Job searches with the human touch - San Francisco State University

Picture for a moment the ability to offer your students a job-hunting program that increases job listings more than threefold; increases student usage more than tenfold; increases employee productivity; operates twenty-four hours a day; reaches out to students wherever they are; eliminates all typos, grammar and listing mistakes; uses no office space; and has a one-time cost of less than $5,000.

The Voice Mail Job Line at San Francisco State University gives all of those advantages. The application is made possible through a system from Career VoiceLink of Orinda, Calif..

In our estimation, this is the best that technology has to offer: speed, cost savings, convenience, efficiency and accuracy, while offering an unprecedented human touch.

The "job postings" are the highlight of the Voice Mail Job Line, for they are the actual voices of the employers, dictating their individual want ads with color and diversity through their myriad accents, personalities, fields and enterprises. Students and alumni like the human touch.

Voice mail is computerized, digitized and disk-based, and therefore does not use tapes, allowing far better manipulation of information. Users can skip to the next job at any time or repeat a listing in case a phone number or detail is missing.

The new feature most appreciated is hearing the actual voices of the employers. This brings the human dimension into play as students put their intuition to use. Typed slips of paper pinned on bulletin boards can never measure up to the power of human intuitiveness in the decision-making process.

Student and alumni use of the service has increased almost tenfold in 10 months. A typical month last year saw about 1,500 individual contacts with our bulletin boards and staff during open hours. The number of monthly contacts now, with 24-hour service, is almost 14,000.

What is appreciated the most among employers using voice mail is the time factor--no more busy signals, answering machine telephone tag or lengthy telephone calls with our staff. Now, only a simple phone call is necessary, which can be placed 24 hours a day and which is always answered on the initial call.

Most of our employers are local, and appreciate the choices they have in seeking San Francisco State students and alumni. Jobs listings for students have increased more than threefold since the system has been introduced. Typical listings have risen from approximately 200 jobs to 400 jobs per month. It is not uncommon for an employer to post a job with us and, within hours, have the position filled.

Voice mail eliminated all the typing, posting, monitoring, and most of the record keeping, for this is now done automatically in the voice mail computer. Instead of the labor of two persons, the job can now be done by the equivalent of one-half a person.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Nelson Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group