Kansas City-based Children's Mercy Hospital says allowing potential employees to introduce themselves to recruiters via video applications has led to a better candidate pool, Dora Grote reports for the Kansas City Business Journal.
The traditional, web-based application for Children's Mercy is 30 pages long—and 35 percent of applicants never finish it. To help applicants overcome that hurdle, the hospital partnered with HireVue to create a web-based video program called "Introduce Yourself."
"I hear over and over again, if somebody would just talk to me, I would have a job there," says Talent Acquisition Director Molly Weaver. "I think your personality doesn't come off on a piece of paper."
How it works
The program, available through Children's Mercy's website, allows potential applicants to select the department they're most interested in and record answers to two broad questions about their background and interests. To better mimic a live interview, the answers can be recorded only once.
The video takes about six minutes to complete, whereas online applications can take much longer, Weaver says.
Applicants still need to complete the full paper application, but officials say the video option has helped Children's Mercy find better fits for its team by helping recruiters get to know candidates beyond their resume.
The videos allow applications to "bring [their] personality to life" in a way that changes the discussion for recruiters, Weaver says. "The recruiters are mentioning names instead of applications. The discussion becomes, 'Did you find a job for Tim?' instead of 'Did you see the application?'"
Grote profiles one current employee who exemplifies how the videos can help both applicants and Children's Mercy. Deibys Oberlechner applied for jobs 16 times through Children's Mercy's online application. But it wasn't until he used the Introduce Yourself program that he was hired for his "dream job" as a care assistant at a special care clinic.
Children's Mercy has hired more than 100 people who completed an Introduce Yourself video (Grote, Kansas City Business Journal, 5/17).
You've filled the position. Now what?
Retaining new hires is one of the longstanding challenges in health care. Despite manager and HR efforts, newly hired employees continue to turn over at a rate far above that of more tenured staff members. In fact, new hire turnover is a disproportionate driver of an institution's overall turnover rate. Nationally, employees with less than one year of tenure make up nearly 25 percent of all health care turnover.
But there's good news: better employee onboarding can dramatically reduce these rates. And we have two toolkits to help you improve the onboarding process, including editable templates, checklists, and guides to equip both HR and managers to efficiently and effectively onboard new employees.