Sherri Bliss: Program Manager, PacifiCare Health Systems
Please describe your recruiting metrics program and how it is used. (metrics for management reporting, metrics for Human Resources reporting, and recruiter productivity metrics).
As one of the nation’s leading consumer health organizations, PacifiCare is recognized for innovation in consumer products and services, as well as our employment practices. In business for more than 26 years, we employ approximately 9,100 employees and do business in 36 states and Guam.
Launched in January 2002 as part of a business turnaround strategy, PacifiCare’s Talent Acquisition department is responsible for the acquisition of human capital through strategic recruitment and branding programs to meet the business challenges and objectives of PacifiCare and assure we are hiring for fit in an achievement culture. Committed to the employment brand we created, “Envision. Innovate. Accomplish,” our department was integral to the success of a business turnaround strategy launched in 2000, officially accomplished at the end of 2004, by facilitating the company’s shift to an achievement culture through talent acquisition and development. Over our 3+ years in operation, we have grown into a world class recruiting organization with notable accomplishments.
In order to evaluate our effectiveness and opportunities for improvement as a staffing function, we have been measuring and reporting a specific set of metrics since our inception. Our key performance metrics at present include Staffing Efficiency Ratio, Hiring Manager Satisfaction, Timely Requisition Fulfillment via a Time Ratio, Employee Referral Hires, Employee Ethnicity Trend and Underutilized Position Fulfillment. We historically measured Quality of Hire via Employee Turnover and Retention statistics, but continue to search for better ways to measure and evaluate new hire quality.
These metrics are used both to evaluate individual and team performance within the department, as well as to report performance to our Office of the President, made up of the senior-most business leaders from throughout PacifiCare’s operations. In addition, metrics are used to evaluate business trends, root cause analysis, and assist in strategic planning on a quarterly and annual basis.
| Q1: | What was the reasoning and strategy behind your metrics program and how has it developed? |
| Our metrics program has evolved to align with expert recommendations and business need. We align our metrics to what matters to the business to assure we are always concentrating on the right measures. For example, our Employee Ethnicity Trend and Underutilized Fulfillment Rate are unique and particularly relevant metrics for PacifiCare’s strategic diversity vision. We measure the ethnic and gender diversity of our employees quarterly to determine if our diversity recruitment and affirmative action plans are resulting in PacifiCare’s workforce demographics becoming more reflective of our diverse membership and the communities we serve. We have been successful in changing the ethnicity trends over the past two years, increasing the non-white exempt population by 11.81 percent, which we believe will make a positive impact on our membership and revenue as well.
In addition to the aforementioned metrics, we gather data to determine how the recruitment experience impacts PacifiCare’s brand among candidates who are interviewed in person for a position with PacifiCare, as well as how the onboarding experience impacts retention and turnover. In January 2004, PacifiCare’s Recruitment Department implemented an on-line interview experience survey for all candidates who are in-person interviewed for a position with PacifiCare, whether or not the person is given a job offer, and whether or not the person accepts or declines the offer in cases where an offer is given. We also implemented retention and turnover surveys so that employees who terminate voluntarily from the company within six months of their start date are surveyed about onboarding and other issues that may have impacted the quick turnover, while employees who reach their six-month anniversary with PacifiCare receive a similar survey to gauge retention inputs. The e-mail based survey instrument was designed in conjunction with Genesee Survey Services, a recognized leader in the field of employee surveys. Not only is the use of an on-line, e-mail based survey tool an innovative utilization of survey technology to enhance our metrics process and breadth, but it also demonstrates our commitment to innovative metrics that have a large-scale impact on PacifiCare’s overall employment brand. | |
| Q2: | What metrics did you decide not to include in your program and why? |
| Although some benchmark reports still measure cost per hire, that has not been a metric we have used in our history at PacifiCare. Because we were implementing a new in-house centralized recruitment model at the time of our department launch, our comparative metric to evaluate performance around cost was the annual amount spent on external staffing firms. Hiring Managers at PacifiCare, while there was no dedicated recruitment department, had become reliant on placement agencies and had budgeted accordingly for agency fees. The Recruiting Efficiency Ratio, the metric we selected to use to measure our cost efficiency, served as a better method of comparison between the former model and the new. The Recruiting Efficiency Ratio, which we learned about from Staffing.org, is the calculation of the total recruitment expenses of an organization divided by the total salaries recruited in a given period.
We also have stopped measuring Time-to-Fill and Time-to-Start for requisition fulfillment. Based on the benchmark report from Staffing.org, the most important metric regarding recruitment time is that the new hire has effectively started work per a mutually agreed upon “contracted start date” between the Hiring Manager and the Recruiter. Staffing.org suggests the Time Metric or the ratio of the Actual Time-to-Start divided by the Contracted Time-to-Start. The actual time is the number of days between when recruiting is initiated and when the new employee starts. The contracted time is the number of days between the date recruiting is initiated and the date the recruiter and hiring manager mutually agree that the position will be filled. PacifiCare was able to implement a customized data field within our requisition process with VirtualEdge, our Enterprise Staffing Software provider, that captures the “contracted start date” and to create a customized report to calculate Time for each requisition and for all requisitions filled within a given period of time. We have been using that report to track the Time Metric since Q3 2004. | |
| Q3: | How are outcomes translated into action in your organization? |
| As mentioned previously, our metrics are used to develop annual goals for continuous improvement. | |
| Q4: | What’s great about your program? What remains a challenge? |
The two things I am most proud of our metrics program accomplishing are:
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| Q5: | What is your frequency of outcomes reporting and of data collection? |
| Individual recruiter metrics, which include hiring manager satisfaction and the time ratio, are reported to our staffing director monthly. Our other metrics are aggregated to the department level and reported to PacifiCare’s Executive Management team quarterly within the Human Resources Quarterly Business Review. Based on each quarter’s metrics and annualized trends, priority areas for improvement or growth are identified and prioritized. | |
| Q6: | How much data is collected manually and how much is collected automatically? |
| Our metrics are managed by gathering relevant information through various support systems including our HRIS, PeopleSoft, our applicant tracking system, VirtualEdge, our financial system, Oracle, and our survey tool, Insight Express. All necessary reporting fields in each system have been captured in customized reports, and are available within our reporting portals for each system. The ease-of-use of these reports with pre-designated reporting criteria enables any member of the recruitment department to capture metrics information anytime. We have also worked with VirtualEdge to customize the system to accommodate our metrics process. For example, in early 2005, VirtualEdge added a field to our requisition database for “contracted start date” and created a custom report to track our Time Ratio, the time metric most highly valued by Hiring Managers according to Staffing.org.
Our Hiring Manager Satisfaction Survey is administered through Insight Express’s award-winning technology that allows for more sophisticated data analysis of survey data. Once all data is collected, the process of calculating specific metrics is a manual process performed within Excel. A template workbook was designed in 2002, our first year of reporting data, and the process is now more a series of data entry activities, with follow-up trend analysis. The data from Excel is later input into a dashboard format for the recruitment team and into a PowerPoint presentation for senior management. The entire metrics process each quarter takes approximately four hours in total. | |
| Q7: | Do you have a data collection tip you can share with others? |
| Own and integrate as many of the reporting or tracking tools as possible for easy access. | |
| Q8: | Have you ever used metrics to build a business case? |
| In the fall of 2004, a business case was made around our process and cost efficiencies to support the centralization of our nonexempt recruitment function. Our Exempt Staffing Cost Ratio showed a significant reduction in exempt hiring costs throughout 2003 and 2004 following centralization of exempt recruiting. Based on these results, we centralized all nonexempt hiring beginning January, 2005. Senior management approved the business case, and the centralization was implemented in January, 2005. Based on Q1 and Q2 results for 2005 that centralization of all recruiting has continued to drive down our staffing costs.
In early 2005, our Employee Ethnicity Trend and tracking of Ethnic Diversity Hiring enabled us to make the business case for further alignment with our full suite of Consumer Initiatives targeting ethnic minorities and women. In prior years, with our Latino Health Solutions Division, we developed and maintained important partnerships with Latino organizations that enabled us to increase the number of Latino hires at all levels of the organization. Through our metrics reporting, we noticed that this trend did not exist within African American and Asian American demographics. We took that as a sign that our diversity efforts needed expansion into additional ethnic and gender groups. We have since begun to implement a similar partnering process with our African American Health Solutions and Asian American Markets groups. We also plan to use the data around our aforementioned retention and turnover surveys to build a business case for a more comprehensive onboarding program. | |
| Q9: | Do you use any internal or external benchmarks? |
| We continually compare our quarter to quarter and annualized performance to identify trends, areas in need of improvement, and areas where we have excelled over time. In addition, we use the Staffing.org annual Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report to determine how we are performing in comparison to other companies both within the health care industry and in other industries. | |
| Q10: | Do you assess correlations in your data? |
| Any correlation analysis we conduct is on an ad hoc basis and is conducted manually. |