal % of people with disabilities (sight impaired for example) that make it difficult to work with computers
• My candidates are Type B people who aren’t used to the logical thinking required to work well on-line

Rest assured, we’ve gone online with clients like this in the past and each one has worked through these issues and still had great success.

Second, know that even those who struggle with computers are on-line because so much of life is on-line these days. My dad is 70 years old and can’t reset the clock on his microwave. He resisted email forever but is finally dealing with email because he realized that he didn’t really have a choice. The professional world has an expectation around the use of email. Similarly, it’s reasonable to expect your candidate population to look to the web for information and resources. The question is not whether to go on-line but how to transition your candidates and what safety net to give them to ensure they feel supported through that process.

Here are a couple of ways to go on-line that ease the transition.

1) Offer paper as an alternative. A small set of people will always need or want to use paper. Initially, a large number of people may feel more comfortable staying with paper. However, you see an immediate group that will want to go on-line and, as an overall %, that number will increase. You might start with the paper options side by side with the on-line options so candidates can choose. Then, as the on-line candidate population grows to critical mass, you can move your paper alternative to the background so it becomes an exception rather than an equal choice.

2) Train your staff in the new on-line processes before you transition from the paper processes. If you can, have the candidates continue to use the paper processes while your staff implements the newer online solutions. The staff can work out the kinks and get familiar with the new processes so they can better support candidates when you open the on-line systems to the world.

3) Roll new processes out one at a time. Perhaps you allow candidates to apply for your exam on-line but keep your recertification process paper based. Like the previous idea, you can control your exposure to new processes so that you can learn with each step.

What else have you found as part of this transition? Where does the real pain come in transitioning candidates on-line? Any other suggestions for easing the transition?

Next posting – I’ll continue the Going Online topic in discussing what going on-line means with regards to candidate expectations of your processes

Moving Online from Paper

We’re in the midst of bringing on another new client (hooray!). This client, like a number of others we’ve had, is using the transition to Credential Manager to switch from off-line, paper interactions with candidates to using the Web as the basis these interactions. Today, most items received from candidates such as applications, test registrations and supporting documentation are mailed to the client. And, the client uses paper mailings for outbound communications to candidates to notify candidates of eligibility, certification status, etc. Having done this with clients a fair amount of time, I was thinking about the common hurdles that I’ve seen clients have to surmount through a process like this.

My next series of posts are going to be around this topic – what are the common areas of change for clients making this transition with their candidate interactions. I’ll note some of the common responses we’ve seen in situations like this and would love to hear from others as to how they’ve dealt with these issues and if there are other major issues they’ve dealt with.

The first issue to think about on this topic is how going on-line with candidates generally means that you’re going to get greater consistency with less flexibility. If you’re running paper today, it means that anything can happen – both by candidates and by your staff. As you go on-line, you start to codify your business rules in software – this forces consistency but makes it more difficult to handles things that don’t quite meet the rules.When dealing with paper applications for example, candidates can mail one in and it can be incomplete, have invalid answers, have partial payment, etc. As the paper application doesn’t enforce any rules, there are none for the candidate to follow. While you have application guidelines, it doesn’t force the candidate to do anything. So, your staff must be prepared for anything. As we all know, if something is possible, at least one candidate will do it.

Once you go online with your applications, the software that processes those applications should allow you to setup rules that prevent much of this candidate bad behavior. This is a huge win for your staff as they are no longer dealing with many of the problems they had in the paper world. However, there is a loss of flexibility with the implementation of software. In the paper world, if a candidate did something with their application in some new manner that you’re staff had never seen before, your staff could merely put that application in a file folder and put it on their desk. Or, they could flag the application with some new status. If you have more than 5-7 statuses for a candidate in your certification lifecycle, this is probably how you got them. 23 statuses for candidate most likely means you have 5-7 of the normal statuses (applied, eligible, registered, certified, expired, inactive, etc.) and 16-18 statuses for exceptions. These exceptions each have only a few candidates but probably take a large proportion of your staff’s time. Going on-line means you have to figure out how to deal with these exceptions and whether its worth the time to codify rules for each exception software – this can get expensive. And, in the future, as new exceptions come up that the software doesn’t handle, how are you going to deal with that? You can see that its not as easy as merely creating a new label and sticking that candidate’s application in a file folder.

I think this is the biggest issue I’ve seen when working with clients through the transition from paper to on-line. What do people think – has this been a big issue for them? How have they dealt with it? What has it meant for them?

Next posting – I’ll continue the Going Online topic with a post talking about the dreaded “my candidate population doesn’t deal well with computers” and what that means as you take your program online.