Chief Advisor at HR Tech Advisor Ward Christman spoke with Kim Delaney BSN,
RN, nursing and respiratory recruitment manager for the hospital on how her
team leverages HR technology to meet the challenges from their vice president
of HR to become more productive with existing resources.
Ward Christman: What is happening in recruiting that has caused you to look at new HR technology?
Kim Delaney: Since demand for new nurses coming out of college has been down the past three years, and our efforts to improve retention have been very successful with an inpatient nurse vacancy rate of only 3.2 percent, our volume of applicants greatly exceeds our hiring needs, especially for the new nurses. Since I know demand will come back around, we need to ensure that our reputation in the nursing community remains solid. We do this by maintaining our outreach programs, even when there is no open position to fill.
Christman: What were you doing before you brought in a video interviewing solution?
Delaney: Two years ago we launched “New Nurse Interview Days” at the main building. We had bagels, facility tours by nurse ambassadors, etc. We interviewed 100 nurses in one day! The reason we set these up is because on paper, all these new graduates look the same; they’re all smart and well rounded, but are they the type of person who can handle this job? The job can be very tough emotionally, and many 22 year-olds coming out of college are not ready for the demands. The in-person interview helps us gauge their maturity, humility, and most importantly, their attitude.
Christman: So you have tons of newly minted nurses trying to get hired and you are also doing outreach. How do you keep up with all that volume?
Delaney: Due to high demand, last year we had to limit the invitations to only candidates who were sent to my team via employee referrals. After our website, employee referrals is our number one source of hirers. We love referrals because the employee can help share cultural insights with the candidate. The managers really appreciate us building a pipeline of candidates via the in-person meetings because it helps shorten the process once they have an opening.
Christman: If this was working so well, why add HR technology to the mix?
Delaney: Just as the managers were coming to rely on our high-touch approach to building a candidate pipeline, our vice president of HR challenged our team with brand new “productivity” goals, similar to the goal program our clinical side already had in place. As luck would have it, I was at a professional association meeting and bumped into Chris Young, CEO of a Philadelphia-based video interviewing company called Async Interview. Their solutions sounded like a great fit to address my goal to improve productivity. Despite my expectations that it would be too expensive, it wasn’t. And to make it easy to test out, they offered us a free pilot.
Christman: How did you roll it out?
Delaney: Async trained my team, then I engaged a part-time nurse ambassador to first watch every video interview and choose which candidate might be a better fit.
Christman: How is it making your team more productive?
Delaney: From a productivity sense, video interviewing saves time for the recruiter by eliminating email, phone tag, and all the time spent coordinating people to attend the interview days. It also saves all the man hours before, during, and after the event, screening candidates on the phone, etc. If we post one opening online, the next day we’ll get 600 applicants—the recruiters could never get back to that many people, but with the video interviewing approach it’s much more manageable.
Christman: How did you make the business case to get the funding?
Delaney: We needed to repurpose our existing budget. We found that for the cost of a print ad or two, we could invest in video interviewing. As a leader here I’m committed to innovation and look for at least one new thing for the department each year.
Ward Christman: What is happening in recruiting that has caused you to look at new HR technology?
Kim Delaney: Since demand for new nurses coming out of college has been down the past three years, and our efforts to improve retention have been very successful with an inpatient nurse vacancy rate of only 3.2 percent, our volume of applicants greatly exceeds our hiring needs, especially for the new nurses. Since I know demand will come back around, we need to ensure that our reputation in the nursing community remains solid. We do this by maintaining our outreach programs, even when there is no open position to fill.
Christman: What were you doing before you brought in a video interviewing solution?
Delaney: Two years ago we launched “New Nurse Interview Days” at the main building. We had bagels, facility tours by nurse ambassadors, etc. We interviewed 100 nurses in one day! The reason we set these up is because on paper, all these new graduates look the same; they’re all smart and well rounded, but are they the type of person who can handle this job? The job can be very tough emotionally, and many 22 year-olds coming out of college are not ready for the demands. The in-person interview helps us gauge their maturity, humility, and most importantly, their attitude.
Christman: So you have tons of newly minted nurses trying to get hired and you are also doing outreach. How do you keep up with all that volume?
Delaney: Due to high demand, last year we had to limit the invitations to only candidates who were sent to my team via employee referrals. After our website, employee referrals is our number one source of hirers. We love referrals because the employee can help share cultural insights with the candidate. The managers really appreciate us building a pipeline of candidates via the in-person meetings because it helps shorten the process once they have an opening.
Christman: If this was working so well, why add HR technology to the mix?
Delaney: Just as the managers were coming to rely on our high-touch approach to building a candidate pipeline, our vice president of HR challenged our team with brand new “productivity” goals, similar to the goal program our clinical side already had in place. As luck would have it, I was at a professional association meeting and bumped into Chris Young, CEO of a Philadelphia-based video interviewing company called Async Interview. Their solutions sounded like a great fit to address my goal to improve productivity. Despite my expectations that it would be too expensive, it wasn’t. And to make it easy to test out, they offered us a free pilot.
Christman: How did you roll it out?
Delaney: Async trained my team, then I engaged a part-time nurse ambassador to first watch every video interview and choose which candidate might be a better fit.
Christman: How is it making your team more productive?
Delaney: From a productivity sense, video interviewing saves time for the recruiter by eliminating email, phone tag, and all the time spent coordinating people to attend the interview days. It also saves all the man hours before, during, and after the event, screening candidates on the phone, etc. If we post one opening online, the next day we’ll get 600 applicants—the recruiters could never get back to that many people, but with the video interviewing approach it’s much more manageable.
Christman: How did you make the business case to get the funding?
Delaney: We needed to repurpose our existing budget. We found that for the cost of a print ad or two, we could invest in video interviewing. As a leader here I’m committed to innovation and look for at least one new thing for the department each year.
Source: HRO
Today
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