Society of Human Resource Management Eliminates Tool Overload and Streamlines Volunteer Management with Lineup

Meet the Client

Originally founded as the American Society for Personnel Administration (ASPA) in 1948, the organization officially changed its name to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) in 1989. SHRM is considered the foremost expert, researcher, advocate, and thought leader on issues that impact today's workplace, and has nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries. SHRM also administers standard and specialty certification exams for HR professionals.

The Challenges

SHRM's exam team used an assortment of survey collection and scheduling tools to gauge interest, recruit, update, and communicate with participating subject matter experts (SMEs) who performed item writing and other tasks for its professional certification exams.

They then exported all information into Excel spreadsheets, which became the main repository for data, and used mail merge to send emails and communicate with participating SMEs. The entire workflow was clunky and inefficient, with data scattered all over the place.

The organization had also amassed around 1,000 active SMEs by inviting anyone who was interested to participate and then conducting a vetting process. But with so many volunteers continually signing up and stepping into and out of projects, it was especially challenging to find and update volunteer data, let alone determine who was qualified for which projects.

The Solution

After seeing a demo of Lineup, SHRM's exam development manager, Charles Glover, knew it was exactly what they were looking for. SHRM's exam team appreciated Lineup's team database for managing projects, forms to solicit interest and sign up individuals, customizable filters to facilitate the SME selection process, and the ability to easily update volunteer information. SHRM now uses Lineup to manage 28 different teams, house its active volunteers, and archive another 1,200 past volunteers.

The Results

Since implementing Lineup, SHRM is able to:

Improve SME recruitment and management
With Lineup, SHRM's workflow has greatly improved. Sarah Chuon, SHRM's specialist in exam development, recruits potential volunteers into the program four times a year by sending out emails directly from Lineup with a link for interested SMEs to sign up and fill out a form — achieving a nearly 70% response rate on more than 6,300 active forms sent.

Within the form, each person selects what they'd like to participate in, and then Chuon uses Lineup's filters to select participants based on experience and other criteria. She's able to manage each project and team in the database. And once a year she sends a form to all active SMEs asking them to update their profile — archiving whoever doesn't respond to keep the database clean.

Access to more data makes Chuon's job easier. "I can see the history of the SMEs and what they've participated in, and I can get the right people into the right projects," Chuon says. "As I continue to collect more data, I can rate each person's strengths in the system and use that data to recruit more effectively."

Better organize information
Lineup's team database is central to Chuon's volunteer management efforts. She is able to organize and track all project-related information — including team members, communications, and activities — from a single interface. She also uses nearly 100 custom fields to help with the volunteer vetting process, including visual tags that enable her to quickly sight read and filter information.

Not only does Lineup make it easier for SHRM's exam team to track and engage with volunteers, they can also take notes and collect feedback from vendor partners about individual SME performance in the platform — all which impact future test development projects.

Save time, tools, and tedious work
With all information stored and updated in one place, Chuon and Glover acknowledge that there's much less stress on their end since they don't have to spend time sifting through and maintaining multiple, disparate systems. By bringing all volunteer management tasks into the Lineup platform, they've been able to eliminate at least four of the tools they were previously using.

With SHRM's exam team able to focus their time and effort in more productive ways, they're able to select qualified volunteers for each project and raise the quality of output in the ongoing development of SHRM's certification exams. "Ultimately, we're able to develop better exam items. That's the whole reason why we switched to Lineup," Chuon says.