Quality matters: Hospital RPO transforms hiring results

Challenges

To ensure each patient who passes through its doors receives the best outcomes, experience and value, an Ohio-based nonprofit academic medical center knew it must continually add quality talent to its existing roster of best-in-class healthcare professionals. After evaluating its recruitment approach through an assessment with Cielo and seeing the benefits of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), the two organizations partnered to create a talent acquisition process focused on candidate quality – not quantity.

Solutions

Spotlight on screening

The hospital makes approximately 2,500 hires each year, according to historical data from 2019. When faced with a record number of openings in 2021, the healthcare organization needed to make more hires quickly to deliver quality care to patients. However, its existing talent acquisition process did not include a robust candidate ranking system to ensure recruiters and hiring managers were interviewing talent best suited for the organization's roles and culture.

By implementing a rating system using technology that allows recruiters to leave feedback, the teams increased transparency and organization of the screening process. This allowed the team to quickly advance top candidates and hire more quality talent while creating a more efficient recruitment process and freeing up the hiring manager’s time to focus on business-critical tasks.

The quality of talent within the candidate pipeline also improved. While it may include fewer individuals than before, the pipeline is now full of talent better suited to the organization and future roles.

Building trust

Change can be difficult, and lots of change was occurring within the medical center’s talent acquisition process outside of its partnership with Cielo, including department restructuring. New to the relationship, Cielo quickly gained the TA team’s confidence through responsive and transparent communication. The team led regularly scheduled check-ins with TA leadership to keep all informed on shifting organizational wants, needs and questions. Transparency on the recruitment approach was immensely important in helping everyone navigate the change management process, including having a clear understanding of what was happening and why.

Openness to new ways of working isn’t always easy, but experimenting can be key to finding the best solution. In the former recruitment process, hiring managers were responsible for evaluating each candidate and organizing candidate interviews. This resulted in lengthy delays between steps in the recruitment process and a 60% candidate drop-out rate.

To reduce drop-out rates and simultaneously decrease the lift required by hiring managers, Cielo pitched a series of hiring waves – a strategy where recruitment priorities vary week-to-week based on need. The catch: Cielo would schedule all candidate interviews, which initially made the hospital’s team skeptical because they were used to arranging interviews and conducting other related administrative tasks themselves. But the first week delivered impressive results, with 32 offers made to candidates from the Cielo-selected pool of about 50.

Once the hiring wave events proved successful, the partnership began to flourish, which led to Cielo taking on all scheduling duties. Knowing that Cielo was delivering on its promises, in combination with regular and transparent communication, helped the medical center’s team see first-hand that hiring for quality over quantity would deliver positive results.

Results

Through a partnership built on clear communication and mutual trust, the hospital and Cielo created a TA process that focuses on providing the best candidates for each role. Results of the first year include:

• 13% inventory turn in June 2021 to a 196% inventory turn in October 2021
• Decreased average time-to-fill to 26 days, down five days in five months
• 12% average candidate drop rate from September to November 2021, a decrease of 48 percentage points from when the partnership began
• Built trust and credibility that allows Cielo to schedule candidates to hiring manager’s calendar within 24 hours, a drastic decrease from 7-10 business days