Public school system elevates student success by recruiting top talent

Insightly makes it easier for Denver Public Schools to recruit and hire quality teachers and staff.

Recognized as one of the top urban school systems in the United States, Denver Public Schools (DPS) serves more than 92,000 students in the City and County of Denver, Colorado. With roots dating back to the mid-19th century, the primary mission of DPS is to help students achieve the necessary skills and knowledge to become contributing citizens in society.

DPS employs more than 13,000 teachers and staff across its 200+ schools. Seeking a more efficient way to identify, track, and engage Colorado’s top talent, the talent acquisition team at DPS began evaluating its existing processes. “Recruiters tracked their candidate interactions in spreadsheets, which created a lot of confusion and duplication of effort,” said Alexandra Jones, Program Specialist of Talent Acquisition at Denver Public Schools. “Ideally, we needed an applicant tracking system, but we did not have the funds for it.”

Alexandra Jones Program Specialist Of Talent Acquisition

Candidate management for a fraction of the cost

Although CRM technology is most commonly associated with sales, Insightly’s flexibility made it the perfect solution for candidate management at DPS. “We’ve adapted Insightly to be

Compared to expensive talent management systems, Insightly was a better fit for our team of twenty recruiters.

come the source of truth for candidate information,” Jones said.

DPS recruiters attend job fairs and collect candidate information via an online form, which is easily exported to CSV format. After the event, the CSV is imported into Insightly, which automatically creates a new lead record for each candidate. Recruiters convert leads to opportunities as relationships progress, yielding a highly scalable and trackable candidate management pipeline.

Simplified KPI tracking

Insightly’s built-in event management feature provides a convenient way to organize the team’s recruiting events. “We use Insightly to track all of our in-state and out-of-state events,” Jones said. “Insightly delivers much-needed transparency into the costs, candidates, and conversations that result from each event.”

For maximum visibility, DPS links Insightly lead records back to their originating events. “Linking records allows us to track return on investment for recruiting events that we attend,” Jones said. “Insightly dashboards will play an important role in monitoring year-over-year changes in ROI.”

Dashboards also simplify the analysis of internal performance metrics, such as team member activity. “We’re a competitive team,” Jones said. “Insightly dashboards deliver an at-a-glance summary of the recruiters who are the most active, which motivates everyone to maintain high levels of engagement and adoption.”

Automated workflows

Workflow automation in Insightly makes it easier for the talent acquisition team to work on the recruiting process—not just in it. “During our off-season, we spend time tweaking our processes and procedures for using Insightly,” Jones said. “We’re continuously refining our Insightly instance to achieve maximum consistency and reap the most benefits from the system.”

Using Insightly to automate reminders, tasks, and processes has already made a noticeable impact on productivity. “Insightly provides everyone with greater clarity and makes it easier for recruiters to reach out to candidates in a timely fashion,” Jones said.

Integrated efficiency

The Insightly Sidebar for Outlook delivers an additional layer of automation. “Many of our recruiters use the Insightly integration with Outlook to add reminders and tasks from their inboxes,” Jones said.

The team is also exploring other value-added integrations with Insightly. “Power BI integration could deliver additional insights by joining our recruiting data with data from other systems,” Jones said. “We’re also interested in integrating our recruit texting platform with Insightly.”

Building additional integrations and exploring new features will help DPS achieve maximum transparency, collaboration, and efficiency from Insightly.