The Challenge

Nobody understands the nursing shortage better than the people who hire nurses. Finding qualified candidates to fill open positions is a huge undertaking for recruiters and talent acquisition teams when the talent pool is dry.

The Director of Talent Acquisition Strategy & Operations at one of the country’s top healthcare systems can personally attest to this challenge. Since they oversee nurse recruitment across the organization’s 40 acute care, managed, and specialty hospitals — sourcing experienced nurses was a critical concern that hinged on providing a better candidate experience.

“Our career site wasn’t user friendly, visually appealing, or personalized for the candidate — especially without video or a chatbot.” Instead, it was more of a static landing page to direct job seekers to the company’s ATS. To help combat the problem, the team added internal talent scouts to proactively source appropriate candidates through popular job boards, social media, career fairs, and email campaigns. But with no CRM or analytics to track who was engaging with their brand, the scouts had to manually input all interactions into disjointed spreadsheets and cross-reference names with their ATS. The extra administrative work was time-consuming and unproductive.

“And what about those visitors who don’t apply, or the applicants who don’t make the cut the first time around? Without a CRM, you never talk to them again,” they explained, precluding the ability to nurture passive or former candidates.

The Solution

Specializing in new recruitment strategies and platforms like text recruiting, event planning, and virtual career fairs, the TA team was on the hunt to find a modern solution for their ongoing problem. The sustained nursing shortage created a critical need for efficiency across the TA team. “The question becomes: how can we do 20 percent more with 20 percent less? How can we work smarter, not harder?,” they said.

When looking at providers, Phenom’s AI and all-encompassing Intelligent Talent Experience platform for candidates, recruiters, employees, and hiring managers stood out. “Ideally, we’d like all TA processes on one platform.” The team saw that Phenom’s integrations and progressive innovation could get their company closer to that goal.

From a product standpoint, Phenom offers the key elements they wanted to leverage:

• Career Site with Chatbot to host engaging content, quick customization, and accurate, tailored job opportunities

• Talent CRM to integrate with ATS

• Campaigns and SMS for recruitment marketing, including University Recruiting

• Talent Analytics to test and track performance

Of particular importance to this TA Director was the ability to share content on social media and track its reach and efficacy to targeted audiences from their CRM. Being able to see who’s engaged and what’s working on specific channels is now a requirement for successful talent marketing.

The Results

This healthcare company couldn’t be more pleased with the value of the platform. “Everyone who’s using it loves it!” Now, their talent scouts can see exactly where candidates are in the application process, share profiles with recruiters, send targeted email blasts to segmented populations, and track who’s opening and clicking on specific campaigns.

Seeing where candidates are on their talent journey — and adjusting content and channels accordingly — has been instrumental in driving more traffic to the company’s refreshed career site. In fact, since going live with Phenom, career site traffic increased almost 500%. And the conversational chatbot that greets visitors and facilitates their job search is helps convert these visitors. In the first 3 months, 72% of the people who viewed a job through the chatbot clicked apply, and 61% of these applies came from mobile.

Analytics like these not only play a crucial role in the recruitment team’s day-to-day operations, they’re helping drive bigger strategic initiatives — like doing more with Phenom’s SMS capabilities. Candidates are less likely to miss a text than an email in a congested inbox, the director said. And they’re more apt to register for an event through a texted URL link than sort through a crowded events page buried on a website, they added.

“The results from texting have been incredible! I sent a text blast highlighting an upcoming career fair, and in less than 1 hour we had 10 new candidates register for the event. That’s amazing for this market.” Even more notable: setting up the campaign took five minutes, reached 625 people, garnered 40 total registrants after a follow-up text blast, and resulted in seven new nursing hires.

Another key focus of the TA team is university recruiting. Previously, collecting candidate information at on-campus events was disorganized and inefficient, with long lines and talent scouts having to manually input collected resumes and potential leads later. With Phenom University Recruiting, talent scouts can conveniently access everything they need to register and capture candidate information instantly from an app on their phones.

“This functionality has helped us hire a lot of graduate nurses as soon as they’re ready to enter the workforce. We can tag them in the CRM, nurture them with targeted content, and then actively recruit them for open positions as they approach graduation.”

The Future

As their event initiatives continue to grow, the company plans to use their Phenom Career Site and Phenom Campaigns tools to promote more virtual career fairs and hiring events through online chats with nurse recruiters.

In addition, they can’t wait to roll out Phenom Employee Experience capabilities to give employees the same job searching experience as external candidates — including Phenom Talent Marketplace for actionable internal mobility, referrals, mentorship, and more. “I think it’s going to be great for cultural engagement,” the director shared, especially as the team plans to leverage more video centered around the heartfelt sentiment and mission of what it means to be a nurse at their company.

More importantly, it’s a way to retain nurses who are looking to make a move within the organization without the heavy lifting. Instead of tasking talent scouts to spend up to two hours a week distributing flyers and cards asking for referrals, they can send an email blast in a few minutes and be well on their way to a referral bonus.

“We’ll have a whole separate bucket of qualified candidates to choose from, and current employees can pursue growth opportunities that are right in front of them,” noted the TA Director. “That’s a game changer for everybody.”