How on-demand interviewing eliminated phone interviews, saved over 3,300 hours

Client

Since the opening of its first hospital by Ben Franklin in 1751, Penn Medicine has expanded to 4 hospitals, more than 1,900 licensed beds, 80,000 annual admissions and 25,000 employees and growing.

The system, which includes one of the nation’s leading research institutions, supports Penn’s tripartite mission of providing the highest level of care to patients, conducting innovative research, and educating future leaders in the field of medicine – which the recruiting team takes to heart when considering candidates.

Problem

The Philadelphia area is an incredibly competitive environment in which to attract and keep top talent, especially for healthcare institutions. And, with Penn Medicine receiving a high volume of applications for each position, recruiters must engage large numbers of candidates quickly while keeping up with their ongoing requisition load.

Penn Medicine found that, on average, completing a phone interview took 45 minutes – including the time to identify a candidate, schedule the interview, and perform the interviewing call itself. Multiply that 45 minutes across 4,000-5,000 annual hires, and the need for increased efficiency became clear.

Solution

Every candidate who applies to Penn Medicine goes through an initial evaluation to ensure they meet the minimum job requirements.

Rather than scheduling and completing phone interviews with each candidate, Penn Medicine integrated a Modern Hire (now part of HireVue) ondemand video interview into its workflow.

By utilizing Modern Hire’s (now part of HireVue) open invite capabilities, recruiters invite all qualified candidates to complete the on-demand video interview with one email. “I joke with my VP that we interview while we sleep,” said Colleen Diercksen, Penn Medicine’s Director of Talent Acquisition Operations. “After sending the invites, we come in the next morning and have 30-70 completed interviews to review. We can quickly identify about half of those people to submit to our hiring managers. It speeds up the process, and it’s fun, too.”

The recruiter and hiring manager experience has improved significantly. Rather than showing a hiring manager a dozen resumes, recruiters can now present a thorough profile of 3 to 5 highly qualified candidates.

“We’ve saved a considerable amount of time on the front end, since the recruiter and hiring manager can work together on very targeted questions to ask in the on-demand interview,” said Diercksen.

“And it’s simple for our managers to quickly assess candidates between patient times or time on the floor. A lot of our managers are not in front of computers all day long – we need to make it available on the fly for them.”

Results

By using Modern Hire (now part of HireVue) to replace the traditional phone interview, the team found it could quickly move qualified candidates through the hiring process and better manage the high volume of requisitions.

“The word about Modern Hire (now part of HireVue) is spreading throughout the organization. I was recently approached by one of our directors, saying, ‘I’ve been hearing all about the Modern Hire (now part of HireVue) videos, you have to get me involved in that.’ We’re also finding that the candidates who use Modern Hire (now part of HireVue) tend to be more interested in the opportunity and more confident when they come in for their face to face interview. It really is a fabulous thing.” – Colleen Diercksen, Penn Medicine’s Director of Talent Acquisition Operations