How Franciscan Health Puts the “Care” Back in Healthcare Hiring

The Challenge

Indiana-based Franciscan Health is a modern healthcare organization that stays true to its founding mission: to care for everyone who comes through its doors. Staffing the system’s 12 hospitals with quality hires is integral to this mission — so when challenges arose a few years ago that impacted talent attraction and retention, team leaders knew something had to change.

With 2,700 open job requisitions in a competitive healthcare hiring market, recruiters were overwhelmed, according to Ellen Page, Director of Talent Acquisition at Franciscan. Low morale crept in, as new-hire churn often required recruiters to fill the same position multiple times due to difficulties attracting and identifying right-fit job candidates.

Page also noted some critical gaps that she knew could be addressed by finding the right technology partner:

Career site functionality. Maintaining an accurate listing of available positions presented a major challenge and required constant site monitoring. “There were breakdowns between posting new jobs and then removing them once they were filled,” Page explained.

CRM functionality. Recruiters needed better visibility and stronger recruitment marketing capabilities to successfully attract and engage high-quality job candidates.

The team searched for a solution that would integrate seamlessly with their newly implemented Workday ATS and help achieve three major goals:

• Get “back to the basics” of effective recruiting

• Increase quality and efficiency by introducing automation

• Keep human touch central to the process

The Solution

In researching technology vendors, Franciscan’s TA and HR leaders created a wish list of capabilities and features that would help them expand their reach, attract high-quality talent, and improve the talent experience for all stakeholders.

“Phenom had everything we wanted, including both the marketing capabilities and the technology piece,” Page said.

In addition, Phenom stood out as a holistic, unified solution. “Unlike other vendors, you’re working with just one partner rather than many for point solutions like scheduling, texting, CRM and the career site,” Page said, noting the reduced complexity and time-saving benefits associated with streamlining that.

Because Phenom has been a certified Workday partner for more than 7 years, Franciscan could also rest assured that integrations would go smoothly. “That was a huge plus — we needed a partner that could fully support all our integrations,” said Page, who also noted she has experienced first-hand the issues that arise when the opposite is true.

Eager to improve efficiencies and experiences, Franciscan implemented Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform, leveraging the following products:

Career site
With AI-driven career site capabilities, Franciscan can now showcase customized, dynamic content to better capture attention and engage the right candidates. The site displays personalized job recommendations to visitors based on their interests, experience and skills. And the time-consuming task of monitoring job postings? “That doesn’t exist anymore,” Page shared.

Chatbot
Despite initial hesitations, Franciscan activated their career site chatbot … and they haven’t looked back. “It’s so interactive, and candidates are really engaging with it,” Page said. Not only does it whisk candidates seamlessly through the career site and apply flow, it’s become a valuable resource for the TA team, she added. “We’re constantly looking at the questions that come through.”

Talent CRM
Capturing the information of all candidates and site visitors — not just those who have applied — means that recruiters can keep in touch with best-fit talent. “We can re-target warm leads that we lost. That’s really powerful,” Page said.

Campaigns and Events
Hiring events are critical to healthcare recruiting, and Phenom Events simplifies their management from creation and registration through marketing and lead collection. “We’re able to get the word out a lot better now,” Page said.

One-Way Interviews
As part of their video-first candidate engagement strategy, Franciscan adopted one-way video assessments to replace screening calls as a first line of candidate selection. “One-way Interviews has been the most impactful tool for recruiters — reducing screening time for recruiters in our internal travel program,” shared Page. "The high volume of candidates made it difficult to set up enough screenings. One-way interviews can be quickly reviewed and decisions to interview can be made, significantly reducing the time it takes to get candidates their offers.”

The Results

Franciscan has seen stand-out results across their quantity, quality, and speed of hire since implementing Phenom, which has led to:

• 400 new coworkers hired every month in 2024

• Open positions reduced by 44% (from 2,700 to 1,500)

• RN openings decreased by 58% over 90 days

From a candidate satisfaction standpoint, Franciscan’s net promoter score rose from 64 to 77 — a testament to making job finding easier and more personalized.  In fact, the career site chatbot alone produced 1,000 hires over the course of a year from its 142,000 interactions — and 2,263 hires across 255,000 interactions since it was implemented. “Without the chatbot, many of these hires likely would have been missed,” said Page.

Similarly, their event attendance has soared. Over 1,000 potential new hires attended their Spring hiring events, with a hiring rate of 25%. Page also described a campaign that launched on a Friday and drew 142 applicants by Monday.

With on-demand analytics, the team gains instant visibility into campaign response metrics to allow on-the-fly strategy adjustments and successful retargeting campaigns at no cost — a major valueadd for the nonprofit healthcare system.

Beyond measurable improvements, Page believes that Phenom positions Franciscan Health to stand out from the competition by enabling a people-first approach.

“With automations and AI, we’re decreasing recruiters’ workloads so they can get back to that human touch,” said Page, noting that developing a relationship is what secures candidate retention — not just speed of communication. “That engagement all the way through the process is really key,” she emphasized.

• Decreased time to hire 13 days

  from 72 to 59 days

• Decreased agency spend 56%

  $73M saved in 2 years

• Chatbot-generated hires

  1,000 additional hires per year

• Improved candidate experience

  13% increase in Net Promoter Score

• Increased event attendance and conversion

  Spring hiring events | 1,000 potential new hires | 25% hiring rate

The Future

As a new year approaches, Franciscan is excited about further leveraging their chatbot, including exploring video applications through the chat interface. They're also expanding their one-way interviewing tool to other service lines.

“Undertaking this strategy wouldn’t be financially possible without the partnerships and integrations that Phenom offers,” Page noted.

She looks forward to the value this will hold for filling positions that aren’t healthcare-specific, such as environmental services team members.

“We want to make hires that will stay,” she said. “Video can help candidates understand what working in a hospital will entail, showing them the actual work and job duties. We’ll also be able to convey our employer brand — that they’ll be working for and cared for by a reliable, stable company.”