Recruiting in healthcare is extremely competitive – but with the right strategy, it’s possible to stand out from the crowd.
In this episode, Yvette Hansen, Director of Talent Acquisition at Baylor Scott & White Health, shares how her team bought back 10,000 hours by automating key steps, allowing recruiters to focus on sourcing top talent.
Yvette also shares:
Connect with Yvette Hansen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yvettehansen/
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[00:00:00] Yvette Hansen: We wanted to start a pilot where a candidate applied for a job. And if they answered all of their questions favorably, they'll actually skip the phone screen with the recruiter. And there'll be given a link to the hiring manager's calendar, and they can schedule their own interview by adding that scheduling link in a single year, we saved over 10,000 hours of back-and-forth time with a candidate that the recruiters got back on their calendars.
[00:00:21] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent? Today, I'm Dave Travers, President of ZipRecruiter. And on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses.
Today's Talent All-Star plays a critical role at Texas's biggest healthcare system, Baylor Scott & White Health. And as Director of Talent Acquisition, Yvette Hansen has led some really innovative campaigns that have gotten some seriously impressive results. And she's not only an award-winning recruiter, she's also an award-winning athlete.
Most recently, she's been training for her next big competition, a 50K race. Yvette Hansen, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:01:04] Yvette Hansen: Thanks, Dave. Happy to be here.
[00:01:06] Dave Travers: So one of the things I'd love to dive into first is something we, we share a passion for, which is recruitment marketing. And I know this is an area you've thought a lot about in healthcare, obviously at Baylor and elsewhere, it's a incredibly challenging environment for certain types of roles and certain skills.
How do you think about the topic of recruitment marketing, and where are you pushing forward over the next 12 months?
[00:01:34] Yvette Hansen: So I think recruitment marketing in any industry, but specifically in healthcare, is imperative. I think if you don't invest in recruitment marketing, you are, like my boss likes to say, tying one hand behind my back.
We need to be out there. We need to promote our brand, our positions, our employee voice, our stories. Why would somebody want to come here? So ultimately, your employee voice campaign has to be really important, your employee value proposition. Has to be front and center. I think, um, especially in for the healthcare industry, there are so many different competitors coming into our space that we really have to differentiate ourselves as to why somebody would want to come work for us.
What is our culture offering you? What is the value that we can offer your career, your family? All of that has to come into play.
[00:02:17] Dave Travers: You, you mentioned two things there that are buzzwords that I'm not sure everyone knows. So when you say value and voice, when it comes to employees into recruiting targets, what do you think about specifically unpack that into plain English for
[00:02:31] Yvette Hansen: The employee voice is basically just that it's getting our team members to share their unique experiences here at Baylor, what it's like to work there.
You get the story of an employee from beginning to end to. Sometimes their family gets involved. And so like we had one team member who was a supervisor, not an individual contributor. He was a supervisor and he challenged himself to go back to school. And not only did he go back to school to get his bachelor's, but also his master's.
And he was able to participate in our tuition reimbursement program. Shortly after graduating with his master's degree, he was promoted to a regional director role, which was fantastic. It was his goal. And he ultimately. Attained that goal. And he allowed us to share that story in a very fun and personable way on TikTok.
Actually, we had another team member who shared their experience working with such a diverse and dynamic team and just wanted to share how much joy he got out of coming to work every day. And his campaign is one of our highest performing campaigns of all time. He has a very joyful demeanor. So that very much helps us, but just being able to amplify his voice using social media, it just, it really connected with individuals as to why they should come work here.
[00:03:41] Dave Travers: So I think what's, what's, um, interesting about that is I think a lot of talent leaders. Know what their employee value proposition is and know what it is that closes candidates, gets candidates excited, keeps people there for a long time who are really successful. And they know of some examples of internally successful people who would also be amazing storytellers, but they haven't necessarily started creating content and buying media and doing a campaign.
How would you. If you're starting, I have a sense of my value. I have a sense of my, my, of a couple of voices that would be really powerful. How do you get started?
[00:04:22] Yvette Hansen: I love that question, Dave. Cause I had a really unique story with that. So when we develop the employee base voice campaign, we knew what we wanted to do.
And I started thinking about, did I hear any stories about anyone that I, cause I'd recently come to an organization. I wanted to learn about people. And so I was asking about team members and their experience. And I had one team member say, yeah, my husband went back to school and then he got promoted. It was really great.
And I asked, Oh, was he able to get tuition reimbursement? And she said, yes. Two months later is when I was talking to our marketing team about our employee voice campaign, and I remembered this woman telling me the story. So I reached out to her and I said, Do you think your husband would be willing to participate in this campaign?
And I explained it to her. And she said, I think so. Let me ask him. And she shot the first video on her phone. And they sent us the video and it was a couple of years ago when it was the, the pointing videos were really popular, like you pointed here and things popped up and so he felt kind of silly doing it, but he loves his wife and he, she asked him to do this and we just leveraged this relationship that we had and he was our very first campaign and performed fantastic.
It was a fun thing to do, but you can do it. You get started with the simplest thing. Like, who do you know? Just ask them, grab your phone, shoot the video, add a little bit of creative magic to it and post it and see how well it does.
[00:05:43] Dave Travers: That's amazing. And the word that comes bursting out of that is authenticity, which is counterintuitive when you're thinking about yourself or somebody, a campaign you're starting. You want it to look polished and perfect and uncontroversial.
But on social media, what is so clearly true is that authenticity is incredibly powerful, so it doesn't have to be highly produced to get started.
[00:06:04] Yvette Hansen: Well, and, and those are the ones that do the best, right? Dave, like the, the high produced videos look fantastic. And I love those too. But the ones that perform the best, the ones that resonate with your audience more, your candidate population more are the raw looking footage, because they want reality.
They want to know what is it really like to work here. If I could get a GoPro and get a team member to walk the halls and, and share what their day looks like, I would absolutely do that. I think there are companies who have done that, and it's. I don't know what their data looks like, but I'm sure that the output looks great.
I'm sure that they get a lot of click through rates and we haven't been able to do that. Um, or I personally haven't been able to accomplish that yet, but it's definitely on the list.
[00:06:42] Dave Travers: I was talking to a CEO the other day who was telling me that she was recording a video for all of our employees to see about a message she wanted to convey, but it was asynchronous.
It wasn't live. And so they were recording it over Zoom. And at that moment, she, as she was in the middle of it, she got a text from her daughter. She had to teenage daughter. She had to respond right away. And so she responded right away and then finished her message. And her team was like, okay, that was great.
Let's just rerecord it. And she's like, no, no, no. I want everyone to see it exactly like that. And she said she was overwhelmed by the number of employees who responded to that very real, you know, obviously not, uh, highly sanitized, scripted moment. And in the, it said so much more than she could ever say about the importance of.
Balancing work in life and all that, all that other stuff that, um, that, that, uh, doing sometimes is more powerful.
[00:07:33] Yvette Hansen: And Dave, and how it starts from the top, right? If you've got your leadership saying, Hey, I get it. My kid needs a response right now. So when it happens to you, don't be afraid to stop, take a pause, respond to your text message, or if they're knocking on your office door, turn around and acknowledge them.
You know, so I, I think that's so important and I love to hear that.
[00:07:54] Dave Travers: So, okay. So, so now you've got your, the ball rolling down the hill on how to start with value and voice, let's talk about some of the specific challenges you faced and so many people face when it comes to specific roles, when it comes to nurses or particular types of technicians, how do you think about when you have a particularly acute shortage in supply demand problem of labor and a highly skilled field.
How do you think about attacking that particular problem specifically?
[00:08:24] Yvette Hansen: Yeah. So there's long-term, midterm, and short-term strategies, right? Like there's, what do we need to immediately do? And it's like throw everything in the kitchen sink at it. And we're in that position now with certain roles throughout healthcare, right?
We know there's talent shortages, especially when it comes to licensed positions, there's a talent shortage across the globe, not just the US but across the globe. Right. So we know we're up against that. And that's when you say, okay, from the, for the immediate. Here are the things we have to do, and you do have to have a strong social media campaign.
Everybody's on social media. I think there's a study out there that said. 73 percent of job seekers between the ages of 18 and 34 found their last job using social media. So if you are not on social media, get out there and promote your jobs. Use your employees to promote your jobs. Have a really solid employee referral program, right?
You want to make sure that you're best candidates come from your referral. So making sure that you have a robust referral program and that it's automated as much as you can make it. So you're soliciting those referrals. You're doing the external population. Make sure that your recruiters have the time to source passive candidates, giving them back time.
So automating things where you can taking administrative tasks away from them. Because there's one thing to be said for back in the day when you would get inundated with candidates and the recruiters were so busy just trying to sift through them. That's not the situation they're all into today. Some are in that situation.
I, we all know that. But a lot of them are in a situation where they get two to three candidates a week on their postings. So, but they're bogged down with administrative tasks or, um, even those two to three candidates, they're trying to, you know, figure out, do they have, um, referrals I can solicit, um, and the hiring manager needs consultation.
And then you're mixing them sometimes with the recs that have a high volume of candidates. So now they're spending time with these high-volume candidates. So wherever you can take time away from a recruiter, take that away and give them time back so that they can in fact source passive talent, consult with the hiring manager.
Do networking, um, attend events, things like that. And we're obviously partnering with organizations, um, that are diverse focus that we can spread our reach into. So we partner with organizations like the National Association of Hispanic Nurses, the National Association of Black Nurses. N-A-H-S-C, which is the National Association of Healthcare Executives, to make sure that we've expanded our reach into those populations as well and making sure that they know who we are.
And we're a fre, uh, A-D-E-I-B friendly company come apply here. So we've done everything we can. Obviously there's job postings to be had, uh, sponsoring those job postings, making sure that they're at the top of the list. Making sure that you've got referral bonuses if they're available, a sign on bonuses, relocation where we're applicable, and that you're promoting those items as well.
We also have talent community newsletters going out that are specific to a job role. We have, um, email and text campaigns going out that again are specific. We are trying to tailor our outreach and then of course, pipelining. So for every recruiter that talks to candidates, maybe the recruiter talks to five candidates today.
One of them is absolutely interested. They're going to put them in for the position. Two of them, probably not a good fit. But the last two are interested, but not today. So, making sure you have a solid pipeline strategy that you can put them into, that equates to a keep warm strategy. So if one tells you, yeah, I'm available, but I can only work this shift, that means they're ready to hire, ready to interview, but, um, but the job doesn't exist yet because the hours that we're looking for don't fit them.
So you want to send them a keep warm strategy that makes them feel like, yeah, we're looking for you today. But that last candidate that we're going to pipeline, that individual says, you know, I'm in Chicago, you're in Texas. I really do want to get there, but I have two kids in high school, so I'm not going to make the transition for a year.
So you want to send them a keep warm strategy that's tailored to that one-year-long keep warm effort, right? You don't want to send them a list of jobs that are available today. You want to send them information about what's happening at Baylor, why it would be great to move to Texas. Hey, here's an expansion we have going on.
If you happen to know anyone in your network that might be interested, please do feel free to share this information forward. So that way they understand you're not just trying to, you're not looking out for yourself. You're not looking out to fill that role. You really are interested and you heard what they had to say and you're responding to what they shared with you.
[00:12:40] Dave Travers: Wow. Okay. So that was an amazing strategy you just laid out, but I felt overwhelming to me. I felt, I feel like it could feel, it was incredibly impressive, but the question is, okay, where do I put my one foot in front of the other and get started? And one thing that really perked my ears up, as I heard you talk through that a couple of times was using automation to take some of the drudgery and wasted time and unnecessary toil.
Out of a recruiter's time so they can focus on what's really valuable, like referrals, passive candidates, all the, the best candidates, um, flowing in. So, so AI and automation are such a hot topic right now. All of us are being inundated every day by technology vendors promising they can do everything from, you know, make us breakfast to, to take the toil out of recruiting.
How do you start that process? So you have this team, you know, that not every second of every day is being used productively. You know, there's probably technology that can take toil away. How do you do that? How do you get started?
[00:13:40] Yvette Hansen: So the first thing is you talk to your recruiters. We did a time study for recruiters.
We try to figure out how much time is it taking at each step in the process. And we documented that time. But then I sent that time study to two other groups of recruiters and said, can you validate this for me? What would you change? How is there a step I forgot about the other recruiters forgot about, or would you take longer because your job family requires this much information or this much time?
So you take that time study, and you say, okay, here's the time study. Are there any steps in this process that I could automate? We wanted to start a pilot, um, where a candidate applied for a job. And if they answered all of their questions favorably, which we all have questions posted, right? Like, you ask them all these questions.
They're known as the basic advertised qualifications, right? Do they have those? And if they meet them, usually the recruiter sends them an email says, Hey, you met our qualifications. We'd love to talk to you. Let's schedule some time to connect. There's a piece of automation you could add right there.
Instead of going back and forth with the candidate or having a coordinator do that, you can add a scheduling link, right? If you have technology. And most everybody does these days; you can add a link, and that will minimize all of the back-and-forth time. I think we estimated by adding that scheduling link in a single year, we saved over 10,000 hours of back-and-forth time with a candidate that the recruiters got back on their calendars.
So there's one piece of technology you can offer. What we did for, for this situation is we said, if they answer these questions favorably. They'll actually skip the phone screen with the recruiter, and they'll go straight to the hiring manager. They'll be given a link to the hiring manager's calendar, and they can schedule their own interview.
And then they still have to complete their application. So it allowed to give that time back to that recruiter. And we communicated this with the recruiter, with the hiring leaders, and the executive leadership team. And we said, will this work for you? What are the concerns? What are the primary concerns?
And what are your thoughts on this? So the recruiters were a little hesitant. They're like, Oh my gosh, you're bringing somebody in. Like, I'm still a recruiter. I still want to be part of the process. But we made sure it was clear. This is only for positions where we had more applicants than we needed.
There are jobs you're working where you don't have applicants. That's where you need human touch. We need networking. We need cold calling. We need text messaging. Cold outreach. Um, but for these other roles. I think we can get by with this bot doing this for us. Um, so we started with that, and the pilot was very successful.
We're expanding our, our efforts to include other locations. We started with one location and five small jobs. The results were phenomenal. I'm thinking about the data, and I want to say we went from eight candidates to one hire; we went from having to the higher men are having to see eight candidates to get the one higher that we're down to three.
[00:16:23] Dave Travers: Wow.
[00:16:24] Yvette Hansen: And that, and that small group and that pilot, and we're hoping we'll see the same results as we expand it, expand this work.
[00:16:29] Dave Travers: And how many, how many hiring managers have you had tell you, you know, I really miss having that eight-to-one ratio.
[00:16:35] Yvette Hansen: Not one yet.
[00:16:35] Dave Travers: Me neither. I've never heard that either. Okay. One of the things that I would love to talk to you about is that recruiting and talent isn't your only passion. So I know from, from previous chats that you are a passionate athlete and you do, um, some incredible racing and challenges and, and CrossFit and all these, um, amazing things, uh, that you're involved in.
Talk about the passion, you bring to that and making time with your busy job, being this executive where you have to do, um, so much, have so much responsibility, and how you make time for your passion outside of work and how you bring that into work.
[00:17:15] Yvette Hansen: I could talk about that all day, Dave. I love, so it's interesting.
I pulled up some data because I'm a data geek too, Dave, by the way. So I was like, okay, I run marathons. I run 50Ks. I do Spartan. I love High Rocks is a great competition that I participate in, and CrossFit. And so I'm right now I'm training for 50K, and I was like, I wonder how many people. do a 50K every single year.
And so I think everybody knows the stat for marathon about 1 percent of the US population completes a marathon every year. It's 0.0003 percent of people run a 50 K every year, which is a phenomenal number because I surround myself with people who do 50 K's and marathons all the time. And I think about that when I'm training or when I'm thinking about people.
My eating plans. Yeah, does it take a lot of commitment and discipline? Absolutely. But there's community there. And I think that's one of the most important things to me. Whether it's in my personal life or my professional life. Am I doing hard things? Yes. Am I doing things that some would call insane?
Absolutely. But I am not alone in it, and it's almost like they say, you don't want to be the smartest person in the room. You don't want to be the most, you know, the craziest person in the room. You want to surround yourself with people who are like-minded, who challenge themselves. And I feel like I do that at work.
It's like. Am I doing some things that are really cool and innovative? Yeah, but I'm not alone. And I love surrounding myself with people who are up for the same challenge and looking at how do they get over that obstacle? How do they achieve change? How do they get buy in? How did, what kind of change management did they practice?
Do they put into play? It's things like that, that I think they just crossed my world and I just love it. And it's, it's absolutely, I'm, I'm so impassioned by it. Like I can talk about it all day.
[00:19:05] Dave Travers: Wow, I love that because so many of us have heard that you are what you eat sort of truism Which is which is true but it what is even more true and has been proven many times over is you are who you spend time with and It's also incredible as someone who's not nearly as accomplished an athlete but if if you haven't Gone to a race of any sort.
If you haven't gone to a 5K fun run, it's an incredible community that has developed in those races and in, in those communities of people who are just getting out there and getting active on Thanksgiving morning or whatever
[00:19:39] Yvette Hansen: Dave, they cheer louder for the last person across that finish line as they do for the first person, because for some it's the greatest achievement they've made.
And I don't know how long, right? And you want to encourage that and support that. And it's the same way when you surround yourself with people doing really cool and innovative work. You may fail big, but you'll get as many cheerleaders behind you when you fail big and learn big because they will say, Hey, now I don't have to make those same mistakes because you've paved the way for me.
I can actually make a right turn where you made a left. But here, let me take you on that journey with me because I can help you get where you need to be. And I think that's fantastic. It's one of the things I love about the TA community. It's everyone wants to share best practices. We're all in it together.
Everybody wants to see the other. And so, and don't get me wrong, we all want more, more of the candidates than our competitor. But at the end of the day, we, I haven't talked to one TA professional who has said, I'm not going to tell you my best practices, or I'm going to my grave with my secrets. We're all willing to share and say.
Let's all succeed together.
[00:20:41] Dave Travers: That is so true. Then, the power of connecting the right person to the right opportunity. What, what a great TA function as you're describing it in a great TA professional does is connect someone to the opportunity to find a great fit for them. And there's, there's an endless abundance of that.
That's not a scarce resource in the world about. The, the ability to connect people to an even better opportunity. So I absolutely love that. That's a great place to pivot to the way we close each episode here, which is to do sort of a rapid fire where we, we assume for a moment that you and I are just getting on an elevator together and we've got one minute.
Uh, and I'm the Chief People Officer, CEO of Baylor Health, and in 60 seconds together, I say, Oh, hi, Yvette, how are you doing? And I, you know, while I have you here, there's one question I would love to know, which is what is the most important thing that the TA team needs to accomplish over the next year?
[00:21:36] Yvette Hansen: Obviously, getting more talent through the door, getting them through the door and faster. And the way to do that is creativity and imagination. We have to be really creative about how we're reaching out to those folks and allow them to imagine their careers here at Baylor, allowing them to understand what the culture is like here.
The family feel and being quick about it, not wasting anyone's time. We, we coined a phrase called candidate-centric, and it's, it's basically saying everything we do. We're keeping the candidate at the center of what we do. So keeping their time respected, making sure that they feel like. They are being informed at every step of the process, making sure that they we respect their time with regard to the interview and not rescheduling where we don't need to limiting it by the number of people who have participated in an interview.
All of it.
[00:22:23] Dave Travers: Awesome. Uh, okay. One other final question. You're the expert on interviewing. Like what's your best tip to make me a better interviewer?
[00:22:32] Yvette Hansen: So I would say listen to both. What people say and what they don't say, right? A lot of people will talk about, I was able to accomplish all these things. I launched this program, this project, I got it off the ground, but the question is.
Did they use data to center everything, right? Whether it was quantifiable or qualitative data, were they grounded in fact or assumption? Did they A, B test a solution or did they just go with one and never think about an alternative way of thinking? And then, did they have a change management program in place?
Did they listen to everyone this was going to affect? At the end of the day, you absolutely want technically good and solution-oriented folks, but you also want people who are going to bring others along with them. So that's what I would say is, is one of the things you want to listen for.
[00:23:18] Dave Travers: Amazing. Listen for the things they're not saying.
That is so powerful and a great way to invert the problem of, of what you listen for in an interview. Well, let me tell you something that I. I heard loud and clear. It's clear Yvette, why you are a Talent All-Star. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us today.
[00:23:35] Yvette Hansen: Thank you so much, Dave. It's been a pleasure.
[00:23:41] Dave Travers: That's Yvette Hansen, Director of Talent Acquisition at Baylor Scott & White Health. We'll put her LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. And if you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com. I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. We'll see you right back here next time.