One Healthcare Org’s Prescription for Recruiting Success: EVP, Mission, AI
The current diagnosis for the healthcare industry?
Chronic growing pains.
Even as healthcare continues to confront major talent shortages, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that healthcare will add more new jobs than any other U.S. industry over the next 10 years. This will include a projected increase of nearly 180,000 registered nurses, a number worth noodling as National Nurses Week (May 6 – 12) is about to begin.
“The healthcare industry has gone through amazing waves around talent that you couldn’t have imagined,” says Wanda Cole-Frieman, the senior vice president of talent acquisition for CommonSpirit Health, one of the largest nonprofit healthcare organizations in the United States. She sees her role as finding “the right talent with the skills that we need to be forward-thinking healthcare professionals and to serve our patients powered by human kindness.”
And doing it at scale and without losing that human touch. CommonSpirit has 157,000 employees, including 45,000 nurses and 25,000 physicians and advanced practice providers, working at more than 2,300 clinics and care sites and 137 hospital-based locations. “Our organization embraces human kindness in our care for patients,” Wanda says, “as well as infuses it into our approach to attracting and retaining talent.”
Here are three critical tactics Wanda and her team deploy to stay in front of the healthcare hiring challenge:
1. Get laser-focused on your employee value proposition: Your EVP is your MVP
Wanda’s TA team worked closely with CommonSpirit’s talent management team and company business leaders to get a vibrant employee value proposition, one “that looking from the outside, people can really feel,” Wanda says.
“It’s important for people to know what they’re signing up for,” she explains, “especially when they’re not sitting at their computers all day. They’re actually out in our hospitals and our medical groups, serving our patients, so we want a really clear, transparent employee value proposition.”
A clear EVP, Wanda says, is also critical for retention, which is paramount when you’re facing an ongoing talent shortage. So, it’s important to understand what your employees need. “And what we’re hearing today,” she says, “is that they want flexibility and they want to understand career paths. They want companies to invest in them.”
Flexibility and career advancement are also what candidates are looking for; LinkedIn data shows that flexibility and career advancement are both in the top five priorities for members around the world when considering a new job.
To get the EVP story out to talent, CommonSpirit has found there’s no substitute for having current employees help land future employees. “Having our employees tell our story,” Wanda says, “has been really effective for us. Whether it’s video testimonials or spotlights on our website, a little glimpse of what it’s like to work at CommonSpirit has been really helpful.”
2. Craft a dynamic mission statement and use it relentlessly
“One of the things that I feel that my team has done really well over the course of the last 10-plus years,” Wanda says, “is figuring out how to home in on what makes CommonSpirit unique.”
In a competitive market for talent, an inspirational mission that showcases a compelling purpose can be a significant advantage. A few years back, McKinsey found that employees are five times more likely to be excited working at a company that spends time reflecting on the impact it makes in the world.
And CommonSpirit is all about impact.
“As CommonSpirit Health,” their mission states, “we make the healing presence of God known in our world by improving the health of the people we serve, especially those who are vulnerable, while we advance social justice for all.”
The mission is so critical at CommonSpirit that the organization brought together a cross-functional team of HR leaders, caregivers, and talent professionals to develop behavioral questions around human kindness. “We’re not just asking whether you can code or draw blood correctly,” Wanda adds, “we want to understand that you’re locked in with humankindness and why we show up every day.”
3. Leverage AI for content creation and data analysis
The TA team at CommonSpirit has been among the company’s earliest adopters of AI and GAI.
Why?
“Because,” Wanda says, “we have a lot of use cases.” Her TA team regularly taps into Insightli, the organization’s internal AI assistant, for help with content creation and data analysis.
“Recruiters in particular,” she says, “are bogged down with so many administrative things to do that being able to have that human connection with our candidates, both internally and externally, gets strained.”
So, one of the first things her team did — to give time back to recruiters — was begin using GAI to write candidate-facing job descriptions. “We can get very specific,” Wanda says, “about what kinds of people, what kinds of skill sets, are coming for our jobs and we’re trying to make sure our job descriptions reflect that.” She adds that her team monitors the ROI on job ads and will shake things up if they’re not attracting enough high-quality candidates.
“If we go out to market with a campaign and it’s not doing what we need it to do,” she says, “I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars and four weeks to figure that out. I want to know that in 24 to 72 hours and then figure out how to shift. We’re using AI for that and we’re very excited.”
Final thoughts: Approach nurses — and other healthcare professionals — with kindness
Kindness is something we often ascribe to nurses. With good reason.
So, with National Nurses Week about to kick off, it’s an apt time to think about reciprocal kindness. Let’s take a moment to reflect on all that nurses give — not just their skills and knowledge, but their empathy, resilience, and relentless dedication.
The CommonSpirit prescription for recruiting success — a focus on EVP, mission, and AI tools all with a big dose of kindness — is one that can help elevate talent acquisition efforts no matter which industry you’re in. But it may be an especially effective prescription for those in the healthcare space, where talent shortages are simply a fact of life.
