Rogers Behavioral Health: RPO aligns talent acquisition with patient needs

Challenges

In 2016, Rogers Behavioral Health was experiencing a shortage in staff needed to meet the high demand of care delivery. So, the provider 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 hire outstanding talent committed to the organization’s mission of providing a pathway to recovery.

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

Solutions

Hiring talent to transform lives

Rogers and Cielo 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’s RPO team 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.

A culture of caring

Rogers employees everywhere are truly committed to transforming lives, and Cielo took that mission to heart. Cielo’s RPO team was made up 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 its work goes beyond that. Through the Rogers Memorial Hospital Foundation, the organization puts compassion first and works to make sure 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 its primary locations were once focused in Wisconsin, Rogers’ vision drove it to open additional sites across the country to increase access to care. Cielo helped promote the Rogers mission and brand, ensuring new locations could open fully staffed and were ready to deliver services.

Results

Key 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 baseline of 30% to an average of 86%
• Instituted a measure for nursing candidate satisfaction and now consistently maintains a measure of over 90%