Access Healthcare: Employing a differentiated social hiring strategy

Access Healthcare is a business process outsourcing and IT services provider in the healthcare space. The company has witnessed hyper-growth and crossed over 7,500 employees in just over six years of time since inception.

Operating in a highly competitive market for BPO talent, often with attrition rates as high as 40 percent, the company needed to hire (often, over 1,000 people in a month!), train, and deploy resources rapidly to address customer requirements. In addition to that, investments in employer brand development have now become costly and have a limited RoI from traditional print media. Furthermore, creating a strong recruitment engine that could assess potential candidates quickly and improve the overall candidate experience was also required. The challenges that the company was looking to solve included:

• Creating a new benchmark for time to hire
• Reducing the cost of hiring
• Enabling volume hiring at a fast pace
• Reducing the overall cycle time for recruitment

The company chose Facebook as the preferred social platform as a part of its differentiated hiring strategy, because of the following reasons:

• Strong campaigning tools: Facebook equipped the company with the ability to create campaigns targeted at different audience groups based and segments, and catered to the right audience for associate level hiring
• Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning: Facebook allowed for focused messaging based on demographic information — age, gender, interests etc. It empowered the organization to create highly-localized employer brand while enabling rapid hiring.
• Referral process: Facebook-based campaigns enabled the company to leverage the power of a social media-based referral process. The tool took its referral campaign to the world and made crowd-sourcing of talent a viable, focused option in the hands of its recruitment strategist, at a very low cost. Called Refer and Win, the application resides on Facebook 

The following measures were adopted to make the social hiring strategy successful:

• Refer and Win Application: A Refer and Win application was launched on Facebook which enabled prospective candidates to apply or refer their friends for open positions in the company. A mechanism was created for rewarding people who referred the most along with the ones whose referrals translated to hiring decisions.
• Building an Employer brand on Facebook. Access Healthcare created a regular program to post about the organizations’ work culture and employee engagement to build its employer brand using Facebook.  The sharing of these posts by employees of the organization created a widespread boost to the image of the company.
• The 45-minute promise: Keeping in mind that candidates at the entry level are put through a lot of stress during the hiring process, the company made a commitment to reduce the cycle time to less than 45 minutes. The entire recruitment process flow was automated to ensure that the 45 minutes’ time to hiring was honored each day, for each candidate. This became a critical extension of Access Healthcare’s hiring strategy by improving the candidate experience dramatically.

The company was able to create a strong employer brand, acquiring over 180,000 followers since the commencement of the Facebook campaign. 

The business metrics that saw a positive impact were:

• Time to hire reduced to an average of 7 -10 days against 20-25 days.
• Cost per hire became less than $50 per hire.
• Overall hiring process cycle time reduced to less than 45 minutes, from the point of walk-in to a yes/no decision.
• Refer and win program generated 19.2 percent of the overall hiring for the company.
• Overall, the company was successful in ramping up to over 7,500 associates with limited investments in branding and recruitment.