Building a Recruitment Engine for UT Health East Texas

How UT Health East Texas Partnered with Proactive Talent to Build a Recruiting Machine from the Ground Up

The UT Health East Texas (UTHET) medical group provides care to thousands of patients through a network of quality medical practitioners. To attract and hire quality talent for the newly formed health system, leadership turned to the professional Hiring and Talent Attraction services of the Proactive Talent team.

Formed in early 2018, UTHET is the combination of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler (UT Health Northeast) and the East Texas Medical Center Regional Healthcare System (ETMC). The centralized healthcare group provides care as part of the Ardent Health System. It is comprised of a network of regional hospitals, clinics, and freestanding emergency centers, along with home health services, urgent care, and rehabilitation facilities.

Each facility hosted its own recruitment efforts using ineffective methods, resulting in a shortage of skilled medical professionals. UTHET then partnered with Proactive Talent which utilized a holistic approach to quickly and effectively build a recruitment engine designed to attract and engage talented professionals in the healthcare field.

The Proactive Talent Solution

Beginning in August 2018, the recruiters of UTHET examined the specific challenges faced in the region, to address them one-by-one. These included the need to hire approximately 600 talented medical workers who specialized in nursing, nursing support, physical therapy, and similarly skilled professions. By October, this number doubled to more than 1,200, with only a handful of hiring managers and recruiters addressing this process. With UTHET having undergone the recent rebranding, they struggled with the disadvantage of being an unknown employer in the area.

Equally concerning was the low rate of unemployment in Tyler and the surrounding regions of East Texas and how neighboring hospital systems in larger markets, like Dallas/Fort Worth, offered higher wages. A low supply of nursing and physical therapy workers further complicated the difficulties in hiring and retaining quality agents, in particular, the specialty RN’s, such as RN-Critical Care, RN-Emergency and RN-Medical/Surgical.

Proactive Talent quickly enacted a specialized team of healthcare recruiting experts and a lead consultant to fully integrate a three-part recruitment and marketing strategy for UTHET. Over a six-month period, Proactive Talent filled 1,332 positions with a 50% reduction in staffing costs, saving the organization $2.6 million dollars.

Delve deeper into this case study to learn more about how the Proactive Talent team employed the three distinct programs of OnDemand Recruiting, Recruiting Optimization and Recruitment Marketing to achieve these outstanding goals of a reduced hiring budget and positive recruitment results.