🌟 K-12 Customer Spotlight: Alan Wheat | XM Community
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Our next customer spotlight is none other than the incredible AlanWheat, from Special School District of Saint Louis County! 🤩
Q: In a few sentences, tell us about your current role:
A:I am the executive director of student support services at Special School District of Saint Louis County. Within that role, I supervise and support multiple district functions. This includes related services (speech and language services , school psychology, social work, physical and occupational therapy, music therapy among others). Additionally, my role supports and supervises student intake, student records, parent education and diversity awareness, and the Instructional Resource Center.
We are a school district providing special education and related services to all public school districts within Saint Louis county. We currently support approximately 24,000 students.
Q: Tell us about one project that you have run on Qualtrics that has been particularly impactful.
A: Due to our nature as an organization, our stakeholders are spread across Saint Louis County. Getting quality feedback from stakeholders on hires has always been a challenge. Additionally, our previous interview process tended to not always objectively identify the attributes we are seeking because of a lack of calibration across a diverse workforce regarding the quality of responses from individuals.
We created a Qualtrics survey to simplify the process of identifying important attributes and “look fors” within responses of our candidates. Rather than putting a subjective rubric regarding the quality of the overall response, we would ask a question to our candidate and our panelists would have a pre identified set of "look fors" to guide their listening. In this way, we could allow the experiences and expertise of the diverse panelists to assess the quality of the attributes we were seeking for the candidate. Additionally, within each question some attributes are connected to strengths in areas of communication or knowledge or leadership or any other key competency that we are seeking. By completing within Qualtrics we can use scoring on individual attributes within multiple questions in order to report on strength in communication for example across all of our questions. The solution allows us to gain multiple insights on the candidates without complex analysis.
Since implementing interviews using this process, (~4 years in my department), we have identified candidates who were ultimately significantly more successful at a higher rate than previously. Discipline has decreased and multiple candidates have advanced their careers resulting in promotions, etc.
Another key benefit is that individual candidate reports allow for meaningful coaching conversations for both the individual who is hired as well as meaningful debriefing for candidates who were not selected.
Because this process creates reports and summarization in real time, connecting to stakeholders has been substantially easier and helped us create more meaningful relationships with our partnering school district personnel. This process can scale exponentially more. Within the next year, we plan to implement this process for screening interviews for certain roles within the district such as teachers, etc. During closures related to COVID, we found additional advantages by gaining consent to record the interview allowing our panelists to score the interview when they are not able to be part of the primary panel. Transparency is vastly improved, objectivity is substantially better and consistency has improved dramatically as well. Our experience has been that this process addresses the most significant challenges and limitations of the interview process and turns them into strengths.
Q: What would you like to learn from others in the Community?
A: I would like to know more about people who are using text message integrations to make response communication faster. In particular, I am working on a project to create a safe lookout partnership with other employees to ensure their safety when they visit a students home. I have a prototype that uses emails to notify a partner when an employee leaves to visit a home, the project sends another email in 1, 2, or 3 hours based on the length of the visit. If the employee has not closed the loop on the home visit (indicated that they are back at school). Emails are ok but text would be better and more consistent. I do not yet know how to trigger responses to text without using the SMS gateway address as an email which is very slow and inconsistent.
Q: If time and money were endless, what would be your dream experience?
A: To spend some relaxed time with a truly great thinker. Like Sir Richard Branson, Elon Musk... Time with no particular agenda or outcome in mind just creative time to chat and learn. Fame is not the important part. The ability of a person to invest the time, take the risks and get the opportunity to confront real issues and make a difference.
Q: Do you have any additional or fun information you'd like to share as it relates to your experience with Qualtrics?
A: I am a true fanboi. Qualtrics is such a great set of tools to make meaningful connections and dynamic solutions for almost any problem or need.
I have created solutions with Qualtrics that have made tremendous impacts. Improved speed of information, created consistency on the backend for operations without affecting the workflows of contributors. It works so well that people do not even remember how challenging it was before.
So much more than surveys!