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In 2021, Franciscan Health found itself in an all-too-common position: it had over 2,500 job openings and a broken recruiting process. Candidates couldn't find the jobs to match their skills and location and the health system had unfilled positions in what was already a tight labor market.
At a time when businesses debate when and where AI fits in their recruiting process, Ellen Page found a clear use case with better than expected results. Page leads talent acquisition for the Illinois and Indiana-based 12-hospital health system, a system with 436 locations and over 20,000 employees. She shared how she and her team decided to introduce an AI chatbot into the company's recruitment process and some of their future plans for the technology.
How I Decided to Launch an AI Chatbot in Our Recruitment Process
Page's story, as told to Reworked, has been edited for clarity.
Our recruiting process was broken — I'll just lay it out there.
We had migrated to Workday during COVID and partnered with another vendor to fill in the gaps when we went live. Workday is a great product — I truly love it — however, the recruiting module is probably its least mature model. There were some gaps in the career-side job postings application, kind of the marketing side of things.
So we stayed with the other vendor for over a year after our implementation, and frankly, we could not get jobs posted. People couldn't find our jobs. The basic 101 of applying for a job wasn't working.
So we regrouped in 2022 and decided to not renew our contract with the vendor at the end of the year, and went out and started having conversations with other vendors who provided those same services.
A Reluctant Chatbot Adopter, But Quick Convert
When we selected Phenom, I was not going to turn the chatbot on — my team reminds me of this every day. I'm not a chatbot user, and I let my bias filter in.
We literally had to slam in this implementation in four months because the other vendor was housing our application and we couldn't let them go without having another application in place.
I was trying to streamline the implementation, and thought it [the chatbot] was going to be a lot of work. I really didn't educate myself as I should have, and my great subject matter expert on my team said, “Ellen, let's just turn it on and see how it goes.”
Needless to say, it's been incredible. And frankly, I didn't know that we would be spending so much time in perfecting it and enhancing it and and doing all the things that we do because of the results that we're seeing.
When we turned it on, we just turned it fully on. What was great was [the chatbot] came with what we bought, and it's very user friendly for the employer side.
Once we started seeing the results from the people that were interacting with it, we started to deep dive into the data. We have a library of questions. We can go in, reorganize, we can change answers. I charged our senior Talent Acquisition Group to review those answers and questions and challenge ourselves to keep improving the responses.
Helping Nurses Overcome the Wednesday Blahs
When we looked at the data — and this is even prior to COVID and all of the chaotic labor market that we're in right now — when nurses are looking for a job, they typically apply Wednesday afternoon, between noon and 4 pm.
It's not just nursing, it's all aspects of our business. A healthcare system is a small city, right? We have painters, all the way up to accountants, lawyers, we cover it all. We see that people feel the worst in their current job in midweek. The weekend has passed. They came in on Monday, sucked it up on Monday and did it again on Tuesday.
By Wednesday afternoon, they're like, “I want out.” Then by Thursday and Friday, it's the weekend.
So we knew that Wednesday was the high point. What we didn't realize is that if I'm a nurse and I work three 12-hour shifts, I don't have a lot of time to look for another job.
They're going to our website because they want to apply to Franciscan. They love our mission and our values, but they don’t have time to sort through the 2700 openings.
They're driving to the chatbot saying, “Find me a job in Indianapolis.” And it says, “What kind of job? What is your current job title?” When they enter “registered nurse,” it presents options for them to review positions to click right through and proceed to apply.
How Else Is the Chatbot Used?
The chatbot gets a lot of questions and not all of them are about finding a job. We can drive those questions with links to other sources.
So if someone asks about our benefits, we have a benefits page that we can drive that link to. A frequently asked question is, “What is your hiring process?” So we drive them to our Q&A to show what they can expect and next steps.
We get questions from our own co-workers now! Why are they on the external career site asking questions about their retirement? I’m not quite sure. But we forward those types of questions to our retirement team, who may do more education about, “Hey, if you're looking for these questions, here's where you can find those answers.”
[The chatbot] enables a candidate to quickly find positions. It enables them to ask questions like, “Do you have full-time positions other than clinical positions?” “Do you have remote positions?” “Do you have work from home?” There are a lot of questions and the chatbot walks you through the entire process. You could ask anything at any point and hopefully get an answer that helps you know what next steps are.
When a candidate finds a job that’s a good fit and they click through to apply, that’s usually their last interaction with the chatbot unless they come back to say, “I need to check my application” or get additional information.
In 2025, we will be enhancing the chatbot with another product that Phenom is offering, where they'll be able to apply right through the chatbot. Right now, it presents the top seven jobs that match what they asked for. But when they click on a link, they go into our application process. The new chatbot will just ask those questions right there, and [the candidate] will stay right in there, which is fantastic. We'll be able to insert videos and really enhance that experience that those candidates are asking for, and meet those needs to an even higher level than we're doing now.
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Feedback on the Current Recruitment Process
When we ask people to evaluate our recruitment process and how likely they would be to recommend Franciscan, we've seen our net promoter score hover right between 78 and 79, which in healthcare, anything over 50 is considered pretty great.
When people rate the whole process, they're giving us great — what we call our happiness calculator — they're giving us great reviews and four stars.
And it's the whole process, and that's what you really want. You want it to seem seamless, so they don't know whether they applied to the chatbot, or clicked on a link, or we still get people that say they walked in with an application. We have no place that they can walk in and give an application, but sometimes they go through so many different steps to get to the app. We track those clicks behind the scenes.
So [the chatbot] is just there. It's just part of the DNA of our career site now.
The only thing we had to adjust was because we didn’t anticipate the volume of the interactions, and frankly, the wide array of questions. We try to meet bi-monthly to review those questions. We delegate that out so that not only one person has the responsibility of maintaining that library.
We've had 287,000 interactions since we went live in January 2023. That's strictly interactions, people just clicking on it, asking a question, whatever that may be. I had anticipated if it did work we would be interacting with candidates and answering their questions. I did not anticipate that we would end up with 9752 applications from those interactions. I had no idea. And we've hired close to 2000 or a little over 2000 people in almost two years.
Let’s put this in perspective. Back in January of 2023, we had 2700 openings. We were at the high point of the perfect storm between COVID 4.0, our own employees getting sick, our own nurses getting burned out. Things were reopening, but there was no daycare. It was a whole new world. In the fall of 2022, we were at the point of everything just hitting the max capacity that we've ever been at. So if you think about it, if we hadn't had that chatbot, those candidates that would come on a Wednesday afternoon on their 20 minute lunch hour to apply would have to sort through all those jobs to find the nursing job that they want at a certain hospital and unit.
They probably would have walked away. It was probably happening before, but we had no data. When I'm talking to our senior leadership I like to say these are 2000 hires we would never have had or not as quickly.
Because when your time is limited, you're going to go where it's easy to apply.
Final Words of Advice
My only advice for other people considering introducing a chatbot into their recruiting process is do it. Because even if we didn't spend the time in the maintenance part of it, even if we did the minimal amount, we would still have 287,000 interactions just because it's there.
People are using it now. The fact that we really tried to refine it and make it the best answers that they can receive, the best automation? That's just the cherry on top for our recruiters.
