We are often asked to create a variety of different forms for our institutions: donations, events, interests, just to name a few. Many of these can be built quite easily, but when you have a particularly complex form to build sometime you need to think differently about it and employ a combination of solutions.
Recently the state of New Jersey pass a new hiring law dubbed the “Pass the Trash” that would “…giving New Jersey school administrators sweeping new powers to warn other districts about teachers accused of sexual abuse…“.
This change in law requires school to gather a twenty (20) year employment history on all applicants and specific information if the applicant has had direct contact with students or children.
This new law and it’s requirements presented us with a challenge of designing an application form that could gather and track all of this information.
The sheer volume of information that needs to be collected to meet the requirements is a tad overwhelming. Finding a solution that allows you to collect the required, relevant information in a way that is manageable and provides a good user interface and experience (UI/UX) is difficult.
To solve this problem I turned to two tools, Forms Manager from Finalsite – our school’s web site provider- and Google Forms.
Forms Manager gives me a way of building forms that are configurable and provide a good UI/UX experience. You can build a page that matches your schools look and feel . Elements that can be arranged in numerous ways to make for a smooth flow for data entry and by using conditional fields applicants only need to see those fields that a relevant to their needs and history.
If n applicant has one undergraduate degree, two advanced degrees and 6 volunteer experiences they can select the corresponding number for each and fill in only that data for that number of experiences.
This level of user interaction from a design standpoint becomes complicated. As I like to point out, simplicity on the front end often means complexity on the backend.
In this case, within Finalsite, if I am allowing entry for three (3) undergraduate schools where I am asking for ten (10) discrete pieces of data I need to build out thirty fields for just this section. If employment history has nine (9) piece of data and we provide seven (7) options for former employers you need sixty-three (63) fields.
This is complicated further when you begin to build in the operational logic for the conditional fields. These are the UI elements where you give the applicant a dropdown that allows them to choose between one and five options and only showing the number of options they select.
What become onerous is if you have to build this out for twenty (20) years worth of employment history. You need an option that you can rinse and repeat easily…
Enter Google Forms.
While Google forms IS NOT the best tool for the entire form as it doesn’t offer the user experience we would want, it does make the ability to track multiple employment and volunteer experiences easier the single form can allow for multiple submissions.
Rinse and repeat.
The data entered in the form is held in a Google Sheet which can then be shared with those responsible for compliance and validation of the information entered.
Using these two tools we are able to capture the data we need to meet the requirements of the law. If you are using a HR or other online tool for employee hiring you may have other options, but you need to figure out your best option with the tools and budget you have.
Here is what the form looks like:
This process is not yet complete and we are still in the draft stages with the forms, but by leveraging the power of both of these tools we believe we have a solution a complex data collection problem. Thank you Finalsite and Google!
