Founded on the mission of making a healthy difference in people’s lives, Essentia Health combines the strengths of over 15,000 employees to provide exemplary care across the Midwest. To succeed, Essentia has to ensure their 100+ hospitals, clinics, and care facilities are fully staffed, which means routinely overcoming a challenging labor market.
“There are not enough healthcare candidates,” said Essentia VP of Talent Management John Higgins. “You have to do things better than the competition to provide a better candidate experience.”
A clunky hiring process led to top talent dropping off.
To avoid understaffing, Essentia needs their hiring process to consistently provide an ample candidate pipeline. But previously, their hiring process wasn’t operating efficiently at scale.
“We had some gaps that we needed to solve,” said Higgins. “Candidates were dropping off the application process. Our hiring pace wasn’t able to keep up with the organizational demand.”
Essentia needs to hire a number of different role profiles—cafeteria workers, PAs, surgeons, and administrative roles, just to name a few—to keep their facilities running optimally. What makes things especially tricky is that engaging each profile requires a certain level of nuance. That means Essentia has to tailor their hiring process across profiles, being fast enough to hire high-volume while being robust enough to hire top physician talent, the most difficult profile to find.
We weren’t providing a great candidate experience, so we weren’t hiring the best talent.
VP of Talent Management
A full-scale hiring process transformation.
Instead of changing small parts of their process, Essentia prioritized a sweeping improvement of their candidate experience, a ubiquitous aspect of the hiring process across all profiles. To do that, they partnered with Workday Paradox to revamp their hiring with Workday Paradox Candidate Experience Agent. AI is now infused into multiple stages of the hiring process, providing the capability to be faster, smarter, and more efficient.
Nowhere is that more evident than in Essentia’s Conversational Career Site, the cornerstone of their new solution. What was once an antiquated career site now functions as a mobile-first launchpad into a frictionless hiring process, leveraging an AI agent named Olivia to capture candidates, match them with relevant jobs, and usher them through a job application. With Olivia driving the automation through the early parts of the hiring process, Essentia's recruiters are able to spend more time with top talent coming through the pipeline.
We wanted TA software that aligned with the consumer-grade experience our candidates have in their everyday lives.
VP of Talent Management
Screening and interview scheduling, nuanced by job profile.
Olivia automates the necessary nuance to efficiently hire all of Essentia's profiles. And she does it by putting each candidate in charge: They get to choose the direction of the interaction, and any resulting automation differs based on the candidate's hiring profile.
For high-volume candidates, Olivia sends screening questions in the chat and instantly schedules qualified candidates for interviews. For high-skilled healthcare professionals, Olivia can match people with the right job (based on location/preferences) and transfer them to a formal application in Workday Recruiting. If candidates ever have questions, Olivia answers with relevant content to level-set expectations and push best-fit candidates to apply.
“The 'aha' moment for us was right after we turned on the product,” said Higgins. “Within 49 seconds, we had our first candidate self-scheduled for an interview. And it was unbelievable because no one other than the candidate drove that process.”
Once we implemented Olivia, we significantly enhanced our ability to connect with candidates.
Director of TA
How new software can mean so much more to recruiters.
Since adding Olivia to their team, Essentia Health has doubled the amount of interviews they’re scheduling while reducing their time-to-schedule from three days to 29 minutes.
But beyond the time savings and candidate pipeline increase, AI has given new meaning to the work Essentia’s hiring leaders perform. With AI leading the way on administrative work, Essentia’s recruiters have been able to add more consultative conversations with candidates and hiring leaders, increasing the efficacy of hiring the right people across every profile without having to learn new tech.
Since going live, we have seen our benchmark metrics move from the bottom quartile to the top quartile.
VP of Talent Management