Hartford HealthCare is the most comprehensive healthcare network in Connecticut, providing medical treatment centers and services across more than 400 locations in the state. In order to meet the high standard of care they are known to deliver, HHC (Hartford HealthCare) employs 30,000 people, a number that continues to grow and has been increasingly difficult to maintain since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, in the aftermath of the pandemic, HHC is hiring in a market that has always been challenging due to the high-skilled nature of healthcare positions, but now has fewer qualified, active job seekers than ever before.
Lack of qualified candidates for nurse positions drove the need for a data-driven recruitment advertising strategy
When Hartford HealthCare started working with Appcast in October 2021 they sought to increase their qualified candidate flow for their nurse positions, which have been particularly difficult to fill. They hoped that Appcast would enable them to understand how their recruitment advertising budget was being spent on these positions, and to build a unified strategy across recruiting teams to maximize ROI.
“Other vendors have always just told us how we’re doing with some sort of spin on it”, said Matt Fraser, Talent Administrator at HHC. “Our recruiting teams were never on the same page, getting the same message, or looking at the same data.”
Expanded reach across thousands of new sites brought more candidates, faster
From the beginning, Appcast sought to develop a well-rounded recruitment advertising strategy for Hartford HealthCare and that started with diversifying the sources HHC was advertising their jobs on. Via Appcast’s programmatic job ad distribution software, HHC’s nursing positions got in front of thousands more candidates, and at a much faster rate than when they posted these jobs manually.
“The ability to send jobs to thousands of different sites is amazing”, commented Matt. “The leading job sites supposedly get everywhere, but just because they are big sites doesn’t mean our candidates are looking at them. Now that we’re working with Appcast, we’re getting our jobs out to sites that we never thought of before, and we’re getting candidates from them”.
Hiring funnel metrics meant smarter buying strategy and full data transparency
Once Hartford HealthCare was able to expand their candidate reach, the next step was making sure that they were getting in front of more of the right candidates. This is where Appcast’s enhanced ATS connection played a key role in not only making full-funnel metrics available to HHC, but in allowing Appcast’s data-driven technology to make even smarter decisions about where to post their open roles. This, combined with the strategy recommendations Hartford Healthcare received from their Appcast Customer Success Team, allowed them to be confident that their recruitment advertising budget was being spent as efficiently as possible.
“Appcast takes a really critical look at our data and tells us which vendors are working for us and where we should be investing our money”, Matt stated. “It doesn’t really matter how many applications we get if we’re not getting qualified candidates. Metrics like CPQ (cost-per-quality-applicant) let us know if we’re just wasting money”.
5x increase in hires for Hartford HealthCare’s hard-to-fill nurse positions
Within just a few months of partnering with Appcast and honing in on full-funnel metrics like CPQ and CPH (cost-per-hire), Hartford HealthCare saw a 3x increase in qualified candidates and 5x increase in hires. They were also able to reduce hiring costs by 31% during the same time frame – a significant success in one of the most notoriously difficult markets to hire in post-pandemic.
As HHC continues to increase their volume of hiring (specifically evergreen and hard-to-fill roles), they appreciate the results that have made Appcast a key component of their recruitment advertising strategy.
“As someone who doesn’t necessarily specialize in recruitment advertising, Appcast is a lifeline”, Matt said. “We’ve seen significant cost savings just working with Appcast, and I can’t say enough about how much support our customer success team has provided. The value is immense and that’s why Appcast is the way to move forward in terms of our recruitment marketing”.
