Client Challenge

One of the largest healthcare providers in the mid-Atlantic region was facing some difficult market challenges:

• Demand for services was rising steadily, in large part due to an aging local population.
• Rapid growth was occurring in many of its specialized service lines.
• Competition was mounting from both niche players and from large, multi-entity providers.
• The regional talent pool contained limited talent in the most competitive and sought-after specialties.
• As a result, the company’s vacancy rate had risen to over 9%, impacting the system’s ability to deliver care.

The client’s HR leadership team wanted to improve the recruiting function’s ability to fill openings faster and more accurately. They also wanted to ensure that the organization’s staffing function was optimally deployed to handle the aggressive business growth planned over the next five years.

To help them quickly identify opportunities for improvement, the health system decided to have DoubleStar’s team conduct a comprehensive review of the recruiting function’s structure, operations, and service delivery capabilities.

Our Solution

DoubleStar conducted a detailed review of the customer’s practices utilizing our comprehensive assessment methodology. The review focused on recruiting delivery structure and practices, candidate sourcing, applicant-flow processes, and candidate-management capabilities.

DoubleStar’s assessment included the following initiatives:

• Conducted over 30 interviews with selected service leaders, key stakeholders in HR, and recruitment team members.
• Reviewed existing staffing reports, materials, tools, templates, and utilization of their applicant-tracking system and conducted thorough process reviews and performance analyses.
• Compared results to best practices in healthcare and in other similarly complex industries such as pharmaceuticals, consumer products, and technology.
• Analyzed findings to determine the client’s ability to deliver against the enterprise’s current and future service demands.

The final deliverable included a detailed Roadmap for Change that enabled the client to make short- and medium-term improvements to its recruitment organization that increased operational efficiency and improved service delivery effectiveness to internal clients.

Business Impacts

A key finding of the assessment was that due to the strength of the existing recruiting function, the client was not a good candidate for an RPO solution. This enabled the client to focus its energies on immediately rebuilding the function to incorporate modern sourcing approaches and enhanced service delivery to key client groups.

The client also elected to implement three of DoubleStar’s strategic recommendations, focusing on building a new talent acquisition strategy, creating specialized recruitment roles for project management and sourcing, and enhancing the consulting skills of its in-house recruiters. The successful implementation of these initiatives resulted in a 100+% increase in hiring manager satisfaction scores over a one-year period.