Paper Title (use style: paper title) - George Mason University



Design of a Recruiter-Student Connection System Using Social Networking

Mary Barthelson, Issam Boumlic, Souheil El-Hage, Ummer Shamma

Department of Systems Engineering

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA

Abstract—

Index Terms— (key words)

Introduction

The current undergraduate recruitment system is a “Drag-net” approach to recruiting, which universities attempt to mass-recruit by contacting as many students as possible, in hopes that most of the students will apply to the university. With this approach, universities neglect to search for quality students; instead focusing on quantity.

University Recruiting Process

In order to fill their enrollment targets, universities typically market toward under-filled programs. This means that if a certain program at a university has a low amount of students, they will work on encouraging prospective students to enroll in that program at their school. Universities will also market towards sources of applicants in the past.

In order to stay under budget, universities will focus of recruiting systems that produce a large number of results at the lowest cost. A good example of this is sending emails to students, as it does not cost universities anything to send someone an email. They will also recruit out-of-state students, as costs for these students tend to be much higher as opposed to in-state students.

To improve the quality of enrolled students, universities will increase the size of their applicant pool in hopes of recruiting as many high quality students as possible. This approach helps to beat other universities who are also looking for the best students.

Social Networking Websites

Social networking websites are platforms that build social relations among people who share interests, activities, backgrounds, etc. It consists of users, their social links, and other services. Most are web-based and provide means for users to interact with each other, such as messaging, public chats, etc. They enable individuals to self-organize into communities, which allow for swift communication. They also break geographical and social barriers, which allow connections to be identified at the global level. Some examples of social networking websites in the U.S. include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Social Networking and Universities Interaction

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This figure shows how users create profiles through social network websites. The process begins with a student creating a profile. At this point, the student is now a user of the website, which enables them to be noticed by universities. Once the user is accepted into the university, they enroll in the university. After the student studies at the university, they exit the process as a skilled laborer who can contribute to the economy.

Social Network tools currently used

1 CRM Tool

CRM (customer relationship management) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way. For example, an enterprise might build a database about its customers that described relationships in sufficient detail so that management, salespeople, people providing service, and perhaps the customer directly could access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer had purchased, and so forth. According to one industry view, CRM consists of:

• Helping an enterprise to enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customers, manage marketing campaigns and generate quality leads for the sales team.

• Assisting the organization to improve telesales, account, and sales management by optimizing information shared by multiple employees, and streamlining existing processes (for example, taking orders using mobile devices)

• Allowing the formation of individualized relationships with customers, with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximizing profits; identifying the most profitable customers and providing them the highest level of service.

• Providing employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers understand and identify customer needs and effectively build relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.

2 College Board

College Board is an organization that prepares and administers standardized tests that are used in college admission and placement. In addition to managing tests for which it charges fees, the College Board works with programs that claim to increase achievement by poor and minority middle and high school students. Funded by grants from various foundations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the College Board Schools operate autonomously within New York City public school buildings

3 Cappex

Cappex aims to try to give students some relief by helping students connect with colleges and universities that are interested in recruiting them. The site aims to help students, guidance counselors and school administrators by connecting them all via the web. Students simply fill out a profile and schools can look for students through Cappex based on profile criteria. Similar to LinkedIn, Cappex enables schools to attempt to connect with students but students can choose which schools they are interested in connecting with. School administrators can leverage Cappex as a recruiting tool to search for prospective students. Guidance counselors can also get involved with Cappex by registering to assist student throughout the school selection process.

• 47 percent of schools said college social media sites are important or critically important.

• Nearly one third of colleges receive as many as 6 to 20 percent of their enrollments via college search social media sites.

• 39% of schools cited an increase in enrollments resulting from college search social media sites.

• Nearly 50 percent of colleges said they will dedicate more resources to college search social media in 2011-2012.

Stakeholder Analysis

1 Primary Stakeholders/Goals

1 Students

• Earn an income

• Acquire experience

• Attend best colleges

• Stay under budget

2 Universities/University Recruiters

• Fulfill enrollment targets for all schools and departments

• Stay under budget

• Improve quality of students that enroll

3 Social Network Owners

• Make a profit

• Stay under budget and stay in business

• Maintain relevance to users

2 Secondary Stakeholders/Goals

1 Governments

• Improve quality of life for citizens

• Improve the economy

• Enable innovation

• Increase size of labor pool

• Maintain funding for operation

• Generate revenue

• Stay under budget

2 Advertisers

• Maximize exposure of certain products based on target’s interest/field/location

3 Administrators

• Keep website functional & secure

• Resolve STEM related member conflicts

4 Web developers

• Build a website in accordance to the owners’ vision

Stakeholder Tensions

Many of the stakeholders’ goals are mutually beneficial. Students want to connect to universities, universities want to connect to students, and social networks want to enable these connections. It is not a conflict of goals that cause tension and prevent the system from changing. Conflict occurs because stakeholders must prioritize their goals in order to work with their budget and constraints. For example, while universities want to improve the quality of their students, they first need to ensure they meet enrollment target rates and stay under budget. These two goals have an immediate impact on funds for operation, while quality of students has a long-term impact on revenue. A university could spend all of its resources recruiting ten of the highest quality students in the world, but unless these students are able to pay millions of dollars for tuition, the university will not earn enough revenue to stay in operation for long. As a result of this, universities must look for systems that produce a high number of connections at a low cost. Universities need to recruit out-of-state students in order to increase revenue, so there is an incentive to spend money for recruiters to travel – but only to events that will produce many possible connections for each recruiter sent, reducing the probability that high quality connections will occur. Social networks have many features that can be utilized to establish personal connections between recruiters and geographically dispersed students, but there is no incentive for the university to change the current system and take advantage of all of these features. Universities are more likely to utilize only those features that produce a higher number of connections per recruiter. The constraint of resources and capital for university recruiting limits the ability for social networks to be better integrated into the recruitment process and lower the cost of recruiting geographically dispersed students. This prevents social networks from making a profit and may impact their ability to stay in business. With a high information cost, students do not receive the best visibility for the opportunities they desire. These conflicts create a cycle, as the initial sacrifice of quality of connection impacts the university’s ability to win the highest quality students from competing universities.

Scope

The process being designed will be based on the George Mason University (GMU) undergraduate recruitment process. It will consider high school and university interactions. Transfers will not be considered. Costs will include labor, travel/event expenses, and marketing materials. The quality of students will be based on student GPA & SAT scores.

Gap Analysis

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Problem Statement

The labor, travel, and material costs to establish strong personal connections early in a student’s career is high due to geographical dispersion and high information costs. The highest quality students are being lost to competing universities in the current system set up to manage these costs.

Need Statement

There is a need for an increase in the quality of students enrolled to be established under budget and in enough quantities to meet target enrollment rates.

System Requirements

• The system shall produce between 2580 and 2690 enrollments.

• The system shall maintain or reduce the cost of the undergraduate recruiting process compared to enrollment service revenue by at least 8%.

• The system shall maintain or decrease the difference between the average GPA of accepted students and enrolled students to less than 2%.

• The system shall maintain or decrease the difference between the average SAT of accepted students and enrolled students to less than 2%.

Proposed Solutions

1 No Change

Pros:

• No significant drop in enrollment rates, budget or student quality will occur.

Cons:

• Freshman enrollment rates may continue to decrease

• Losses will still be seen in failed recruiting attempts for the top students

2 Add Social Networking Tool

Pros:

• Potential increase in enrollment rates

• Potential increase in student quality

• Potential decrease in cost

Cons:

• Potential risk to enrollment rates, budget or student quality will occur.

3 Change Resource Allocation

Pros:

• Potential increase in enrollment rates

• Potential increase in student quality

• Potential decrease in cost

Cons:

• Potential risk to enrollment rates, budget or student quality will occur.

Design Of Experiment

1 Student Surveys

• Surveys of high school and college students will be conducted via Google Forms in January and February (In Development).

• Distributions will be determined for student demographics and corresponding social networking preferences that could impact their decision to enroll and intermediate steps in an altered recruiting process.

• Distributions will be determined for student demographics and the manner by which students interacted with universities prior to their application and enrollment. This information will be used to supplement historical data that is either missing or not available.

2 Interview/Survey of Admissions Employees

• Distributions will be determined for the number of applicants, admissions, and enrollments and their associated GPAs and SAT scores. A more detailed breakdown for student demographics will be used, if available. Essential missing data will be supplemented by the student surveys.

• Information will be gathered about the admissions process and sub-processes that is not currently known. This information includes employee job function and task descriptions as well as estimated time spent on vital tasks.

• This information will be used to scope the model and determine which employees and processes are essential to the model. Any other necessary costs will be identified, such as marketing materials and social networking subscription fees/budgets. Most salary information is known (see 11.2.5 Resources), but information gathered from the employee surveys will supplement any missing cost information.

• An attempt will be made to assemble a detailed breakdown of system costs that are not available in the budget executive summaries in order to estimate a budget for the essential tasks and materials identified.

Queuing model in Arena

• A model will be built based on research and survey data. The simulation will begin when a university and student first make contact and will end when the student exits the recruitment process or enrolls.

Simulation Design

The goal of the simulation is to determine the recruitment process that produces the highest number of applications of the highest quality students at the lowest cost and which social networking tools facilitate this modified process. The components of the recruitment process that will be analyzed and modified are tool placement and cost along with resource (labor) allocation and cost. Initial analysis of outputs and sub-processes will be used to determine possible process changes that were not initially identified and their impact on the overall system and sub-processes.

Prospects entering the system go through intial processing (and subprocesses) that utilize marketing and recruiting resources. After this step, students may choose to return contact to the university or exit the system. All prospects at this stage are considered inquiries and go through student profiling processes with other students that enter the system as inquiries. This process utilizes marketing and recruiting resources as well. Inquiries move on from here and either apply or exit the system.

The applicant goes through the university’s application review process and subprocesses. Some students that were not initially identified enter the system at this phase. The university makes its decision whether to accept a student or not, and the applicant either leaves the system or moves on to make an enrollment decision.

1 Input Data

Research and survey data will determine what inputs are used in the model. This section provides an outline of what information will be used for each component of the simulation and gives a brief analysis of data that is currently available.

2 Entities

Information on sources of student entry into the recruiting process will be used to determine how many different sources are modeled. All create blocks represent a student, but different sources will have different manners of entry and different costs associated with them. Students may arrive randomly or in batches (lists). Currently the only numerical data available on student entry into the system is a broad overview, although the model below depicts multiple known sources of entry into the system: students from Cappex, prospects from other sources, students from Facebook, students from Twitter, students from Instagram, students from College Board, and inquiries from other sources. Whatever historical data is not available for these sources will be inferred by survey data of college students.

3 Attributes

Attributes will be assigned for GPAs, SAT scores, and predetermined values for whether a student will contact the university, apply, be accepted, and enroll. A cost will also be added to each student’s total recruitment cost to reflect costs associated with subscriptions to the various social networking sites. For example, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are free, while there is a $17,000 budget associated with Cappex. As more data becomes available, more decision blocks might be added to subprocesses, each corresponding to a new attribute generated in the initial assign blocks. Placement of and the number of assign blocks will change depending on what data is available and whether any correlations between student quality and preference are identified. A preliminary analysis of student demographics for entities and attributes can be found on the next few pages.

4 Processes

The current processes depicted are top-level: university processing prospects, university profiling student, and university analyzing applications. The employee interviews and surveys will be used to separate these processes into their subcomponents. A cost will be added to students at each step in the process, which will add up to be the total cost of recruiting or attempting to recruit that student.

5 Decision Blocks

The current decision blocks depicted correspond to the top-level processes: prospect decision to contact inquiry, inquiry decision to apply, university admission decision, and applicant decision to enroll. The employee interviews and surveys will be used to determine what additional decision blocks need to be added and what criteria will be used to determine entity path.

6 Resources

Employee surveys and interviews will narrow down the list of which employees will be included in the model, as well as what processes they are assigned to and their associated costs and schedules. The employees listed below are full-time, but there are seasonal employees that need to be identified along with their salaries.

7 Output Data

The model will record the following data as the entities leave the system: number of uninterested prospects, the number of uninterested inquiries, the number of enrolled students, the number of uninterested applicants, and the number of rejected applicants. GPAs and SAT scores will be recorded for each of these categories in addition to total cost to process each student. Sub-process information will also be output in the report which will help identify bottlenecks in the system and the effectiveness of different social networking options. Analysis of this information from the model of the current system will lead to a better understanding of the recruitment process, which will lead to a more comprehensive list of requirements, and the development of a more complete list of alternatives.

8 Assumptions

The scope will be finalized after a full data analysis of the survey and interview results. Assumptions will be developed to supplement information deemed essential that is unobtainable. Most assumptions will either involve simplification of processes or estimation of cost.

Value Hierarchy

Three factors will be used to determine the best recruitment process alternative: enrollment yield, cost, and the quality of the students recruited. Enrollment yield was given the highest weight, as enrollment targets must be met in order for the university to make revenue for operation. The cost of the process was given the next highest weight. The admissions department has a set budget that they must not go over. The quality of student recruits was weighted slightly less than the cost. Quality students are essential to ensure improved university standing in the long run.

Results

Conclusion

References

1] Angelescu, Laura, Easterlin, R. (n.d.). Retrieved from

2] Agapitova, Natalia [2003]: “The Impact of Social Networks on Innovation and Industrial

3] Development,” DRUID Summer Conference, Copenhagen/Ellsinore

4] Enriquez, Leon A [2002]. Editorial Thoughtscapes. [Online]. ................
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