Overview
Tidelands Health [Tidelands] is an integrated health system comprised of 298 licensed beds and more than 50 outpatient locations. It is located along the coast of South Carolina in one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. The market growth not only drives the demand for healthcare services, it is driving Tidelands’ need to recruit providers in an arguably constrained environment. It is with this in mind that Knowledge Capital Group [KCG] was engaged to partner with Tidelands’ Recruiting team to optimize processes and enhance enabling technologies.
The Challenge
Just a little more than a year ago, Tidelands’ recruiting needs were about eight providers yearly and was managed by a third-party, part-time resource. With the hyper-growth Tidelands is experiencing, the recruiting need has nearly tripled and the recruiting team is now comprised of two full-time staff – a senior recruiter and a program coordinator.
As the internal function of recruiting is relatively new, the two staff did not have many established processes to follow and had no supportive technology systems. To this end, they rapidly created some Google sheets to track candidates [along with sticky notes and a white board] and set up some email distribution lists and standing meetings.
While these informal processes and systems worked to some extent, the sheer volume of candidates along with the scope of the recruiting function [inclusive of all front-end sourcing, interview scheduling/coordination, offer creation, and negotiation] ended up illustrating some real gaps in processes – mostly around progress transparency, stakeholder alignment, communication, and handoff to the credentialing and HR teams.
The Approach
KCG first partnered with the Recruiting Team to conduct a current state assessment – documenting all workflows, constraints, and opportunities involving everything from how they sourced candidates, onsite interview processes, offer / negotiation steps, and all touchpoints in between. KCG then worked with key stakeholders to map ideal state workflows, supportive processes, and reporting and communication needs. A few key findings were that Tidelands did not have a common recruiting vernacular, executives craved more real-time updates on recruiting and offer status, handoffs to key stakeholders relied mostly upon manual processes, and no current HR technology system could really provide the tracking and reporting that was needed.
With the assessment complete and the ideal state articulated, KCG worked with stakeholders to create a multi-phased, recruiting pipeline process that had standard definitions, processes, and outcomes for each phase. Once this was agreed upon by leadership, KCG then began to systematically lean out the current state and ensure new workflows were operationalized within Recruiting and all supportive departments [MSO, HR, Finance, Legal, etc.].
The last step in the process was to work with key stakeholders to create a simple candidate tracking tool that followed the pipeline phases and facilitated cross-enterprise communication and reporting. As Tidelands had a current license for SmartSheet™ and KCG had competency using that tool, KCG partnered with key stakeholders to build a custom candidate tracking tool that was aligned with the pipeline phases, supported all newly-established workflows and processes, and generated automatic tracking reports and candidate handoffs.
Impact
The result of the collaborative work immediately paid dividends. The pipeline and its definitions were universally embraced by Tidelands, processes have been improved and integrated within the supportive departments and executives have been very pleased with the cadence and flow of recruiting information. Furthermore, the newly adopted workflows and technology created sufficient capacity within the Recruiting team that HR transitioned Advanced Providers recruiting to the Recruiting team – and added no FTEs in the process.
