Healthcare Talent Strategy Triumph: A Data-Led HR Success Story

In this exclusive UNLEASH webinar, we investigate how US health industry bellwether, Providence, working alongside Visier, was able to design and implement a successful data-led talent strategy across acquisition and retention.

UNLEASH is recognized by SHRM to offer Professional Development Credits (PDC) for SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP recertification activities.

How do you achieve a 15% increase in vacancy fills, and a 15% improvement in staff turnover at the same time?

For health giant Providence, a 100-year bellwether of the US, the answer was taking a data-led approach.

In this 60-minute UNLEASH webinar with partner Visier Inc., Mark Smith, Insights, Optimization & Staffing Leader at Providence, and Gary Russo, Executive Director of Workforce Intelligence at Providence explained the inside track of this success story.

Providence’s strategy was rooted in addressing its business problems, namely a market with significant competition for talent that went beyond frontline healthcare skillsets.

This extended to a range of support roles within the “massive infrastructure” of the organization, Smith explained: “What it means is everywhere we go, we’re faced with unique challenges across different verticals and industries, even though we are a healthcare system.”

Establishing the Insights, Optimization & Staffing division aimed to bring the organization’s data together – which Smith stated had historically been fragmented, meaning “we weren’t really able to get a unified story out”.

“Secondly, in bringing things together, the desire was to make sure we were a trusted source of truth from a data perspective.”

Data-led results are most valuable when seen in context

Having established its objectives, Smith detailed the impact of the strategy on Providence’s talent acquisition.

“We’ve had some great volume over the years. In 2022, we filled about 43,000 positions across the organization,” he said, taking the organization’s total headcount to 117,000 at the end of the year. Providence counted nearly 124,000 employees by the end of last year.

To achieve this result, the organization carefully mapped out “what it looked like to make improvements” over the period and “really set targets for divisions and lines of business based on their historical data”.

By monitoring and using available sources of data, Providence was able to improve fills and time-to-hire, reduce overall turnover and cut down on its reliance on agency staff.

However, Gary Russo, Executive Director of Workforce Intelligence at Providence, explained that it was critical to have a deeper understanding of the business issues being addressed than the data alone.

In other words, context for the data was critical: “Listening to what people were asking us became super critical, because it wasn’t just about having a number.

“It really became a factor of education, not just what’s the math, which was always important for us to build that ongoing credibility, but really understanding what drives it.”

Retention is now Providence’s primary focus. Having been close to 21% turnover at the end of 2022, the organization has set the “big, hairy, audacious goal” to reach its pre-pandemic levels of turnover – closer to 18%.

Getting the right elements in place for success

Securing leadership buy-in for the data-led strategy, included making improved retention a performance metric for leaders on incentive or bonus plans, Russo explained.

“Everyone recognized that we needed to keep more of the talented individuals that we have, and particularly as a mission-based organization, finding that cultural fit is critical.”

Offering his key takeaway from the discussion, Smith told organizations not to “waste a good crisis.”

“The pandemic is behind us but the harsh reality is it is going to be our challenge for the next 30-40 years. If you start with really looking at where you can make an impact by ensuring you have the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time you should be able to get a lot of traction.”

Carla Garcia Williams, Senior Director, People Analytics Consulting at Visier, added that the “key to the success story we heard today is to just get started.

“Start having the conversations, understand the business problems, start having a mindset of truly understanding your focus. Not necessarily being data-minded at first but thinking about what business problems you’re trying to solve.

UNLEASH is recognized by SHRM to offer Professional Development Credits (PDC) for SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP recertification activities.