Users of JobMine have no fear, next fall WaterlooWorks will be here.
The UW Co-operative Education and Career Action (CECA) department, in partnership with Dundas-based company Orbis Communications, is working on a brand new website called WaterlooWorks which will replace JobMine.
WaterlooWorks has been in the works since November 2011 when CECA began phase one: assessment.
“We definitely got feedback from students that JobMine is not user friendly and does not have the functionality that we want and our ability to make changes to JobMine was limited … We started out with an assessment of what our options were … we wanted to provide a more current system,” said Dianne Bader, director of operations within CECA and the head of the WaterlooWorks project.
WaterlooWorks will involve several new features as well as significant updates on the functionality of current features.
“The search is a lot more robust ... you can distinguish between jobs that are new and jobs you’ve already clicked on, you can open jobs in multiple browser windows, 24-hour access … you can see exactly where jobs are located [Google Maps are directly on pages],” Stephanie Tortorici, CECA marketing associate, said.
Bader said, “One of the expanded services outside of the search is one free no-rank. So once you go through all your interviews and you find there’s one job you just don’t want, once a term you can just sign it off … If students signs off a job we ask them to tell us why because that’s valuable information for us and the employers.
“Students would like to see salary information being mandatory. We’re not prepared to do that, we’re going to put a field in and coach and encourage employers to put the information up, and maybe some time in the future it will become mandatory,” Bader said.
The co-op process will remain the same in essentials, but WaterlooWorks will include several features that will encourage more valuable communications between students and employers.
“Employers can now message students with their rankings, so along with an offer and a rank of two or even a rank of nine they can say we’d love to have you, or on the flip side you would have got this position if you’d done this,” Tortorici said.
Bader added, “As a student concludes their work term, in the same way employers rate students, it will allow students to evaluate the work term … once there’s enough information in the system students will be able to see how other students have rated jobs and employers will be able to see how they are being rated.”
Throughout the project CECA has placed a lot of emphasis on student feedback.
“We’ve been pushing hard on engaging students, certainly more than a lot of other projects on campus. It’s hard to engage students, they’re all busy, they get lots of emails from everybody around campus, they’re on campus, and they’re off campus. We feel we’re doing as much as we can, as much as we can think of. Hiring students to do the engagement with students is great,” Bader said.
CECA has been reaching out to students through a WaterlooWorks panel on Facebook (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/317004421788243/">https://www.facebook.com/groups/317004421788243/</a>), their website, Twitter, presentations to student societies, demos, drop-in sessions, focus groups, and webinars.
“A lot of the feedback we’re getting from students is how to reach students, and how to keep them engaged, and how to keep them aware of what’s going on … we’re also asking them specific functionality type questions … we’ve tried to take what they ask and engage it,” Bader said.
Tortorici added, “We did post on our website a comparison of the results of the poll questions and said ‘this is what you said and this is how we applied it … I think the students on the panel are pretty pleased with the way they’re being engaged. There was a comment the other day saying thank you for this student panel, we really appreciate it.”
WaterlooWorks will be implemented in five stages. The first took place last spring, during which one architecture class was given access to WaterlooWorks for their recruiting period. Currently, two architecture classes, including first work term students have access as a part of phase two, and students who used the system in Spring 2014 will see work term support on WaterlooWorks. In Winter 2015 the system will be partially available to all students with increasing functionality over the next few terms.
