The College Planning Council is organizing a new process to streamline hiring classified employees.

The four-step yearly process requires a staff member to enter a request for a new employee. For high priority positions, the staff member will answer follow-up questions for a faculty group to evaluate.

The group will present a recommendation to the College Planning Council, who will approve or deny the hiring.

“Lets say, god-forbid, we have an earthquake and we have to hire a disaster manager,” said Superintendent-President Dr. Lori Gaskin. “Then we’ll hire him.”

Last year there were 87 requests for new classified employees. The follow-up questions and group of evaluators will cut that number to a manageable size the councilors said.

“We felt that we could get more information than what was available in program review,” said Paul Bishop, vice-president of information technology and head of the evaluation group. “We could specify why was this position needed and how does this impact the program?”

The college is not planning on hiring any classified employees in the near future until after 2014.

“We said we would implement the process sometime this year in preparation for the opportunity for hiring,” said Gaskin.

The workgroup’s name will be decided at a later time.