By Zee Johnson, HRO Today

Predictive Analytics Play Critical Role in Pandemic Hiring

Sevayo® Insights Empowers Fortune 10 Healthcare Provider to Navigate Talent Demands

At the recent HRO Today People in Healthcare Summit, industry expert Jeff Lackey, founder of JKL Advisors and former head of talent acquisition at a major healthcare leader in the US, spoke about how his organization rapidly transformed to meet the hiring challenges of the pandemic. What does it take to hire 50,000 people in 30 days and build a workforce that could meet the demand of administering COVID-19 tests and vaccinations to reach tens of millions of people across the US? The answer began with predictive analytics.

Lackey needed to leverage accurate data to determine the right strategy to find, attract, and retain the talent needed during a crisis to achieve monumental hiring goals. Enter Sevenstep’s Sevayo® Insights, a proprietary data aggregator that centralizes talent acquisition (TA) data to provide synthesized reporting, versatile benchmarking, predictive analytics, incisive diagnostics, and prescriptive solutions.

A Conductor to Guide the Talent Function

“Most organizations have a great amount of data, but the real challenge is that it is not integrated and therefore unusable,” explains Noelle Paras, Vice President of Client Services for Sevenstep.

Lackey agrees, saying that without a unifying technology to inform operations, a large and complex talent function resembles a “70-piece orchestra without a conductor figuring out how to play.” But with the technology in place, an organization can integrate data from multiple streams like its applicant tracking system (ATS), human resources information system (HRIS), and even social sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. 

As a result, the organization can understand what is working, what is not, and what changes could make a difference. This understanding was the foundation of a talent ecosystem, enabling talent acquisition teams to be proactive instead of reactive in their decision-making.

Sevayo® Insights was applied as part of Sevenstep’s RPO engagement with the healthcare company, drawing data from across multiple client systems and leveraging a relationship that goes back twelve years. And the results didn’t just diagnose what had already happened. They also determined what was to come up to three weeks in advance. “These insights answered the questions before they were asked,” Lackey says.

Data “blind spots” that inhibited the company from being informed were also removed, allowing Lackey to make decisions confidently on a moment-by-moment basis. This unified database made the healthcare enterprise more empowered than ever before.

Gaining Visibility Across the Talent Ecosystem

“By getting visibility to your entire talent ecosystem, you gain agility, become highly responsive, and can take action to support diversity by identifying where we need to become more equitable,” says Paras.

For example, the organization achieved clarity around three critical areas.

• Talent supply: the talent function could pinpoint all talent types aligned to specific roles and qualifications, including permanent, contract, and geography.
• Resource supply: this empowers the TA team to flex and scale quickly through capacity planning, leveraging what is needed (RPO recruiters, internal team, contractor staffing) at the time. 
• Process performance: measuring success and addressing issues was possible with accurate and current data around metrics, including time to fill, efficiency, quality, retention, satisfaction and, importantly, candidate feedback. 

To thrive in today’s tight talent market, Lackey says it is critical to be proactive and maintain a clear understanding of your current talent needs through data. This can be achieved with a few best practices.

• Take inventory of all inputs/feeds and aggregation.
• Seek objective support to ascertain what steps to take.  
• Use that information to support the talent ecosystem further. 

By late 2021 and into 2022, the effort proved successful. The organization is now positioned to weather the shifts in the workforce and rapidly evolving demands that are now part of the healthcare landscape. The hardship led to improvement, and the improved use of predictive analytics was instrumental in moving the TA function forward.