Steven MacDonell’s team hires a lot of nurses. This year, they’re on pace to fill over 40,000 RN positions, a feat he credits to his team’s resilience and hard work.
Steven is HCA Healthcare’s AVP of Talent Acquisition. HCA Healthcare has 185 facilities and over 275,000 employees.
Steven shares that one of HCA’s strengths has always been process efficiency and speed. Over time, competitors have caught on and mimicked that approach, especially over the last 18 months.
Positioning HCA as a nurse employer of choice
“You really have to walk the walk” and be a great place for nurses to work, Steven shares.
“HCA is interesting because we have a well known national brand for executives, but frontline nurses don’t necessarily know who we are.”
So the health system is “telling the story of what it means to be an HCA nurse.”
HCA can offer nurses “the ability to work how they want, when they want, and where they want. Whatever you want to do in nursing, we have it somewhere in the company.”
Steven expanded, “A nurse could work for 40 years and have three, four, or five full, varied, and impactful careers without ever giving up tenure or benefits” because of HCA’s massive scale.
And that outsize footprint means “when we change something at HCA Healthcare, we change healthcare. People want purpose, and we offer that like no other.”
Care models to support nurses
“We’re always asking, how can we make nurse’s jobs easier?”
Recently that’s meant hiring “nurse extenders,” or LPNs, Unit Secretaries, and other support staff to enable nurses.
HCA also leverages “an incredible amount of patient data” to help nurses predict likely patient outcomes.
For example, Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy (SPOT) flags if a patient is likely to develop sepsis and has saved an estimated 8,000 lives in the last five years.
But it’s not always big technological innovations that keep employees happy. Within the first 90 days of a nurse joining, “we work hard to remove the little annoyances that start people down the path of dissatisfaction.”
Ensuring people know where to park, where to eat lunch, and that their badge works on their first day “goes a lot farther to set someone up for success than you might think.”
In the middle to long term, hiring enough qualified staff has a massive impact on whether an individual nurse is burnt out or satisfied.
Building Talent Acquisition teams
The first step to hiring enough nurses is assembling the right recruiting team. Recently, the labor crunch has led to a predictable run on recruiting talent.
Steven’s advice to TA leaders is, “you’ve got to be open to hiring for aptitude and ambition.”
If a person can influence others and navigate competing priorities, “we can teach them to make a phone call.”
Speed to hire
“It’s hard to overstate how important speed is in hiring nurses.”
On the Incredible Health platform, 68% of nurses accept their first offer, and 61% accept their first offer even if subsequent offers have higher pay.
It’s easier to demand breakneck execution within the Talent Acquisition team, but holding cross functional partners accountable is more complicated. Steven’s solution? “Track everything.”
In a competitive labor market, Steven has seen a tendency to “over-process candidates,” because hiring managers mistakenly believe a lengthier selection will lead to better decisions. “But the data just doesn’t support that.”
Getting that data is key. “We’re constantly evaluating vendors and technology, whether that’s build or buy.”
When HCA decides to buy, “it’s usually because there’s a value there that’s difficult for us to mimic or build on our own.”
Steven was an early adopter of Incredible Health, because “you’re so unique in how you approach the candidate pool, it would have been difficult for me to replicate.”
Incredible Health can help
Here at Incredible Health, we’re passionate about helping nurses find the right role and helping hospitals hire enough staff, quickly.
We do that in part by curating the right nurse candidates for each recruiter.
“Instead of a laundry list of nurses, Incredible Health surfaces 12 or 15 who are a perfect for the role, pre-screened, and actively looking,” said CEO Iman Abuzeid, MD.
Incredible Health allows employers to hire permanent, experienced nurses in 20 days or less. If you’re ready to hire nurses fast, let’s talk.
