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.