From Lead to Hire and Beyond: Measuring Sourcing and Recruiting ROI with Franciscan Health

A hiring event with hundreds of job seekers might sound like a recruiting dream — but for Franciscan Health's flagship Indianapolis hospital, it quickly turned into an operational nightmare. Security scrambled, patients weren't pleased, and parking became impossible.

After reflecting on these mass hiring events, the team realized a critical truth: Despite impressive turnout and 15-20% on-the-spot hire rates, they weren't solving their real staffing challenges. The same previously declined applicants kept returning, while specialized positions remained unfilled.

For Franciscan Health, a 150-year-old Catholic healthcare system celebrating its sesquicentennial with multiple hospitals across Indiana and Illinois, this moment marked the beginning of a complete recruitment transformation.

Watch their full session here or continue reading to catch the highlights!

From Pandemic Crisis to Strategic Reckoning

As many healthcare organizations experienced, the pandemic had devastated Franciscan Health's workforce. "The fall of 2022 was probably our worst time at Franciscan [with COVID]. We had 3,000 workers of our own who were not working due to being sick. We had 1,000 contractors throughout our system," recalled Franciscan Health’s Director of Talent Acquisition, Ellen Page, during IAMPHENOM. "It was probably the lowest point of recruitment in my 25 years of doing this."

As they emerged from the crisis and implemented Phenom in January 2023, Franciscan wanted to revive their signature in-person hiring events to help rebuild the workforce. At first, the events appeared to be successful, drawing massive crowds of about 2,200 candidates across 12 events throughout the year. However, they came to realize the impressive turnout masked a troubling reality: they weren’t exactly moving the needle and filling critical roles.

"We were hiring between 15%-17% [of event attendees]. Some events, we hired 20% of the people that showed up," Page noted. But these were often positions they could have filled from their desks, not the critical specialized roles keeping them up at night.

For Page, this revelation sparked a complete strategic shift.

The Hidden Costs of Mass Hiring Events

Digging into the data further revealed that each hiring event demanded extensive resources and planning, including:

12 weeks of advance marketing preparation
Pulling every recruiter from their normal duties
Hiring managers spend entire days waiting for qualified candidates, who sometimes don’t show up
Expensive marketing tactics, including purchased lists and mailed postcards
Infrastructure strain from hundreds of simultaneous interviews

They also found the same declined applicants kept returning to new events — highlighting the lack of targeted outreach from their Talent CRM.

The Truth in the Data: Revisiting their Event Strategy

This honest assessment became the catalyst for change. Rather than abandoning hiring events entirely, Page and her team stepped back to define what success should look like. Three clear objectives emerged:

Event Enhancements: Recognizing their approach wouldn't scale, the team needed to reimagine in-person events to work more efficiently without draining recruitment resources.
Cost Reduction: With unsustainable expenses for planning and executing events, they had to find more cost-efficient ways to achieve better recruitment outcomes.
Quality Over Quantity: Instead of mass events to solve overall staffing needs, they focused on attracting the right talent who would actually fill critical roles and drive impact.

Enter "Talent Tuesday": Precision Over Volume

"I needed to reduce the cost of promoting the events, maintaining the event… And we had to look at quality over quantity," Page explained.

Working with the Phenom team, Franciscan developed a revolutionary approach: Talent Tuesday.

"What we decided to do was leverage a product from Phenom, and we call it Talent Tuesday. [We use] intelligent sourcing with our CRM and events. Then we use data to drive the events," Page shared.

From Reactive to Proactive: The Power of Intelligent Sourcing

The transformation required rebuilding their talent pipeline from scratch. Page discovered their existing Talent CRM was filled with previously declined candidates — "if we didn't hire you and you stayed in the CRM, there was probably a reason why we didn't hire you."

She challenged her team: "I want you to increase [candidates in] the CRM 30% quarter over quarter."

Using Phenom Intelligent Sourcing and X+ Source, the team could now search both their CRM and Phenom's cloud database of millions of profiles to identify and invite the right candidates. Recruiters could simply type natural language queries like "show me registered nurse candidates near Philadelphia" or even "show me candidates similar to [a specific high-performing employee]" — and the system would automatically identify matching professionals based on skills, location, titles, and company experience.

This enabled them to:

Actively identify qualified professionals
Build targeted talent pools for specialized roles using natural language searches
Create dynamic searches that automatically surface new candidates matching specific criteria for hard-to-fill positions like Cardiovascular Operating Room (CVOR) nurses — saved searches that update whenever new matching candidates enter the system
Know exactly who to invite to focused micro-events with confidence that they're reaching the right talent

This proactive approach became so integrated into their process that it fundamentally changed their recruitment philosophy — from casting wide nets and hoping for the best to precision targeting the candidates who actually matter.

The nurses identified through this process didn't necessarily attend a hiring event; they simply scheduled interviews during the designated Talent Tuesday. "The manager knew when they were interviewing. They knew what day it was. They didn't have to sit there all day waiting to see if someone would come in," explains Page.

Their pilot program targeted CVOR nurses — a critical specialty where "we could do the procedures, but we couldn't take care of the patients afterwards." The results were extraordinary:

17 CVOR nurses identified and invited
9 were hired from that targeted group
Zero infrastructure disruption

"The recruiters loved it because they didn't have to go to an event and help recruit for positions they weren't even hiring for," Page explained. "We didn't make security, patient experience, parking, we didn't make anybody mad because they didn't even know we were there."

The New Normal: Scaling Success Across the System

What started as an experiment has become standard operating procedure. "We probably did 25 Talent Tuesdays [in 2024]. This year, we're probably going to do over 100."

This model proved immediately replicable and scalable. If a position remains unfilled after 90 days, it automatically triggers a “Talent Tuesday”. As a result, the Franciscan Health team experienced additional successes:

For Physician Office Support Staff:

52 candidates were invited to apply
13 were screened for skills/culture-fit
10 interviews were conducted
3 were rejected after the interview
5 were hired on the spot

For Emergency Room RNs, the impact was:

18 candidates were invited to apply
9 were invited to an interview
6 interviews were conducted
4 offers were extended on the spot

Cultural Transformation Through Technology

The impact extends beyond metrics. "I joke at work because Phenom is a verb at work. Everybody comes and says, ‘show me that Phenom thing that you do.’ And that's why we know it's working, because it's ingrained in our culture and in our recruitment processes."

For healthcare organizations struggling with similar challenges, Page's advice is clear: "Evaluate your current process. It's not just the number of people you're hiring, it's who you are hiring and the quality of those hires."

What began as a quick inspiration has evolved into a sustainable, scalable approach that delivers what matters most: the right people in the right roles to continue Franciscan Health's 150-year mission of compassionate care — without creating chaos in the hospital lobby.

Ready to transform your healthcare recruiting strategy?

Download the Ultimate 2025 AI Recruiting Guide and learn how to implement targeted sourcing strategies like Franciscan Health's Talent Tuesdays and achieve remarkable recruitment ROI.

Apurba R
Apurba is a writer who specializes in creating engaging content, backed by storytelling, data, SEO and a cup of coffee. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, cooking fusion food, or curiously traveling like a local.