Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario — The new system for hiring students on a contract was unveiled at a town hall meeting last week.
On December 20 the new customized PeopleSoft contract hiring system replaces the Electronic Student Contracts System for hiring students including research assistants, teaching assistants, teaching fellows, and non-academics.
“The process for hiring students on contract is changing,” explains Debbie Radley, project manager for the Queen’s University Administrative Systems Replacement (QUASR) human resource module. “At our last town hall meetings in July, we said that we would be letting people see how the new system looks and operates. This most recent town hall is intended to do just that, specifically providing information to those who hire students on contracts.”
With the PeopleSoft system, student and human resources information will be in a shared database. When users want to hire students, they search for them using their unique ID numbers. The search/match capability reduces the duplication of student profiles in the system.
The new system allows for rules to be automatically applied to contracts. For example, it will assign four per cent vacation pay to all student contracts instead of users having to do that for each contract. Electronic signature approvals are retained in the system, an important feature of the legacy system.
In the new system deadlines for paying contract employees are driven by transaction date, not by payroll cut-off date. This means employers will be urged to enter payroll information on time.
Termination dates for student contracts will flow from the expected contract end dates so it will be important for employers to review contracts on a regular basis, especially for renewals.
When hiring a contract employee in the new system the contract must be created and then approved in sequence by the appropriate people. For example research assistant contracts must be approved first by the department head/designate, then the principal investigator/designate, finance, and the student in that order.
This process ensures that approvals and funding are clarified before the student accepts the contract. In the legacy system, the required approvers could sign-off in no particular order.
The transition to the contract hire system will coincide with the early cutoff in December. The exact cutoff date will be communicated to users well in advance of the launch date.
Contracts entered before the cutoff will go into the legacy system and, once approved, will be copied into PeopleSoft. After the cutoff date, new contracts must be entered directly into PeopleSoft.
An encore of the student contract town hall will occur August 25 from 1:30 pm-3:00 pm. The session will be held in the Kinesiology Building, Room 100.
The team is also asking town hall participants to take a feedback survey. Questions and comments can also be emailed to the team. More information can be found on the website which includes past presentations.
An encore of the student contract town hall will occur August 25 from 1:30 pm-3:00 pm. The session will be held in the Kinesiology Building, Room 100.
