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Meet the 2020 Innovator: Angad Madra of Corizon Health

February 22, 2021
 
iCIMS Staff
8 min read

Over the coming months, iCIMS will be highlighting our 2020 Innovator Award winners to give you more insight into our winners’ thoughts on innovation in talent acquisition, upcoming trends, and best practices. 

In this edition, we speak to Angad Madra, Talent Acquisition Manager at Corizon Health – a leading provider of correctional facility healthcare. We asked him about his experience using iCIMS at organizations like Dollar General and Aramark, as well as questions about what it’s like hiring for healthcare positions in prisons. You can read our Q&A with Angad below.

iCIMS: As a talent leader, what are you passionate about? 

Madra: Efficiency is the number one thing Im passionate about. I get excited when I can impact a process, streamline that process, and help people save time. Whether that’s impacting the recruiting team or the candidate directly, I want to make everything as efficient as possible. 

The efficiency of our team is directly related to the technology we use. The flexibility of iCIMS – I have used it in the food service industry, retail, and now healthcare – allowed me to configure the platform to my exact needs. 

iCIMS: Prison healthcare is an interesting field to hire in—I expect most of our readers aren’t very familiar with it. What are some of the challenges you have? Has the pandemic impacted those challenges at all? 

Madra: In our everyday recruiting, we mostly compete for nurses. But some of the hardest talent for us to find are the niche, specialty doctors. Most of the jails are in rural areas. We don’t have enough people to source from period, let alone someone with a specific skill set who is willing to come do the jobWe have to be creative in order to recruit for these positions and leverage our resources well. 

Since the pandemic, we’ve actually been hiring more to cover people who may be out or quarantined. The frontline workers cannot work from home, so we’ve been hiring more people to fill in for those who can’t be there. We’ve also seen massive shift to telehealth. With COVID-19, healthcare workers now can work from home which has certainly increased our openings as well. 

In this industry, we have to be super aware of our competitors which includes correctional healthcare, hospitals, urgent care or any other place a healthcare worker might have the opportunity to work. We need to be aware what our competition is doing, what technology they are using, and how long their application process is. It’s all great information for us to know so we can stay up to date and keep improving candidate experience. 

iCIMS: Working in a prison could be a hard sell. We know a lot about how organizations are reinventing their recruitment marketing–how do you sell working at Corizon? 

Madra: The people we want to work for us see this opportunity as purposeful and as making an impact. They are supporting people who will eventually be our neighbors again in the future. What we do here makes a huge impact and changes lives. The most rewarding thing in recruiting at Corizon is when we find people who are very excited to go to work at one of our facilities. 

One of the biggest misconceptions we are working to address is the fact that jails and prisons are dangerous for healthcare workers. Because of the inherent security in our facilities, there’s armed guards and security officers with our workers. It’s much more of a controlled environment than even a regular hospital where you don’t often know who you are treating and there’s limited security.  

iCIMS: We see a lot of mid-sized businesses that don’t have a dedicated talent technology lead, and talent leaders have to become experts in the systems they’re usingYou’ve worked at huge enterprise organizations, but Corizon has a smaller team and your role is directly involved in the system. Do you have any tips for teams like yours to master their talent acquisition software? 

Madra: Two tips. First, leverage technical support and your account team. I had a lot of questions when we were first implementing iCIMS and then after we went live. iCIMS has some of the best customer service I have ever received. To have a whole team be there to support you and share best practices – it’s priceless. I’ve always had them on my speed dial. 

The second tip is not to have technical support always fix the error or update something for you. Instead, work with your support team and have them teach you how to do it. I would ask them to teach me, show me where they were in the system, and help me learn. I wanted to be empowered to do it in the future, and to expand my understanding of the platform and my skillset. Also, do this for your teams internally. Instead of pulling a report for your recruiting team, show them how they can pull it and empower them as well. 

iCIMS: You won an award for innovation – why do you feel like it’s important to be an innovator in talent acquisition? 

Madra: This isn’t the 1980s anymore, where one company comes along every now and then and does something remarkable. Every week I get multiple emails from new vendors, showing new solutions to help with everything from sourcing to website building, you name it. There is so much innovation in this industry. Technology is booming and we constantly have to be aware of what’s going on and what’s trending. We have to be ready to pivot and change our strategy if something is not working in order to keep moving forward. 

For more from Angad & the Corizon Health team, read their full success story here.

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