Aspen Dental’s Early Talent Advantage

The Challenge

As a Dental Services Organization (DSO), Aspen Dental provides business and operational support to more than 1,000 dental offices in nearly every state. But most people aren’t familiar with the DSO model — including a majority of students in dental and hygiene schools, according to Aspen Dental’s Reece White, Recruitment Marketing Manager.

For this reason, it’s all about the long game for the organization’s recruitment marketing team. To successfully compete for talent among a small candidate pool of dentists, hygienists, and other dental health professionals, they need to capture attention early in the academic journey, and keep leads riveted through their school years.

“We have a very small candidate population, and those candidates have a lot of options when they graduate. We need to get students excited about Aspen Dental early, and then connect with them often to maintain that interest,” White said.

The team already had a formula for success: intense on-campus outreach to connect with students early on, combined with maintaining contact all the way through to graduation and labor market entry. But there was no formal system of record to track candidate data and behaviors. Cumbersome processes inhibited recruiters’ ability to work effectively — and detracted from the candidate experience.

Aspen Dental looked for a technology partner that would help them work quickly and at scale to elevate their brand with university students, and nurture them into hires post graduation.

The Solution

One of the overarching drivers in the search for a solution was the need to get up and running quickly, according to White. Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform had the tools Aspen Dental was looking for, as well as seamless integration capabilities with their Workday ATS and other tools that promised a speedy implementation of the following pillar solutions:

• Career Site. Foundational to the candidate experience, the team first overhauled their Phenom Career Site to meet modern expectations. The key to attracting attention among today’s students? Serving up the kind of selfmade personalized content they see on TikTok and Instagram. With Phenom’s career site capabilities — including personalized job recommendations, a talent community to subscribe to, user-friendly no-code Phenom CMS, and more — Aspen Dental can easily keep the career site fresh with authentic employee videos and other original content.
  
  “For this younger generation of candidates, seeing a dentist in their practice talking about day-to-day work life can be just as compelling, if not more compelling, than a beautifully crafted, premium-priced professional video,” White pointed out. “If you look at our career site, you’ll see employee-focused content that gives visitors a true idea of what it’s like to work at Aspen Dental.”
  

• University Recruiting. Phenom University Recruiting enables the team to easily create and manage all of the events it hosts every year. The tools include customizable registration forms and landing pages, campaigns, AI Scheduling to fast-track candidates to an initial phone interview via chatbot, automated confirmation and reminder emails, and reporting analytics that help the team optimize the effectiveness of events.
  
  Critically, the capabilities facilitate collection and tracking of attendee data and interactions. “Part of the benefit is that we gain that CRM data on both behaviors and personal identifiable information, and we can use that to nurture the student until they graduate,” White said. “Because if the first challenge is getting candidates through the door, the second challenge is, what’s going to keep them interested?”
  

• Talent CRM. Acting on the valuable data collected through their events is the next step in delivering a cohesive, stand-out candidate experience. Events forms sync with their Phenom CRM, where recruiters can view area of study, school, graduation year, location, events attended, as well as ongoing interactions with content. New leads are invited to join the Aspen Dental talent community to receive updates and relevant communications.
  
  “We can target candidates in a way that’s appealing to them for more effective outreach,” White said. “If you self-identify as a critical candidate group, we can make sure that you are being noticed and contacted from that point forward.”
  

• Indeed Quick Apply and Net Promoter Score (NPS) Integrations. Once a candidate is ready to apply, the process needs to be as frictionless as possible — especially in a competitive market. In addition to leveraging Phenom Hosted Apply which enables job seekers to apply without ever leaving the career site, an integration with Indeed Quick Apply also helps prevent candidate drop off. “We leverage Quick Apply specifically for those hard-to-reach candidate groups,” White said. Quick Apply requires just enough contact information for a recruiter to get in touch. “Then we can give those applicants the white glove treatment through the rest of the process.”
  
  Integrations with NPS tools also give the team a more holistic view of the candidate experience, gathering feedback from job seekers on various aspects of the career site and apply flow. The team can then use this feedback to make immediate optimizations and continuously deliver what candidates are asking for.

The Results

Aspen Dental knew what it would take to deliver a tailored experience that keeps candidates engaged. Now, Phenom helps them do it with agility, efficiency, and the ability to scale with impactful results, including:

The Future

Moving forward, the team will continue capitalizing on their Phenom investment with plans to roll out:

• Phenom Design Studio, a no-code framework design tool that gives non-technical users the power to create sophisticated career site features

• Automation Engine, which provides the framework and components to identify, build, implement, and monitor automation workflows into new or existing talent lifecycle processes

• Phenom SMS campaigns in a continued effort to meet candidates where they are

As Aspen Dental’s parent company, The Aspen Group, expands into new markets, White noted that the effective partnership with Phenom serves as a model for their emerging brands. “We want to replicate that success,” he said.