Show Us the Money

The inefficiencies in Columbia’s hiring procedures are unacceptable. Employees of the University often face long delays between starting new jobs and receiving their first paychecks. Columbia University’s Human Resources department has been trying for years to minimize these delays through the use of better computer technology, but it has ignored many problems surrounding the hiring process. Technological improvements should be accompanied by structural reforms that simplify the payment procedures.

Hiring at Columbia is broken up into four distinct groups: academic, administrative, service, and the medical center. Each of these groups is then broken up among the various schools and departments. Overall, 380 individual departments engage in hiring. Once someone has been hired by a department, his or her information—such as W-2 tax forms and records of employment—is sent to more administrative offices, ending up in the Human Resources Information Services department, where it is stored in a central database. Only then can employees receive their paychecks.

It is not uncommon for the same personal information to be entered into a computer three or four times during this process. Over the past eight years, Information Services has been updating the technology used in hiring to reduce this redundancy. The department is currently implementing new human-resources software through which information would be entered only once, hopefully making the endeavor more efficient.

This ongoing effort to improve the technology ignores a central problem with the hiring system, however—each department has its own rules for hiring. For the process to go smoothly, each person involved along the way must be knowledgeable about the appropriate paperwork and requirements for that specific hiring. The inevitable result is dramatic inconsistency in the payment time line throughout the University. Ultimately, this lack of standardization puts the burden of hiring on those in administrative roles in the various offices that oversee paperwork. To minimize delays, the University should institute standard rules for hiring and processing paychecks. Wherever possible, fewer offices should be involved from start to finish.

The problems don’t stop here. Any student who goes three months without receiving a paycheck is deleted from the system. A student who worked in the spring but not in the summer must fill out new paperwork in the fall. While it is logical to discard employment data for alumni who have left their campus jobs, it makes little sense to delete students’ employment information before they graduate. Additionally, if a student works in one department, then all of his or her paychecks are required to come from that department. For example, a sophomore who works for the bartending agency but takes on a second job in the biology department will receive all of his paychecks from the bartending agency.

An inefficient administrative structure does not excuse the fact that it is possible for new hires to work months without pay. The University should take a serious look at how it handles the hiring process if it wishes to do right by its employees.