Case Studies

GuideWell is the parent to a family of forward-thinking companies focused on transforming health care.

1. What changes have you made to your candidate experience recently? What improvements are you most proud of? How do you know that your changes are making a difference?

GuideWell has made several candidate experience improvements from 2020 to 2021, including:

• Increased communication with applicants, especially in early stages of the apply process, through automated emails to all new applicants, showcasing joining our family of award-winning companies.
• TA consultants narrowing initial candidate slates earlier, communicating quicker with applicants who do not meet a position’s skills and educational needs.
• Designed and implemented a new candidate-centric apply process, where applicants do not need to log into a system to apply and are asked to supply only required data.

We know all of these improvements have contributed to a more positive candidate experience, since our returning job seekers have increased steadily, and our applicants are telling us directly that they “love the easy apply experience” through an immediate feedback mechanism at the end of our apply process.

2. Why did you decide to make changes to how candidates were being treated? What data or evidence prompted you to make a change?

Our candidates are our future employees, and they’re often clients/members within our businesses, as well. Respect for their time and interest in joining us is critical.

Two major pieces of data were the tipping points that prompted change:

• Our applicants were frequently telling us that they were not receiving regular enough updates on their application, and we were also seeing more than a 15% drop-off at application time.
• Feedback that we received in the 2020 Talent Board survey process verified that we needed to improve communications with applicants in the early stages of our apply process.

3. How did you build support and commitment within your team and the broader organization? How did you demonstrate the importance of candidate experience?

Improving the candidate experience is a theme that we weave regularly into team meetings, one-on-one conversations with our hiring managers and, most importantly, it’s one of our 2021 team goals.

We created automated and personalized touchpoints with our candidates, utilizing the tools we have. We also have TA consultant discussions, in addition to our already occurring one-on-one candidate discussions. And we recognize teammates that demonstrate commitment to the best candidate experience during team meetings through our dynamic recognition program.

4. How do you measure candidate experience? How do you report on your recruiting process? How do you use that data to demonstrate financial impact as well as manage recruiter and hiring manager behaviors?

We use multiple measures of candidate experience, including:

1. Partnering with vendors like Talent Board for formal surveys on overall candidate experience
2. Asking for feedback each time a candidate applies, and then analyzing quantitative and qualitative feedback.

Then we share this information within our TA team and with business partners.

At GuideWell, we are in the process of deciding how to combine that data with industry standards on the financial costs of longer time to fill, losing candidate confidence and having negative promoters of our talent brand in our communities.