The Challenge: The Problem of Scale

University of Leeds, a large Higher Education institution with legacy systems, faced significant challenges in streamlining its recruitment process for online postgraduate courses. The vast majority of its student base was historically on-campus, meaning internal processes were set for that audience. Decoupling and splitting these processes for online students required mass changes to data gathering and the IT stack.

Key operational difficulties stemmed from:

• Fragmented and Inefficient Admissions: The old application portal did not fulfil its potential. The
  process was laborious, requiring approximately 15 steps, creating a "stop-start" process, with long
  delays, and requiring applicants to provide information repeatedly.
• High Operational Cost: Staff had to manually transfer applicant information onto spreadsheets to work
  through tasks, which lead to constantly having to revisit the beginning of the process throughout.
• Lack of Real-Time Data: The university lacked the real-time attribution data necessary to pivot
  resources strategically during short recruitment windows (often 5 to 6 weeks in market).
  
  

The Solution: Engineering Systemic Agility

BabelQuest adopted a highly consultative approach to address the University’s unique complexity, focusing on engineering a unified, seamless experience for both admissions agents and applicants. The core objective was to instil systemic agility, enabling the institution to match the demanding pace of modern online course recruitment, particularly in fast-moving subjects like AI and data science.

Key components of the bespoke solution included:

• Process Transformation and Automation: BabelQuest helped redesign the application journey, reducing the arduous 15-step process by 67% to just 5 steps. Complex automation and conditional logic were implemented to manage numerous exceptions, effectively automating the validation of (or
  straight-through processing for) much of the previous manual workload.
• Focus on Compliance and Accessibility: The new application portal was built to meet the University’s stringent functional and non-functional requirements, including high levels of Accessibility for disabled students. Crucially, the solution used HubSpot’s secure functionality to handle sensitive, protected characteristic data by collecting it for legal purposes while securely hiding it from admissions agents to ensure fair decision-making.
• Future-Proof Agility: The implementation focused on configuration over custom code, guaranteeing long-term maintainability and rapid optimisation for future growth, allowing the University to test and deploy new courses quickly.
• Speed of Implementation: BabelQuest delivered the functional system in six months by leveraging a specialised, agile methodology. This is a significant acceleration, as similar internal HE projects typically required multiple years to achieve.
  
  

Key Results and Impact

BabelQuest’s HubSpot implementation provided immediate, tangible results across operational efficiency and strategic management:

• Pace of Decisions: Decision-making time reduced fourfold, from 40 minutes to just 10 minutes per application.
• Competitive Advantage: End-to-end application processes - previously delayed by months of manual  chasing and academic review - are now completed in under two weeks.
• Conversion Rate: Elimination of major drop-off points (where conversion rates previously lagged) in the middle of the application funnel.
• Staff Experience: Admissions agents reported an operational ease that was 'night and day,' translating to a clearer applicant journey and higher-quality consultative engagement.
• Strategic Management: Managers gained visibility of forecasting and prioritisation. This new data enabled the executive team to call out risks sooner and pivot budget and resources midway through recruitment cycles, providing the agility required for modern course management.

The project successfully established the foundation for agility, enabling the University of Leeds to de-risk channel experimentation and rapidly iterate on its strategy, fundamentally transforming its recruitment capability to meet the demanding pace of the online learning market.