How Community Medical Centers Converted 471 Hard-to-Find Candidates with Phenom Bot

Medical teams are always in high demand, and that couldn’t be more true than in San Joaquin Valley in California, where the largest private employer in the region, Community Medical Centers, is based. A large healthcare system that operates four acute-care hospitals, more than ten healthcare centers, and the only Level 1 trauma center in the region, they needed to grow, and fast, but with hard-to-find medical talent. They searched for an HR technology solution that provided an easy-to-use career site with powerful candidate insights.

What they ended up with exceeded their expectations.

Community Medical Centers career site with chatbot

How It All Began

Just as Brandon Prideaux, director of talent acquisition, was joining the healthcare center in 2018, his team was about to implement a career site and a chatbot, both from different vendors. Seeing that this could lead to a broken apply process in the future, Brandon asked them if they could pause and dream bigger.

What if they could implement a more personalized, easy-to-use career site? “I was always impressed with the consumer application of the Phenom Career Site. It has the familiarity of Amazon,” he explained.

And what if it was on a single platform that also provided a chatbot with more functionality, as well as a CRM to conduct sourcing campaigns, grow their pipeline, and provide invaluable insights into talent pools? And what if that platform could also seamlessly integrate with iCIMS for all of their hospitals?

“I was always impressed with the consumer application of the Phenom Career Site. It has the familiarity of Amazon.”

– Brandon Prideaux, director of talent acquisition

The talent acquisition team had not realized this was possible. With Brandon at the helm, they pivoted quickly to the Phenom TXM platform, which delivered all of the above, plus the promise of a robust feature roadmap.

Along with the Phenom Career Site and CRM, Community Medical Centers deployed Phenom Bot, an AI-powered chatbot to enable real-time candidate messaging that engages active and passive job seekers. Phenom Bot asks candidates questions to deliver personalized job recommendations—and putting those job postings directly in the chatbot itself made all the difference.

Phenom Bot asking the candidate questions

The Biggest Surprise? Performance of the Phenom Bot.

Within just two months, Phenom Bot exceeded their expectations, and Brandon posted this on LinkedIn:

LinkedIn Text: AI was a big buzzword for Talent Acquisition this year. I think as leaders in this space we all have similar reservations: "What does this actually mean?" "Will I need to lay off recruiters"? Well, here's on answer. Here is just one month's chatbot metrics with our new Phenom People career site. These are questions about jobs that recruiters did not have to answer themselves. Instead, they can focus their time on building relationships.

The team did not expect to see such phenomenal results with the Phenom Bot so quickly. With 0 recruiter input in 2 months, the center’s talent acquisition team saw the following results:

Over 4,500 unique bot interactions
471 applies from those interactions (50/50 administrative staff and hospital staff)
22% apply-to-hire conversion rate

The best part? Many of these chatbot conversations and applies come in when the center does not have recruiters on duty. “With the new chatbot, we’re able to engage with candidates at all hours and during weekends,” said Brandon. “That’s huge, considering many of our job seekers are night nurses and other hard-to-reach clinical staff. I’ve always wanted a weekend recruitment team, and this now serves that purpose.”

Having not just a technology vendor but also a long-term partner was important to Brandon and the team. “I explained to Phenom that we’re looking for a true partner who will help us use the platform to the best of our ability,” he said. “And from the start, they have been super engaged.”

“I’ve always wanted a weekend recruitment team, and the chatbot now serves that purpose."

– Brandon Prideaux, director of talent acquisition

The team has plans to implement more Phenom TXM platform features, including adding screening, scheduling, and FAQs to the Phenom Bot and leveraging the Phenom CRM to push out well-designed email campaigns. By using tools that help attract scarce medical talent and then mitigate the barrier of entry to apply, Community Medical Centers is able to get closer to its goal to optimize patient care.

Looking to implement Phenom Bot, along with the Phenom TXM platform, at your organization? Request a demo!

Derek Herman

Derek leads the Marketing Communications initiatives at Phenom People. He engages with Phenom customers to spotlight their stories in the media.