Hiring nurses is tough — you may find candidates who fit the bill, but they’re quickly scooped up by a competitor. Typically, hiring an employee in healthcare takes 60 days; for registered nurses (RNs) — it’s more like 80.
With the rise of the gig economy post-pandemic, nurses want immediate communication and to be hired ASAP, which is leaving this massive expectation gap. The best nurses expect to apply for a job today and be hired tomorrow.
When it comes to hiring RNs, speed and personalization in the recruiting process is everything.
Leveraging automation in healthcare recruiting.
The “need for speed” is especially true for SSM Health, a healthcare system serving the Midwest that is on track to hire about 12,000 people in 2022 alone.
“We seem to be able to get and garner candidates in the other functions, but nursing has just turned around — it's completely competitive. You don't have the ability to post and pray anymore. You've got to spend time sourcing,” said Teri Cayler, Senior Director of TA Operations at SSM Health.
SSM knew they needed to do something different to stand out. Looking to gain a competitive advantage by saving their team precious time, they set their eyes on their healthcare hiring software, which included Workday Recruiting, to see what could be improved. The need for automation became apparent, which ultimately led them to a partnership with Paradox.
With the addition of their conversational software recruiting assistant, Olivia, SSM Health recruiters could skip the tedious administrative work, like scheduling, and speed up the recruitment process for candidates. Using automation, they moved top talent through the screening process and into interviews much quicker — cutting their time to schedule from 2-3 days, to just 3 minutes.
By introducing Olivia, SSM made its hiring process as streamlined as possible; drastically reducing time spent on administrative tasks, removing human error (buried emails, lack of bandwidth) and eliminating redundancies.
Back to basics: hiring events.
With the time saved through automation, SSM was able to focus on other high-value work, like sourcing and enhancing specific parts of their talent acquisition process.
One area they honed in on was hiring events — which they had seen success with in the past. They took a collaborative approach within their organization, inviting key nursing clinician leaders to come into their bullpen and plan a hiring event to attract other nurses.
With the help of Olivia, SSM personally invited over 1,500 candidates to register to speak with a recruiter or nursing leader. Within two weeks of sending event invites out, SSM’s recruiters were fully booked — with no lift from their team. Olivia even handled sending out reminders to registrants ahead of time.
The event itself was a success. The recruiters brought qualified candidates in, all while building a more solid foundation with their partners on the nursing leadership team.
You had all these people sitting in a room, making those phone calls. The energy that was there — people [were] feeding off of that.
Reimagining Healthcare Recruiting.
We recently invited industry analyst, Tim Sackett, to sit down with Teri and Carlos Fernandez, Director of Talent Acquisition at Houston Methodist, to discuss how their teams have been rethinking their approaches to healthcare hiring. Especially, through the use of conversational AI to hire nurses.
