How This Healthcare Provider Is Staying Ahead of Hires in a Competitive Labor Market

The Challenge

With millions of patients across this healthcare provider’s multi-state footprint, the critical work of helping patients is not without its challenges — especially given pandemic-related resource strains. In the aftermath of COVID, this company’s talent acquisition goals changed significantly. Their open job opportunities grew astronomically with 5,500 openings available — up 183% from pre-pandemic levels.

As their TA team battled increased demand, they also faced three other challenges impeding the entire healthcare industry:

• Increased recruiter load. Like others, their recruiters carried requisition volumes almost double their average. “When you reach that high of a req load, it’s hard to keep up with every single applicant,” explained their Director of Talent Acquisition Strategy and Operations.

• Limited applicants. With competition high and pay rates competitive, fewer people were applying for full-time, onsite work — especially in rural communities.

• Lengthy application processes. Most candidates in the industry simply didn’t have the time or the patience to fill out a lengthy application. “We must meet the candidate where their needs are. Things need to be quick and easy,” the director said.

The Solution

Being a Phenom customer before the pandemic hit helped the TA team address all of those challenges — and then some.

According to the company’s director, the Phenom CRM is a lifesaver for their recruiters. They can simultaneously source external and internal leads, as well as engage (or reengage) candidates from the same system — all while hyper-personalizing the experience. “Instead of adding more seats on job boards, our recruiters look in the CRM first,” they said. Often, a candidate’s information is already in the system. This method leads to better cost savings in many recruitment areas. “Reengagement through the CRM is a great avenue for finding more applicants without spending more money.”

With Phenom Referrals, the team is able to leverage the same approach to increase quality candidate leads from employees, while Phenom University Recruiting helps secure early talent from virtual or on-site campus events.

Since nursing students are the team’s biggest target hires, convenient features like text-to-apply and a mobile app to register attendees, capture resumes, and compile and share candidate notes have become invaluable to expediting post-event screening and follow up. And with the help of the CRM, recruiters are able to nurture relationships with nursing students and recent graduates to support long-term hiring goals.

To address the common challenge of application length — especially across healthcare where credentialed quality candidates can’t be compromised — they used their Phenom Career Site, CRM, and events functionality for an effective workaround. By creating a quick-apply form as an event within the CRM and hosting the content on a landing page, candidates can now apply in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes. After the form lands in the CRM, candidates are prescreened and added to a contact list for follow up.

Since expedited communication with candidates is a non-negotiable in this hiring market, the TA team are big advocates of texting. With Phenom SMS, recruiters can communicate with multiple candidates simultaneously, automate personalized messages, and instantly get important questions answered. The director said this was a massive improvement from their previous process, which involved 15-minute phone calls with one candidate at a time.

Meanwhile, the Phenom Chatbot automates additional conversations, schedules interviews, and answers FAQs to reduce administrative tasks. “We used to take five days to schedule an interview. Now, it only takes a minute,” they marveled.

The Results

By streamlining and simplifying their hiring process with Phenom, the healthcare provider filled thousands of open roles that previously sat vacant. So far this year, the TA team secured over 3,400 positions — a 10% increase from last year — while the company as a whole made 17,000 total hires, a 14% increase.

Despite higher req loads and hires, the big win is that their time to fill hasn’t increased. In fact, they’re beating the industry average by up to 20 days. “The market is more competitive, and demand is increasing. The fact that we haven’t seen our time to fill increase right now is a win.”

With Phenom’s recruiter automation, recruiters are spending less time on the phone juggling screening and scheduling and more time moving candidates forward in the hiring process — all within minutes. “We want to treat our candidates to the same white-glove experience as our patients,” they said. “Phenom keeps us on the forefront of innovation so we don’t have to sacrifice quality for quantity.”