Season 1, Episode 5: John Heffron – TA Metrics

John Heffron will unpack the metrics that matter most in talent acquisition, from time-to-fill to quality-of-hire. He’ll share how data-driven decisions can elevate recruiting outcomes.

Transcript

Angela Pointer 0:00

Welcome to the Hiring Scope podcast from the National Association for Healthcare Recruitment, where we explore the latest trends, insights, and strategies in the ever changing world of healthcare hiring. I'm your host, Angela Pointer, and each episode we'll dive deep into the challenges and opportunities facing recruiters, hiring managers, and healthcare professionals alike. Whether you're looking to attract top talent, navigate industry trends, or build a stronger workforce, you're in the right place. Today I'm excited to talk with John Hefrons, System Director of Talent Acquisition at Peace Health on the wonderful topic of recruitment metrics. So, John, welcome. Thank you so much. Yes, before we dive in, I'd like to learn a little bit more about you, the John story, and also kind of tell us about your current role in organization.

John Hefrons 0:53

Yeah. So my current role, as you mentioned, System Director of Talent Acquisition. So that has me overseeing both allied nursing as well as physician recruiting for the organization. And we are about 1,800 employees spread over three states: Alaska, Oregon, and Washington. I've also recently taken on the role of contingent workforce as well. So all of our travelers and locums. So kind of a big area of responsibility, but I've got a really strong team that supports me. So very happy to be where I am at the moment.

Angela Pointer 1:23

Awesome. So tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get involved in healthcare recruitment?

John Hefrons 1:29

It's an interesting story. So I graduated with a BA in political science from the University of Washington. And then I moved to Los Angeles to be an actor. And as you can see, that's uh worked out really well for me. So I took a job as an office manager, and that led me into kind of the HR side of things. I was taking care of everybody's benefits and started doing hiring for Microsoft certified engineers. My family and I moved to Portland. And when I got up here, I was looking for work and took a recruiting job with the American Red Cross for the blood services side of their functions and did that for a couple of years and then got into leadership, took kind of a big scope of responsibility of the Western part of the United States, leading the recruitment teams. That led me to running vendor management for the organization, relationships with LinkedIn, and indeed, I also had the contingent workforce. So a relationship with a national vendor. As time went on, I started looking for another opportunity and Providence Health System, big health organization here on the West Coast. They came and knocked on my door and took a role with them. I was the talent acquisition manager for the Oregon region. And then we had a big merger. And so I took another region, the Northern California region. Ultimately during COVID, started looking for a different opportunity and so moved towards a smaller healthcare organization, but a larger role, director for talent acquisition at Samaritan Health Services, five hospital system, but also had a health plan and 80 clinics. So just really taking care of all the work and then having that responsibility of, you know, what's the strategy? What are our relationships with vendors? What are the tools that we need to be doing? And how can we measure things? So that has been a great experience for me over the last three years. And then recently, this opportunity opened up at Peace Health, again, kind of within the footprint that I live. And I was really excited about the opportunity. My leader at the moment is somebody who I worked with at the Providence Healthcare System. And I was really excited to be reunited with her. Excellent group of humans that I get to lead and to work with and support. And so I've been with Peace Health since uh December of 2024.

Angela Pointer 3:43

Awesome. I'm wrapping my brain around all the things people do before getting into recruitment because not too many people go to college and decide, I want to be a healthcare recruiter. So I took a different path of yours. I think that first person I've met to be an actor, that was interesting. That's quite interesting. Do you ever feel that some of your acting skills come into play at all in recruiting? 100%. 100%.

John Hefrons 4:09

Yeah. When I was, you know, I felt kind of guilty about the money that I spent towards my acting career. And now I think about it, all the auditions that I went in, all the rejection that I had to deal with, you know, going to auditions and not getting roles, having bad performances, which I had a few of those in my days. All of that just kind of leads towards resilience, uh, gives you that experience and being comfortable in front of other people. So I'm, I think my acting experience has really paid off for me in terms of my growth into leadership and my comfort in just presenting to uh you know executives, uh, to frustrated managers who are, you know, want to kind of make their case and be upset with us. And what I like to do as an actor, you're always listening to the other person on stage with you or in a scene. And that's what I like to try and do is listen to what their issue is and try and find out what that problem is and how can we come together and you know have the best outcome for everybody.

Angela Pointer 5:09

That's great. That's great. And speaking of listening, for all of our listeners today, we're going to be talking about um recruitment metrics. Fun topic. Love diving into this. So let's just start by talking about why our recruitment metrics especially important in the healthcare industry, maybe compared to other sectors.

John Hefrons 5:29

I kind of feel without data and the ability to see trends in talent acquisition and in healthcare, you can't really adjust and figure out where you need to go. And that's I think that's probably true in most industries, but I find that especially important in healthcare to many of our roles really requiring extensive training, both before we hire them and then after they start. You know, data, being able to see turnover trends, vacancy rates, looking at our time to fill, time to train. You know, how long is it going to be from when someone gives their notice until you have their replacement on board and fully productive? You know, if you can start to predict some of those numbers and put all those various pieces together, you can start your hiring and training process in a way that helps you bring down the use of agency and premium pay. And I think within healthcare right now, that is kind of one of the main focuses as we continue to come out of COVID, but with the various pressures on healthcare, payer mixes from insurance, all those things are really putting a lot of pressure for talent acquisition to perform. So that's why that the data is a really, really important piece to be paying attention to.

Angela Pointer 6:40

Got it. And you actually touched on the next question, but I want you to, I'll mention it again because for those of you who are taking notes, you may want to get this down. So, what are the most critical recruitment metrics that healthcare organizations should be tracking? I heard you mention a few. So if you want to maybe repeat some of those so that the listeners can grab those.

John Hefrons 7:00

So the time to X metrics. So time to fill, time to source, time to onboard, those things are really important, but it is, it makes you look kind of in the rearview mirror as to where you've been. And I think you need those as a part of the puzzle, but I think it's also really important, and I'm just kind of really starting this journey myself, to figure out where you might be going. So, how can you predict for your organization? And then you need to partner with your HRS team, with finance, et cetera, to figure out, you know, where, and I ask this question to leaders when I talk to them all the time. Do you know what kind of growth is coming your way? You know, if you've got a hospital, how many uh new beds are going to be coming online this year? So figuring out what those ratios are of nurses to patients for those beds, you know, how many are they going to need during each week, adding those numbers up and then going, okay, now let's look at our time to fill for those kinds of roles, figure out how long is it going to take us to hire them. So, in advance of the need, how far in advance do we need to start recruiting? And so adding all those pieces together can really, really be helpful. So to kind of go back to your question, I think it is getting the information up front and understanding where does the organization want to be trending? You know, are they growing or are they contracting? And what is that going to mean for you in terms of advertising dollars and efforts up by your team? You know, is your team right size? Do you need more people in order for them to actually be vetting candidates in the best way?

Angela Pointer 8:37

That's so good. And I'm thinking about something that you said about rearview mirror versus looking in the front. Can you imagine driving a car and all you're doing is looking in the rearview mirror? It'd be crazy, right? So I think it was really cool that you mentioned the fact that we need to be looking at where we're going. And I know that there is a particular organization that we're both a part of that kind of distinguishes between leading metrics and lagging metrics. So I think that was a really good call out there. So walk us through, because you mentioned about time to X. And I know we talk about time to fill. To me, I think that's in recruiting, that's the love-fate relationship kind of with by defining time to fill. So walk us through kind of the impacts of time to X, time to fill, patient care or operational efficiency.

John Hefrons 9:24

Um, the longer a position is open and unfilled, the more an organization is spending on travelers and premium pay, and not being able to really be able to focus on on caring for our patients and being able to bill for those patients for the services that we're providing for them. So for me, looking at our data on aging requisitions are those that have been sitting at a certain step in the process are candidates, you know, looking at individuals that are stuck at 14 days or over 21 days, you know, that's really going to help us move things along. I will say that, you know, that the longer there's time to fill, kind of the worse impact on patient outcomes. I feel like, you know, having travelers are fantastic. Uh, they uh these are wonderful people who uh travel around the country really helping us out, et cetera. But if we have our own employees, our own caregivers who are invested in the organization and really looking for those best outcomes for us as an organization, you know, that's the desired, um, you know, desired outcome. We really want to have our own people uh caring for as many of our patients as possible.

Angela Pointer 10:36

Yeah, that's so true. I just had this thing in my head. I read it yesterday, I don't remember where, but when you were talking about the cost of vacancy, I this number sticks in my head for every clinical position open according to this particular um study, that equates to $7,500 a day in lost revenue. So I think that's that's that's so important. So thank you for touching on that. Now let's talk a little bit about how we can improve hiring strategies using data and metrics. So tell talk a little bit about that.

John Hefrons 11:10

Sure. So in my my early years, I really did focus a lot on like the number of hires, kind of looking in the rearview mirror. Uh, it was a start, and I still know what those numbers look like. Uh you know, currently, I'm still looking at those numbers, but it's most important for me to understand the age of the requisitions. I was talking about earlier the the candidate funnel, where uh where do we have bottlenecks? That's the information that really helps me support my team. Do we need more, because it'll help me identify whether we need more candidates coming into the funnel or do we need to connect with a certain leader at a facility and ensure that they're paying attention? Do they did they know that they had candidates that had been put forward to them? And are they um dispositioning them or setting them up for interviews? All of that is just so important to kind of keep the process moving forward. You know, I think about the number of times that we've kind of identified that work over the last several years of uh using various vendors to identify the data and then understanding, oh gosh, that individual's out on a leave of absence and nobody is covering that requisition. And so just being able to identify where you've got your bottlenecks, that'll really help to kind of open things up. We spend so much effort on attracting talent, we have to treat them, treat our candidates well and then disposition them quickly. I think that, you know, customer satisfaction, you know, the even if we don't hire somebody, maybe they'll come back and reapply in the future. But if we treat them poorly and they feel like they've been insulted by taking that time to apply and never hearing back from us, that's an awful candidate experience that, you know, I think we really want to avoid.

Angela Pointer 12:50

Absolutely. And you mentioned something you're talking about candidate experience. Is that another metric that you look at as well?

John Hefrons 12:57

Yeah, we do surveys on a twice a year, uh, where we'll survey our managers and as well as survey both our hired candidates and non-hired candidates. And we're really looking at those numbers. And I am not where I would like our organization to be at the moment. I would love for our non-hired candidates to really enjoy the experience of being declined from us. And we're we're not at that point. You know, what does that look like? I'm I'm still not quite certain. You know, I think it starts with, you know, as many positive person-to-person interaction as possible, as opposed to just receiving a kind of canned rejection email. The surveys that we do, we get uh it allows for like a verbatim response. And I read every single one of those because I'm looking for trends. And so many people are just like, you know, you didn't even take the time to bother to read my resume, you know, you rejected me immediately. So, you know, understanding what that individual's experience is and trying to improve that so that they can feel valued. At least I was considered and they will consider me for the future. Maybe we're looking for opportunities for them for the future. And if it's a no and it's not a good match, you know, are there other opportunities either within my organization or elsewhere that we can try and support them with? I just think those sorts of interactions can have a much stronger candidate experience.

Angela Pointer 14:25

Here's your experience with acting coming into place with your going on all the interviews and those types of games. What are some common mistakes you see when it comes to either interpreting or using recruitment metrics?

John Hefrons 14:37

Yeah, well, I think it's uh that you know we've talked about this already a little bit, but looking backwards, how many did we hire last year compared to the year before? There's I think there's value in looking at that, but it's just a sliver of the picture. You know, data always has a story behind it. And just looking at data and going, well, that's the trend. Well, is it the trend, or is is there something that happened? So in 2020, our hires took a big hit in April. We all know what that was. It was COVID and no one knew what to do. A lot of our requisitions at the time were closed. You know, there's often, you know, little crises that happen within a department, a hospital, or even a system that could affect numbers. And if you're looking back three years ago and you're going, oh gosh, we hired a lot more people there. Well, yeah, maybe it's because you opened a hospital at that time. You got to know what the story is behind the data and then be able to explain that as you're sharing information. Because if you just share like a graph, well, big deal. There's no story there. But I again, I do think that there it's important to look at the numbers, but understanding that data underneath.

Angela Pointer 15:43

Yeah, you mentioned story, and that's perfect timing for the next question I wanted to dive into because stories are amazing to tell the data story with. So can you share a success story where data-driven recruitment made a measurable difference in the healthcare setting?

John Hefrons 16:01

When I was at Providence, I was part of a pilot. We were using a vendor that was kind of a, and this was uh four or five, six years ago, I guess, and the vendor big kind of number crunching that we were able to put in our workforce data, put in all our ATS data, et cetera. And we were trying to get to a point of predictive hiring. So we were doing a pilot. It was at one of our magnet facilities here in Oregon. I was looking at our time to approve. So, you know, from when a physician was requested by a manager within the ATS until the leadership team could approve it. Now, that wasn't a number that was being measured anywhere, but I thought, you know, that's an important piece. You know, if they missed a cutoff, maybe it's two weeks before that requisition gets looked at again. And maybe it gets approved, maybe it doesn't. It just depends on that leadership team, et cetera. So I was trying to figure out how long did that requisition take to get approved. And then uh we were really focused on uh the women's health units, so PICU, NICU, uh labor and delivery. And so I looked at those individual uh units and looked at their time to fill, and historically, of course. So looking at the last year's worth of data, time to onboard, and then also went to each of those individual units and talked to the managers to try and understand when you have a new hire, an experienced individual coming in, how long does it is it gonna take you to train them? And then if you have a new grad, because we had a residency fellowship program for specialty training, how long it would it take to train that individual? What do you feel like the mix is gonna be for you know experienced talent versus new talent? Then we also started to look at the demographics of the unit because this vendor took our workforce and was without identifying individuals, was looking at the age of the individuals within the department. So, you know, how many people were getting close to retirement? What was the annual turnover for that department? Using all those pieces together, we kind of came up with a plan for each of those uh units to say how when are you going to need somebody to start in order to be matching up with that predicted turnover? So using all those pieces together, we were able to then backtrack and say, okay, I know that typically it takes us about nine months from when we open a requisition or a requisition is requested until we have that person on board and trained. That's when we need to have that position up front. You know, it took us quite a while. I actually uh had changed assignments, I got moved to another region, an area of responsibility before it kind of wrapped up, but it was just a fantastic experience. I think it kind of set me up for some of the work I've done since then, really being able to kind of match up the various pieces in order to get more predictive in our hiring.

Angela Pointer 19:00

That's great thanks for sharing that story. It's so helpful to see that numbers is not just about numbers on a page, but the impact, and that's amazing. So uh as we're preparing to wrap up, what is your key insight on recruitment metrics and healthcare that you want least our listeners to take away from the discussion today?

John Hefrons 19:21

You're not going to get anywhere unless you have something. So, you know, even if you have like an Excel spreadsheet, find someone on your finance team, have them help you, you know, if you're lucky enough like I am to have both internal tools and vendor tools that can help you kind of digest that information, you know, get working on it and understand where you are, understand the past, but then also uh make sure that you're talking to your leaders, um, whether it's within human resources or leadership within your various areas of responsibility, uh, get an idea of where the growth is. So, and then use those numbers to help you say, well, here's where I think we need to be in order to get there. I need this kind of support on my team in order to grow and have a robust talent acquisition function that's going to be able to meet the needs of the organization. I'm not a statistician, but in the past I found an HRIS buddy at the Red Cross, and he taught me how to use a pivot table and an Excel. And that's where my journey began. Get familiar with as many of your metrics as you can and the numbers, and then just kind of see where that goes.

Angela Pointer 20:29

That's great. I just had a thought when we're talking about metrics and a lot of the great things with looking at where we're going. One thing about looking back that might be helpful is to understand the retention factor. So uh I know we didn't maybe touch on that as much, but I'm curious because as we're talking about metrics, how does that turnover play in as you're looking at moving forward?

John Hefrons 20:52

Yeah, we um again, I'm fortunate enough at my organization that we have uh we use Tableau for our internal measurement tools, and that is a piece that we have, and I can drill that down into individual units, or I can look at the organization as a whole. So that is extremely helpful to be able to share that information with leaders. And even though that's available to all managers within my organization, I'm always surprised to find you know, so many people don't know that it's there and they don't really know about their own units. So getting myself, my management team, and even the individual recruiters to access that information and bring that to regular cadence meetings with their clients, that is huge. Um, because even if they do know, to illustrate that we know as well. And so we're going, okay, if if this is what you're experiencing, are you thinking about what your needs are going to be six months from now? That's a really important conversation to be having. And and you know, maybe some of them do, but they need that little jog to go, oh, yeah, gosh darn it. I need to, you know, I understand that cold and flu season's coming up, and I probably have some turnover coming up here. Um, so how am I going to be able to plan for that future need? That's a really important aspect.

Angela Pointer 22:13

Yeah, that is. And then even from a planning perspective, then also just understanding the why, why people are leaving. I mean, we can't throw a crystal ball into everything, but even being able to address some of those things, because I I this is my little personal thing here is I believe that uh retention starts at recruitment. I know a lot of times people like to look at it separately is that, oh, well, TA is all about hiring and that part of it, but we actually retention starts with the work that we do. Would you agree with that, John?

John Hefrons 22:42

Yeah, 100%. And that partnering with your HR teammates, having, you know, kind of bringing things to their attention. If you see trends, uh, that's a, you know, we are a part of human resources and and uh we need to take that responsibility seriously and be good partners. You know, oftentimes HR isn't even aware of it. So if you see it, call it out.

Angela Pointer 23:05

But well that wraps up this episode of the Hiring Scope Podcast from the National Association for Healthcare Recruitment. Thank you for joining me, Angela Pointer, as we tackle the evolving landscape of healthcare hiring. If you enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. You can also check us out at nahcr.com for more content. Until the next time, keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible in healthcare recruitment.