The Challenge

Every day, the talent acquisition team at a major U.S. healthcare system faces an industry-wide challenge: meeting chronic staffing demands in a highly competitive healthcare labor market.

A few years ago, they realized they had some specific hurdles to overcome that would help their hiring and retention efforts considerably:

• Multiple career sites and a lengthy application process detracted from the candidate experience. Making updates to the career sites was a time-consuming, manual process. “Job candidates weren’t getting a true understanding of what it’s like to work here,” said their Director of TA Programs, Sourcing and Marketing.

• Inefficiencies in candidate outreach, screening, and interview scheduling made filling the pipeline with qualified talent difficult and costlier than necessary. “Our recruiters and sourcers had no insight into warm leads,” they explained, which meant paying for access to external lists and job boards. Scheduling challenges often caused candidates to move on before team members could secure an interview.

• Lack of capabilities for data tracking, reporting, and analytics left recruiters in the dark regarding their efforts. It also derailed TA leaders’ ability to measure the impact of various strategies — and to secure budget. “We wanted to be able to make more tactical decisions and show our impact.”

The Solution

To accomplish their goals, the company knew they’d need the right technology to drive efficiency, transparency, and flexibility in managing the candidate journey for prospective and current employees. Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform stood out as a solution that would give the team the freedom and control they lacked, as well as data insights to guide strategy and tactical decisions regarding sourcing, recruitment marketing, and internal mobility.

They implemented Phenom and quickly began turning processes — and experiences — around with key platform features, including:

• Career Site, CMS, Chatbot, and Video Hub to improve the candidate experience

• AI Scheduling and SMS to help recruiters hire faster

• Talent CRM, Campaigns, and Events to optimize recruitment marketing efforts

• Talent Marketplace and Referrals to support internal mobility and sourcing

• High-Volume Hiring to automate mass hiring

They began by consolidating their three career sites into one and giving team members control over asset management through Phenom’s intuitive Content Management System (CMS). Previously, making a site update meant creating a manual ticket and waiting as long as a week for the vendor to make the change.

Now, using the CMS, the TA team can make real-time updates in minutes to populate the site with interactive content personalized to candidates’ interests. Unique, engaging videos showcasing individual employee stories that are searchable to viewers by topic, career area, job title, and job category are easily collected and shared through Phenom Video Hub, providing day-in-the-life reels and an authentic view of company culture for site visitors. “Phenom gives us the ability to be creative and understand what candidates are looking for from us,” their TA programs director said.

The team also whittled down the application process, eliminating several questions and a mandatory log-in creation in favor of immediately placing candidates into Phenom’s hosted apply flow that requires minimal steps.

Candidates aren’t the only ones benefiting from a new and improved experience — recruiters and hiring managers are as well, with innovative tools like Phenom High-Volume Hiring. The solution combines the use of Chatbot, AI Scheduling, and SMS to fast-track candidates, enabling recruiters to quickly fill front-line, hourly, or seasonal roles.

The Results

A Candidate Experience That Converts

Thanks to a more streamlined and compelling candidate journey, the healthcare system is seeing increased career site traffic, engagement, and apply conversions. “I’m excited to be able to send candidates to a place where it’s easy for them to find the right job, make informed decisions, and apply quickly and easily,” said their TA Marketing and Sourcing Manager.

Career site stats justify their enthusiasm. Since implementing Phenom, the company has seen a 4x increase in career site leads. From 2019 (pre-Phenom) to 2022, apply clicks nearly doubled — jumping from 468,659 to 857,259. In addition, candidates are staying on the career site longer, with length-of-stay now above the industry benchmark.

Invaluable Time and Cost Savings

Most notably, Phenom High-Volume Hiring is helping speed engagement with graduate nurses, a highly competitive labor market segment. AI Scheduling, which automates the process of finding availability on all parties’ calendars and sending meeting invites, has been a “game changer” in this effort, according to their Manager of Talent Acquisition Programs.

“The sooner you can reach these candidates, the better,” they said. “It used to take us five to seven days to connect with graduate nurses. Now, within 24 hours, they’re receiving an invite to schedule a screening.”

With the help of their Phenom Career Site, CRM, Campaigns, and talent community, recruiters and sourcers can easily track, segment, and nurture passive leads with customized content that keeps the company top of mind, reminding candidates why they would be a great fit.

Their innovative efforts even afforded them a prestigious industry award for their use of recruitment marketing technology out of more than 400 competitors. “We were honored to win, especially considering we were up against big companies, many of which are household names.”

In addition, the granular level of reporting provided by Phenom Talent Analytics helps the team make data-driven, tactical decisions when it comes to candidate outreach efforts and securing budget with executive leaders. “It used to be very difficult to measure impact. Now we can measure the effectiveness of a source, and how much effort it takes to convert a passive lead into an interested prospect, a prospect to a candidate, and a candidate to a hire. It’s all right there in Phenom.” This approach has saved thousands of dollars that previously would have been spent sourcing external leads.

Since implementing Phenom, they’ve also noticed increased engagement and satisfaction among TA staff. “They appreciate that we’re investing in technology that helps them increase their output,” they said. For example, their chatbot saved team members from having to handle over 500,000 routine interactions that could be automated. “And because Phenom is open to constantly iterating on those tools, we encourage their feedback. Recruiters feel their voices are continuously being heard. It’s an intangible benefit of our investment with Phenom.”

A Transparent Employee Experience

Phenom Talent Marketplace brings transparency to internal opportunities, helping to develop employee skills and show them they have a career path with the company. Another major win? Referrals have increased significantly and are now the second biggest source of hire. “Our referrals program went from practically zero engagement to being one of our biggest talent drivers,” they said, praising the impact of Phenom Referrals.

The Future

One of the most valuable aspects of the company’s partnership with Phenom is that the door to innovation is always open. “It’s a true collaboration. Even when you think the tool isn’t capable of something, it can happen. Someone’s always working in the background to get you what you need.” They look forward to leveraging that partnership to make increasingly bigger strides across their TA programs.

They’re also excited to continue enhancing their processes and experiences with Phenom X+, a new platform-wide generative AI capability that automates content creation, surfaces actionable insights, and further eliminates time-consuming tasks for talent stakeholders.

“Phenom’s type of generative AI is just unheard of in our industry – it’s not happening at other organizations. I know, because it’s my job to research that.”