How American University Cut Recruitment Time in Half
Before this project, a single hire at American University could take up to a month. Not because anyone was moving slowly — because one Business Process was trying to govern every kind of hire the university makes: faculty, staff, and student employees, all routed through the same conditional logic and the same layers of approval.
American University (AU), a prestigious higher education institution in Washington, D.C., operates a diverse and dynamic workforce spanning faculty, staff, and student employees. With Workday as its central HR system, AU set out to enhance efficiency and consistency across all of those employment categories. Instead, its recruitment process had become a significant bottleneck: slow, overly complex, and burdened by redundant approvals and conditional rules.
Same System, Three Different Jobs
Faculty hiring isn’t staff hiring, and staff hiring isn’t student hiring. However, AU’s Workday setup treated them identically. At the outset of the engagement, a single hire could take up to a month to complete.
Several structural issues were driving those delays:
- A single, one-size-fits-all Business Process — governing every type of hire, faculty, staff, and students alike.
- Complex conditional logic — introducing unnecessary routing and manual touchpoints.
- Excessive approvals — often required from the same person acting in multiple roles, causing duplication and long turnaround times.
The result was a slow and inconsistent candidate experience, frustrated hiring managers, and an inefficient use of HR resources.
Rebuilding Around How AU Actually Hires
Integrum streamlined AU’s Workday setup to align with how the university actually operates, ensuring compliance with minimal disruption:
- Process Discovery & Design — Workshops with AU’s HR and academic stakeholders mapped real-world hiring scenarios and uncovered exactly where approvals and conditions were adding unnecessary friction.
- Segmented Business Process Design — The single recruitment workflow was re-engineered into three rule-based Business Processes, one each for Staff, Faculty, and Student hires. Each was configured with tailored steps, relevant conditions, and streamlined routing to match that group’s specific needs and policies.
- Simplified Approval Flow — Approvals were consolidated to eliminate redundancy. Where possible, steps were configured to auto-complete once conditions were met, removing manual effort and delay.
- Cleanup & Optimization — Obsolete condition rules and approval steps that were no longer functionally necessary were removed, aligning the system with AU’s current policies and reducing the risk of configuration conflicts.
What Changed
The impact was immediate and transformative:
- Recruitment cycle time reduced — by more than 50%.
- Approvals consolidated — eliminating redundant reviews and duplicate approvers.
- Tasks routed correctly — to the proper security groups, ensuring compliance and timely completion.
- Simpler process logic — making the system easier to maintain and less error-prone.
- Improved user satisfaction — with hiring managers experiencing faster turnarounds and fewer manual steps.
The Feedback
“We’ve been with Integrum from the beginning and deeply value and trust them as partners.” — CIO, American University
The Takeaway
By aligning technology with organizational logic, Integrum helped American University turn a cumbersome, one-size-fits-all hiring process into a lean, automated, and policy-compliant experience. The new recruitment framework reflects AU’s unique structure while ensuring speed, accuracy, and control — proof that Workday optimization can deliver both efficiency and governance at the same time.
If one Business Process is trying to do the job of three, that’s usually where your hiring delays are actually coming from. Talk to Integrum.