A Healthier Hiring Strategy

Meeting Missions: Establishing Opportunity for Recruiting Dynamic Talent

A large global healthcare corporation was experiencing talents shortages and high attrition rates, punctuated by monthly fines from government bodies and insurance companies for low-staffing violations. The company needed a new recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner who could hire rapidly for roles traditionally difficult to fill while also increasing worker retention; for example, they were facing 40% attrition for call center workers in the first 90 days. Additionally, the client wanted a strategic partner who could advise and implement process improvements to:  

• Streamline and improve the onboarding process 
• Emphasize candidate experience 
• Ease work and processes for hiring managers 
• Automate processes for continued hiring  

Taking into consideration the company’s historical hiring trends, market location data, recruitment technology options and work seasonality, the Allegis Global Solutions (AGS) team developed a workforce plan to address the needs of our client.  

Starting from the ground up, AGS built a program for high-yield hiring with swift results. 

Taking Action: Streamlining Access to Talent

In the face of a global pandemic, the healthcare leader required a three-fold increase in monthly hiring to 1,500. This need was further challenged by an industry experiencing 50-60% drop-out rates, making it a particularly difficult climate to find healthcare talent. The AGS team implemented a proactive hiring strategy to not only ramp up hiring quickly, but to also build reserve applicants to compensate for anticipated high turnover.

The team developed a method to automate the hiring  process to increase volume, ease the stress on hiring managers and create a positive candidate experience by making the process simpler and more interactive. The reduction in time to hire also eased drop-out rates for candidates. Within 60 days, the team was successfully delivering 1,500 hires a month. In addition, the client achieved hiring numbers in just six months that compensated for any concerns about turnover rates. 

After finding success in the first six months, AGS built enough trust that the client stopped in-house interviewing and we took over the majority of the sourcing, screening and interviewing process. The added benefit of this decision was streamlining the overall candidate interviewing process by two weeks. AGS also established a virtual chatbot to assist with screening candidates. The result was over 5,000 hires in just three months that were solely sourced by the AGS team. Not only did this reduce overall time- to -hire from eight weeks to five weeks while also having markedly better retention rates, but it was incredibly impactful to the business during its peak open enrollment period.  

Delivering Impact: Innovating for Long-term Results 

Addressing quick wins for the client was just the first step in addressing their workforce challenges. The client needed an RPO partner who could maintain a long-term program that kept staff numbers healthy. We have been able to achieve this sustained success through a variety of innovative workforce strategies.

For example, the client primarily needs to fill customer service roles but also requires specialized roles like pharmacy technicians, who require certification. To that aim, AGS set up a program that allows technicians to work while getting their location-specific certification.  

In recognition of our ability to deliver high-volume hiring, the client has also tasked AGS with hiring over 10,000 strategic workers in other divisions of the business. To that end, it was critical to create a positive candidate experience that made the process simple, interactive and encouraging. AGS also deployed technological processes to ease the challenges faced by hiring managers, freeing time for them to focus on other aspects of their responsibilities.    

Within the first six months, AGS was awarded 100% of the client’s insurance health plan call-center business. Following additional success in this realm, AGS was then awarded full ownership of the client’s pharmacy benefit management customer service and pharmacy technician high-volume divisions thereafter. This provided the client’s internal hiring managers with more time to dedicate to their core missions and less time focused on maintaining staffing levels. After five years, more than 4 million people have visited the client’s hiring site and over 73,000 people have been hired. 

In addition to meeting and exceeding hiring goals, the client engaged AGS to increase its diversity, equity and inclusion sourcing channels, especially for veteran workers. AGS exceeded the goal of 5.5% veteran hires – reaching 6.1% for the first time ever.  

Healthy results for our client started with short-term high-yield hires and have grown into a trusted partnership, reaching goals year after year while maintaining the highest levels of customer service.