Liaison and Kira Talent Partner to Meet COVID-19 Admissions and Enrollment Challenges

Partnership will help higher education institutions better facilitate remote interviews with students, increase diversity through holistic admissions

WATERTOWN, Mass. and TORONTO, Ontario (August 18, 2020) – Liaison International today announced plans to augment its admissions and enrollment technology to help higher education institutions meet the admissions and enrollment challenges exacerbated by the 2020 pandemic. The leader in higher education admissions management and enrollment marketing solutions will collaborate with Kira Talent, global provider of holistic admissions solutions, to integrate timed video and written assessments into its robust application and enrollment management platform.

Since their foundings, Liaison and Kira have championed holistic review practices, through which admissions officers seek to gain a more complete picture of each applicant to determine if they are a best-fit candidate for their institution. As universities and schools evolve practices to meet social distancing guidelines, the ability to pair Liaison’s Centralized Application Service (CAS™) with Kira’s timed video and written assessments will make the enrollment experience easier and more equitable for students and institutions alike.

“Liaison is dedicated to ensuring business continuity for our on-campus partners during the pandemic, and we’re seeking opportunities to go beyond this as well,” said Liaison’s CEO and founder, George Haddad. “Our partnership with Kira will help schools in places where in-person interviews are an impossibility right now, but beyond that, it will help to make the admissions process more fair and inclusive. As our schools grapple with systemic racism and bias, holistic admissions practices are an integral strategy for building classes that better reflect our diverse communities.”

“Liaison’s CASs are a natural fit for our technology,” said Kira’s CEO and founder Emilie Cushman. “We've had a long-standing relationship with Liaison but this is an exciting new step, that ultimately, this will make it easier for students to apply to their dream programs and help admissions departments feel more confident in admitting the best candidates.”

As institutions restructure their workflows to include more staff working from home, often at odd hours to accommodate childcare, the ability to review applications collaboratively and remotely has never been more urgent. Liaison’s cloud-based platform and Kira’s asynchronous and on-demand interviews make these processes more efficient so that admissions teams can continue to meet enrollment goals without sacrificing the quality of their decisions.

Graduate programs interested in increasing their capacity for holistic admissions through Kira Talent can join one of Liaison’s 40+ CAS communities, and when the integration launches in November 2020, Kira customers will be able to seamlessly integrate video and written assessments via Kira’s platform. Learn more at kiratalent.com/liasion

About Kira Talent

Kira Talent is the world’s only holistic admissions solution designed for higher education. Founded in 2012, Kira transforms the admissions process by combining on-demand, timed video and timed written assessments with existing admissions requirements. Kira partners with more than 300 programs worldwide to build applicant-first assessments that identify and select their best-fit students. Learn more at kiratalent.com.

About Liaison International

Over the last two decades, Liaison has helped over 31,000 programs on more than 1,000 campuses more effectively manage admissions through its Centralized Application Service (CAS™) technology and complementary processing and support services. Partnering with over 30 professional associations, the company has developed discipline-wide services for a range of fields, including most of the health professions, as well as engineering (EngineeringCAS), graduate management education (BusinessCAS), graduate education (GradCAS), psychology (PSYCAS) and architecture (ArchCAS).

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