Admissions staff for Boston-based Berklee College of Music have a daunting data task as they scour the globe interviewing and auditioning roughly 7,000 promising musicians. Up until two years ago, 80 faculty and 40 staff members on the road throughout the year lugged laptops to manage input, comments and decisions. The laptops were heavy and cumbersome to transport through airport security lines. Staff then later fed information into the Boston-based school’s centralized FileMaker Pro database.

Berklee created their talent audition app with FileMaker Pro software, and it runs on the team’s iPads with FileMaker Go. Today over 20 admissions staff each use the iPad app to manage the data generated by 300 domestic and 30 overseas talent auditions. The iPad app is essential to recruiters traveling in areas of the world with intermittent Internet access. They synchronize the data they collect with FileMaker Pro databases hosted by FileMaker Server when they return to Berklee. Being able to manage the data behind hundreds of international auditions on a small, portable device has made life easier for Berklee College of Music’s recruiting team.

The FileMaker platform offers rich functionality, including the ability to:

• Organize schedules and audition and interview details
• Provide links to online videos of prospect performances
• Support descriptive text and ratings on a predetermined scale to help evaluators score each student
• Incorporate data such as student ID numbers from a legacy student information system, as well as online applications and transcripts from a SQL database

“FileMaker Go has become the core element that has helped us meet the demands of auditioning students with different musical and cultural backgrounds from 83 different countries and all 50 states. I doubt we could continually succeed in identifying, assessing and recruiting talent on the level and scale we have without FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Go.”

– Damien Bracken, Dean of Admissions, Berklee College of Music

Filemaker Go for iPhone and iPad is available now at the App Store for free.

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