How ChenMed is Building the Best Candidate Database in Value-based Healthcare

The Challenge

When three out of every four professionals in healthcare are looking to leave the industry, providing a better talent experience is no longer optional — it’s critical to hire, develop, and retain the workers who are transforming care for the neediest populations. This is especially true if you’re a company in hypergrowth.

Fast-growing primary care provider ChenMed knows this firsthand. Their value-based care serves moderate-to-low-income seniors with complex chronic diseases. The privately held, physician-led company has over 100 centers in 12 states, with 80% of roles falling into high-volume clinical support staffing.

Christin Davis, Managing Director of HR Operations and Technology started her role at ChenMed in 2020, and quickly discovered several talent acquisition and management areas that had to be addressed to see them through the pandemic and beyond.

First, they lacked a robust talent community from which to source and engage candidates — especially for roles in their primary location. “A lot of candidates in healthcare aren’t even applying because they’re in such high demand,” explained Davis, and “South Florida isn’t exactly a mecca for the skill sets we need,” she continued.

“We do a lot of sourcing which requires the ability — almost like an executive search firm — to build and maintain a database and then market to it whenever and however we need to.” A reliable talent community where they could search and filter by skills, experience, interest, location, and more would allow Davis and her team to find best-fit candidates in the right areas and target them appropriately.

Second, they were delivering a lackluster candidate experience for both external and internal job seekers. Applications were lengthy and lacked basic UX design — and they needed more actionable visibility into career mobility for employees. Without it, retention would be an uphill battle considering the competitive talent landscape.

And thirdly, they needed to automate numerous TA processes en masse so recruiters could devote more time on high-impact activities.

The Solution

To overcome these challenges and meet C-suite priorities, ChenMed selected Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform to put power — and intelligence — behind their main goals:

• Hire faster and better. In healthcare especially, quality can’t be sacrificed for quantity — but time to fill is also a critical component to providing good care. Reaching candidates with the right qualifications quickly, and keeping them engaged, was paramount to ChenMed’s TA strategy. Being able to nurture passive career site visitors as well as previous applicants was a must. “We wanted the ability to invite someone back, especially if they resonate with our mission,” Davis noted.

• Make smarter talent decisions. On their way to hiring faster and better, ChenMed required more insightful candidate data and personas to ensure they were hiring the right people. “We needed to have better notes on candidates and know more about people,” Davis shared. “There’s a human life at the end of our supply chain,” emphasized Kara Lloyd, Enterprise Talent Strategy Effectiveness COE at ChenMed, “and getting the right candidate in the right position is vital. It not only ensures better quality of care, it means they’re more likely to stay.”

• Empower internal development and promotion. “Giving our people career ladders and opportunities is essential to retain them,” said Davis. But common to companies in hypergrowth, Chenmed’s number of external hires significantly outweigh internal hires.

By investing in Phenom Talent Marketplace, the team can surface personalized opportunities within the org for employees to find and apply for new roles or gigs, see learning opportunities, chart their own career path, or seek relevant mentorship.

The Results

The Phenom CRM and Phenom AI Discovery have been instrumental in ChenMed’s goal to make better talent decisions by building stronger talent pipelines with all career site visitors — even those who don’t apply for a job. Most importantly, ChenMed recruiters are using the CRM and Phenom Talent Analytics to uncover critical insights that inform their recruiting strategy and promote more meaningful conversations with candidates.

“The recruiters that are most successful in their metrics really understand the value of Phenom — that they have multiple options to find candidates, see source traffic, create dynamic lists, and automate effective engagement strategies with AI,” revealed Lloyd.

With an accurate, continually growing candidate database, ChenMed now has a thorough understanding of their candidate personas — including employees — so they can serve them content they want to see.

By making changes like this, their recruitment marketing efforts are soaring. In fact, one campaign alone resulted in 5% of their database applying for a new job at ChenMed. “We usually strive for a 1-3% apply rate on a campaign like that. We were thrilled to get five,” Davis reported.

Using Phenom Talent Marketplace, time spent on ChenMed’s internal employee career site increased 21% in the last year — with 76% of employees who click on a job description applying to that position. And with Phenom Referrals, they’ve witnessed an 85% increase in employee referrals year over year.

Through these combined efforts, Chenmed has grown their candidate database to over half a million candidates — and in just six months, increased both external and internal applications, reduced time to fill, and leveled off turnover precipitated by the pandemic despite their expansive growth.

The Future

What goals are on the horizon for ChenMed? According to Davis, growing and optimizing their candidate database is priority number one. “Why shouldn’t ChenMed have the best database in value-based healthcare in the next five years?” she asked. “Phenom is helping us build it.”

Part of that strategy will be using their analytics to refine skills, update job descriptions, and maximize ads based on keyword search volume, bounce rate, and more.

The other part will be using their talent community to reach out to alumni employees. “I think there’s huge ROI in using Phenom to bring back quality talent,” shared Davis. As they continue building out their database and rolling out their internal talent marketplace, “we’ll also reduce our dependence on job boards and the bills affiliated with them,” she noted.

Also on their to-do list is refreshing their Phenom Career Site and building out the knowledge base of their Phenom Chatbot, which is already generating 12% of ChenMed’s applications.

Above all, the ChenMed culture is what’s most important for Davis and her team to maintain: “This company’s mission is simple: helping seniors live longer and healthier lives. The only way to manage that mission is to buy into it. Now that we can easily see who identifies with our culture, it’s easier to make the right hiring choices.”