RPO Partnership Helps Rogers Behavioral Health Hire Talent to Meet Patient Needs

For more than a century, Rogers Behavioral Health has been providing treatment and support to thousands of the 43 million Americans who struggle with mental illness or addiction. It is Rogers’ vision to ensure that individuals and families with behavioral healthcare needs have access to the highest quality of care and the ability to experience hope and healing.

But in 2016, because of a shortage in staff needed to meet the high demand of care delivery, Rogers had to make the challenging decision to turn away almost 800 patients. Committed to never being in that position again, Rogers’ leadership knew they needed to find a partner to help them hire outstanding talent committed to their mission of providing a pathway to recovery.

That led them to Cielo Healthcare, specifically for their expertise in recruiting nurses and other specialized care provider roles. Rogers Behavioral Health and Cielo Healthcare began their Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) partnership with the goal of increasing access to care through tailored recruitment efforts.

Hiring Talent to Transform Lives
Rogers and Cielo Healthcare focused on a rapid improvement process aimed at streamlining recruitment for critical roles, including nursing. Keeping candidate experience top of mind, hiring managers were instilled with a renewed sense of urgency to partner with talent acquisition to fill vacant nursing roles. With the commitment from hiring managers, and a simplified hiring process that shrunk the number of steps between application and start-date from 28 down to nine, Rogers was able to attract, engage and extend offers faster than other local health systems and hospitals. The team also created a unique solution for the pent-up nursing demand while also building an ongoing system to ensure there would always be nurses available to care for incoming patients. With the support of Rogers’ leadership, Cielo Healthcare built a resource group of nurses, deliberately over-hiring 15 full-time nurses to work where extra support was needed until a permanent position became available. This consistent nurse resource group truly transformed the way Rogers hired and engaged nursing talent.

Other results of the partnership included:

• Decreased time-to-fill for inpatient nursing positions from 130 days to zero days using the nurse resource group
• Filled the initial 632 requisitions, including nurses, in the first six months, and ended the first year of partnership with over 1,300 new hires
• Reduced nurse vacancies by 89% and overall vacancies by 68%
• Improved hiring manger satisfaction from their baseline of 30% to an average of 86%
• Instituted a measure for nursing candidate satisfaction and now consistently maintains a measure of over 90%

A Culture of Caring
Rogers employees everywhere are truly committed to transforming lives, and Cielo Healthcare took that mission to heart by building a team of experienced healthcare recruiters who could source and engage candidates with the right culture fit to work at the organization and provide exceptional care. The recruiting process was designed to find the right balance of high-tech and high-touch interactions, so recruiters could engage with candidates to assess their connection to the mission and ensure that their personal motivations align with Rogers’ values. This process included virtual career fairs with integrated hiring leader live-chat, and in-depth interviews.

Community Commitment
Rogers Behavioral Health has an outstanding reputation for patient care, but their work goes beyond that. Through the Rogers Memorial Hospital Foundation, they put compassion first and work to ensure that patients struggling with a mental health disease have access to the best care possible for as long as necessary regardless of their income, insurance coverage or ability to pay. While their primary locations were once focused in Wisconsin, Rogers’ vision drove them to open additional sites across the country to increase access to care. Cielo Healthcare helped promote the Rogers mission and brand and ensure new locations could open fully staffed, ready to deliver services. To date, Cielo Healthcare has supported Rogers in opening six new locations across the country, with plans to open four additional facilities in 2019. The partnership between Rogers and Cielo Healthcare will continue its work to increase access to care and provide any individual the opportunity to regain a life filled with health and happiness.