Innovative Healthcare Hiring: How IRC Elevates Interviews with Hiring Intelligence

In healthcare, where quality staffing directly impacts patient outcomes, outdated hiring processes can have serious consequences. This is especially true for Innovative Renal Care (IRC), one of the largest dialysis providers in the United States. "Dialysis is a critical care space, so it's very important that when we're hiring, we're bringing on compassionate, top-skilled individuals — and that we're hiring quickly so that our patients get the care that they need," explained Lindsey Dupuis, Director of Talent Acquisition at IRC.

Dupuis recently shared how Hiring Intelligence solutions for screening, scheduling, and interviewing helped unify a previously fragmented process across hundreds of clinics while significantly improving candidate quality and hiring speed.

Check out the entire session on demand, or read on for the highlights!

In this Article

250 Disconnected Clinics, One Critical Mission

Innovative Renal Care acquired 250 centers across 25 states with 400+ affiliated nephrologists, serving approximately 15,000 patients in home, acute, and in-center treatment modalities. Their hiring strategy needs to support multiple clinical roles while maintaining consistent quality standards across all locations.

When IRC acquired the 250 centers, their approach to talent acquisition was completely fragmented, and the team lacked core data that was essential for them to efficiently do their jobs. "Back in 2021, our 250 clinics all handled their own hiring process. There was no centralized recruiting team. They were using paper applications that were being stored at their clinics, no career site, and we had no analytics," Dupuis remarked. "We didn't know how many jobs we even had open. We had no idea how many applications we were getting."

Their three major hurdles? 

1. High Time to Hire: The scheduling and interviewing process was taking too long. "Scheduling interviews was taking much too long between the back and forth with recruiters, our hiring managers, and the candidates," said Dupuis. "We weren't acting fast enough."

2. Quality of Hire Issues: Many candidates were accepting positions without understanding job requirements. "We were bringing on people that were resigning the same day because they would tell us, 'We're not good with blood.' The whole concept of dialysis is working with blood," Dupuis noted.

3. Inconsistent Interviewing: Without standardized processes, each clinic approached hiring differently. "We needed a framework to be set up to ensure that managers were asking questions to assess if applicants had the necessary skills for the role," Dupuis explained.

Building a Digital Hiring Ecosystem, Layer by Layer

To address these challenges, IRC transformed its hiring process through a multi-year implementation strategy using various Phenom solutions. 

2022: Building the Foundation

The first three key Phenom components of their digitized recruitment strategy included: a dedicated career site to showcase their company culture and values, an interactive chatbot to answer candidate questions 24/7, and an integrated talent CRM that gave recruiters visibility into the candidate pipeline for the first time. “It was a pretty good start,” said Dupuis.

2023: Streamlining Applications

The team quickly identified a bottleneck between their applicant tracking system and candidate management. "We very quickly realized that our ATS and Phenom had a one-way integration. By launching Phenom Hosted Apply, it would filter candidates directly into the CRM, which helped us hire faster without a lag time," said Dupuis.

2024: Hiring Intelligence: Screening, Scheduling & Interviewing  (More details below!)

Next, IRC added Phenom Hiring Intelligence: X+ Screening, Automated Scheduling, and Interview Intelligence. “We have a high-volume amount of applicants and the Phenom screening solution helps us make sure they meet the minimum requirements,” Dupuis shared. Combined with scheduling and interviewing efficiencies, recruiters can now focus more time on qualified candidates.

2025: More End-to-End Capabilities

This year, IRC is focusing on a seamless way to connect everything from job posting to an employee's first day. The goal? A smooth journey with no gaps between saying "yes" to the job and helping candidates find and choose the right job faster. "From the moment that a candidate verbally accepts, they now flow through our onboarding process," Dupuis explained. 

The Game-Changer: Why Interview Intelligence Became IRC's Critical Advantage

While each component of IRC's digital ecosystem played an important role, Phenom Interview Intelligence emerged as the pivotal technology in addressing their most pressing challenges. For an organization where hiring the wrong clinician could directly impact patient care, this tool provided capabilities that transformed their approach to evaluation. 

Here’s how:

• Smart Preparation: Managers access AI-generated interview guides with role-specific questions, allowing even time-pressed recruiters to create professional, consistent interview structures. The system lets them customize question sets based on position requirements.

• Hands-Free Interviewing: Conversations are recorded with consent and transcribed, freeing interviewers to engage fully with candidates rather than scrambling to take notes. Interviewers can highlight standout moments with simple reactions for later review.

• Risk Detection: Perhaps most valuable for compliance, the system automatically flags potentially inappropriate or legally problematic questions. This serves as both immediate protection and a training opportunity for interviewers who might not recognize certain questions as problematic.

• Comprehensive Analysis: After interviews conclude, the platform generates summaries, transcripts, key insights, and analytics on interviewer performance. This provides unprecedented visibility into both candidate quality and interviewer effectiveness across all 250 locations.

Learn More: Phenom Unveils the HR Tech Industry’s First Fraud Detection Agentic AI Tool

Measurable Wins & Future Focus

IRC's implementation of Interview Intelligence and its broader digital ecosystem delivered significant improvements to its hiring process across all 250 centers.

1. Faster Hiring: Automated scheduling and screening tools eliminated hiring delays by removing manual coordination. The system enables candidates to schedule an interview with the hiring manager" directly while pre-screening basic qualifications automatically. "For example, if you are a registered nurse, we start with: ‘Do you have an RN license?’ You would be amazed how many people answer ‘no’ to that question. It was a great tool for us," Dupuis noted.

2. Better Candidate Quality: Role-specific interview guides with questions that help determine if they're a good fit ensure consistent evaluation across all locations, resulting in better-matched hires.

3. Impressive Adoption Rates: The technology has achieved 100% adoption among recruiters and 47% adoption among hiring managers across IRC's 250 locations. This widespread acceptance has enabled the company to standardize interviewing practices while recording 1,325 successful interviews between May 2024 and January 2025 alone.
   
   "We have about 98% of our interviewers consenting to being recorded. The interview intelligence tool makes it clear to candidates when they sign up and receive the invitation that they'll be recorded. At that point, they can opt in or opt out. The hiring manager knows this in advance. If someone opts out, the bot doesn't join and the interview isn't recorded,” Dupuis explained.

4. Comprehensive Data Visibility: IRC now tracks key metrics previously invisible in their paper system. "We now have analytics into what percent of our guides our hiring managers are using. How many interviews do we have? How many candidates? Where are these sources coming from? Phenom has given us insight into all of that," Dupuis explained. This newfound visibility enables them to measure time to hire, time to fill, CRM usage, and other critical recruiting metrics.

5. Ongoing Training Improvements: The system provides unprecedented visibility into interviewer performance. "We are going to continue to improve our interview training and bias awareness. We now have a lot more insight into what our hiring managers are asking and how we can address those that need more support or those that are really great interviewers and could be mentors to others," Dupuis shared.

For healthcare organizations facing similar challenges, IRC's transformation demonstrates how the right technology can fundamentally improve the hiring process while maintaining a focus on quality patient care. As Dupuis put it, "Start with the candidate's experience. Recruiters are the first touch point for a company. You need to make sure that you ensure a positive interaction, and this also helps with retention." 

Download our Interview Intelligence Guide to discover how AI can transform your hiring process with practical strategies for smarter knowledge worker recruitment.