How Novant Health digitally transformed talent acquisition

Novant Health brings together world-class technology and clinicians to provide remarkable care — a simpler, more convenient and affordable experience — to more than four million patients annually. It encompasses approximately 30,000 employees, including 1,600 physicians across an integrated network of 15 medical centers and hundreds of outpatient facilities and clinics in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

Novant Health’s mission to support communities is entirely dependent on its team of talent acquisition specialists to hire between 6,000 and 7,000 team members each year. This responsibility was only going to get more complex and challenging as the chronic shortage of qualified healthcare increases, and the US population continues to age and expand their healthcare needs.

So, beginning in 2017, Novant Health’s team led the initiative to switch from their legacy ATS to iCIMS’ Applicant Tracking solution to improve the experience for both candidates and hiring managers, gain better access to data to improve recruitment, and support their strategic vision to transform HR.

Textbook implementation and rollout

Novant Health’s implementation team was led by Vaso Perimenis in HR Operations and Marilyn Gilliam in Talent Acquisition through the selection, configuration, and implementation stages. The team worked with iCIMS’ professional services team for over 300 hours to build its new recruiting platform, including customized workflows, internal and external career portals, and robust integrations into their background check, assessments, and HRIS providers. To overcome the stigma of the poor experience of using a legacy ATS and prepare for go-live with iCIMS, Novant Health’s talent team trained more than 3,000 hiring managers by:

• Hosting more than 20 training webinars
• Creating a computer-based self-administrated training
• Setting up ‘onsite labs’ at medical centers throughout their network to provide healthcare staff with hands-on experience
• Enabling hiring managers to access the system a week before go-live to ensure jobs were posted

With iCIMS, the talent acquisition process continues to evolve at Novant Health. Along with members from HR service center, talent acquisition and provider recruitment, the HR technology team formed a talent acquisition technology enhancement group that meets weekly to address and make ongoing improvements to the system.

In the past 12 months, the HR technology team and their iCIMS Customer Success Manager implemented over 100 enhancements to the system. These enhancements include things like workflow upgrades, candidate and hiring manager surveys, integration changes, automation to existing processes, personalization, and creation of new dashboards.

Since the system has such vast configuration options, the changes have been mostly self-administered and alleviated hundreds of hours of transactional work.
Part of Novant’s business metrics package involves tracking candidate feedback in real-time. With these enhancements in place, 98% of the candidates rate the application process as simple, transparent, and easy to complete.

The onboarding process gets a digital makeover

After implementation, Novant Health noticed a need for a new and enhanced onboarding process. The team was determined to transform onboarding for new employees and align it to a modern consumer experience. The organization uses iCIMS’ Onboarding and an integration with OnBase, their document management system, to streamline new-hire paperwork.

Now, when a new hire is put into onboarding, automation helps them complete a background check and submit an I-9 form, speeding up the process. As a result, Novant cut their onboarding time by 9%, equating to about $300,000 in annual savings.

Powerful workforce analytics for a 360-view of hiring

Novant Health pulls data from nearly every field in iCIMS into their business intelligence software, marries it with data from their other HR software systems, and creates actionable data for their business. As they move toward an end-to-end view of talent acquisition success, they’re able to go beyond traditional KPIs and move into true business intelligence.

While Novant can tell their efforts have helped them to fill positions faster since implementing iCIMS, knowing how that speed translates to retention and overall employee engagement is key.

“Our biggest internal customer is our talent acquisition team. They need insights into their own data so that they can understand the level of service they are providing. We started with a talent acquisition SLA scorecard that provides a performance score for the talent acquisition specialist and hiring manager. This holds everyone accountable for the talent acquisition cycle,” said Vaso Perimenis, Vice President of HR Operations.