Bill Klaproth (Host): This is Today in Nursing Leadership, a podcast from the American Organization for Nursing Leadership. I'm Bill Klaproth, and this podcast is brought to you by WorkUp. Visit them at WorkUp.health, and with me is Zach Fleitman. He is the founder and CEO of WorkUp as we talk about why 97% of healthcare organizations fail to fully utilize their largest talent pipelines and how they can change that. And we'll discuss leveraging existing community talent pools to mitigate critical clinical staffing shortages. Zach, welcome.

Zach Fleitman: Hey Bill, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to chat with you today.

Host: Yeah, me too. Thanks for being here, Zach. I really appreciate that. So, let's start with this. I guess the first question is why do only 3% of healthcare organizations engage their existing candidate pools successfully.

Zach Fleitman: I mean, it's hard to do. You have pools that are distributed across the four walls of every location of every facility and a system. They're spread across your ATS, your CRM. They're in Excel. They're in PDF resume packets, and it takes a lot of team time and IT team time and BI team time to go back and dive through the list, see who's relevant to which roles, and even just to update profiles. And you may have a conversation, but making sure that the conversation with an individual candidate or talent gets back into their profile in whatever the relevant system is or Excel doc for kind of the next conversation that that takes team time. I don't have to tell you, every team within a health system is having to do a lot more with a lot less these days. And it's really hard to stay on top of all the relationships you have with your community of talent.

Host: Yeah. So, as you said, this is hard to do and that's why 97% of healthcare organizations underutilize their largest talent pipeline. So, let's talk about that. Can you explain the significance of community talent pools and how you looked at this and brought about change to this? Zach, how did you look at this to help solve the staffing shortage issue?

Zach Fleitman: Yeah, I mean, I think first maybe it's helpful to define what these different pools are. And so, you think the superpower of a health system is being the cornerstone of their community's delivery of healthcare. And so, that superpower exposes them to talent at every phase. So, you have access to students that are in secondary programs that are just still discovering what careers are relevant to them and are coming into the wall through observations or a part of community programs. You have students that are post-secondary that have to spend time in your four walls, doing clinical rotations in order to graduate, and have a license to actually practice. And then, you have applicants at various phases in their career, whether it's, you know, applying for a new grad position, doing a residency, or you know, more experienced. And then, you have colleagues that become former colleagues that are boomeranging eligible. These are all different populations that are stored in different places. And so, that kind of speaks to the challenge of maintaining relationships with each of them. And you start to see, "Okay, well, you look at the numbers, if you don't convert one of these relationships into the next hire or the next stage in their career, within 90 days of first encounter, most of these talent goes stale and you're only talking to that person again if they come back, self-navigate to an open role and apply to that position." So, you know, you have all of these relationships that are valuable relationships and could turn into that next hard-to-fill position, that next colleague. But you got to stay on top of them.

And so, when I was working with my early health system partners, what I was seeing is they were doing this when they had time, but most teams don't have time to stay on top of all these different conversations. And so, that's kind of where the impetus came from and said, "Hey, if we could just stay on top of all these conversations, right? Just maintain all of them and regularly check in." And when there's a new position that matches with the profile, just friendly check in, "Hey, this is close to what the last understanding of what you wanted to do." That would naturally lead-- you know, not every candidate, not every conversation is going to lead to a hire, but that would naturally lead to more people saying, "Yeah, that is something that's interesting. Maybe it wasn't interesting to me three years ago, or maybe I wasn't qualified, I was too inexperienced. But since then, I have a new specialty. I have a new care setting that I prefer and this role is perfect for me."

Host: That's really interesting. You said, first, you have to define the talent pools and then basically stay on top of them. So, does your system help automatically do that?

Zach Fleitman: Exactly. I mean, what we first do, we have kind of like phases. The first phase is let's understand who, where, and who your historical talent pools are. And that can be everything from like going to talk to clinical instructors and finding their Excel docs or finding their emails from affiliate education institutions and having them forwarded into our system, and then we automatically ingest all those various different inputs, the resume packets, the CSVs directly from your existing HRIS or CRM, and we just automatically ingest that.

And then, we, you know, with as little or as much information as we're able to get, we'll do kind of like a proactive re-engagement campaign. That's really first and foremost in promoting the brands of our partners, because everything we do is white-labeled for our partners. But then, we want to understand, "Okay, where is this talent now? What certifications do they have? What specialty are they focused on? " And then, based on that information, okay, are there open jobs today that makes sense for them? And if there's not, let's just keep on top of their inbox. Let's make sure that their text or email inbox sees outreach from our system partners so that they you're there, we're interested in keeping the conversation alive. And then, when that right position is there, it's there and it hits them at the right time.

Host: I really like this. So, you're basically creating a database, a potential pool of people to fill positions. The good thing is you know about them and because of the re-engagement campaign, they know about you. So, it's kind of a two-way street. Would that be right?

Zach Fleitman: Yeah. I mean, everything that we're doing is AI-powered, right? So like, the ingestion of the candidates and the tagging of their profiles across all 27 different key characteristics is being done with one AI agent. And then, the constant reach out is being done by a different AI agent, and that's done on behalf of our partners. So, the email will actually come from sarah@betterhealth.org. And so, if someone wants to respond, they can respond right to Sarah. We'll see that. And we can also automate the back and forth email or text exchange if that's what our partners want us to do.

But then, we have other agents in an algorithm that'll match those individuals if they've expressed interest in the role directly to the role off of our partner's website. So, what we're trying to do is just allow our partners to do more with less and really only have to put human time in once it gets to that kind of like face-to-face human interaction.

Host: So, it sounds like this is really proactive, like you kind of have a bench of candidates for each position that you know are there, that you're constantly working. So if a position does open up, you know who to go to right away.

Zach Fleitman: I like that bench metaphor, right? Like yeah, we're the assistant coach, right? the main coaches are the nursing leaders and the talent and the talent acquisition and HR teams, right? But those teams have so much on their plate. They're actively coaching what's going on in the field with assistant coaches, just like walking up and down the bench and talking and being like, "Hey, you might be going in next inning. So like, let's stretch and stay warm. You still want to play second? You still want to play center field?" So, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we're augmenting what the teams already want to do and already know has to be done, but there's just not enough hours in the day to do.

Host: So, you mentioned also, I was reading more about this, you said that through this, your plan, this engagement campaign, you can increase engagement by qualified applicants by more than 30%. Is that right?

Zach Fleitman: Yeah, I mean, you can increase your qualified applicants for any given position by 30%. You know, I think that that's kind of a baseline, and I think the focus is obviously on these hardest to fill opportunities, right? Like, our partner doesn't care if we increase 30% qualified applicants to one of those positions that is already fully staffed, right? And today, that might be, you know, some of those entry-level positions, new grad hires, even in kind of what is overall difficult-to-fill positions like nursing.

But where that really benefits them is like, okay, there is an imaging tech shortage across the country. There's respiratory therapy shortages in a lot of areas, surg tech shortages. When you're looking at nursing, trying to get nurses to fill some of these am-surg, med-surg positions in the third shifts and overnight shifts, right? Like, those can be more challenging. But that's where it's even more important to keep a wide net and keep a really good understanding of where all of your previous talent interactions are. Because you know that new grad nurse that you didn't have a place for two to three years ago now might be experienced. And now, they might be in the place in their life where they want to make that couple extra hours for doing night shift, or maybe they weren't aware of med-surg and you wanted to highlight to them that this is a really good learning experience for new grads. And so, you were directing them towards a hard-to-fill position. But it's really tough to do that at scale one-on-one with manual outreach.

Host: I could see where this is a time-saver as well.

Zach Fleitman: Yeah. I mean, right today, people are going into their CRM and their ATS and pulling these out manually. They're exporting it into Excel and then they're distributing the names of the candidates they think are best fit to the right people to reach out manually, right? That's a ton of work that we can automate with our AI agents today, and your team can just focus on the highest leverage piece of the process, which is actually talking to these candidates and finding new ones if you need to. But the thing I think is crazy is you see these huge levels of spend on, like Indeed, for example, in the Allied Health World. And 60 to 80% of the candidates you're getting from Indeed, you've already had a relationship with. They're already in your ATS or your CRM. It's just you haven't been able to stay in touch with them. Once again, not enough hours in the day. But if all of a sudden you had an unlimited hours in the day through like an AI assistant, you're staying in touch with them, maybe you don't need to rely and lean on these other third-party providers to get all these candidates in your four walls.

Host: Absolutely. So, can you share a success story or results that you're getting with this?

Zach Fleitman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we just recently ran a re-engagement campaign for a few thousand former clinically rotating students with our New Jersey partner. And they got hires within 30 days from it. I mean, it was near immediate hires. We had a similar result from streamlining, clinical rotations and observation requests for our Northeast Ohio partner. And just last week, they were able to fill one of their longest and hardest to fill med-surg positions, med-surg nursing positions.

So, what we're seeing is streamlining like observations and rotations, and we didn't really talk about this, but it also reduces the amount of time, for example, like observation coordinators and clinical structures have to spend on, like the tedious administrative task is we'll actually do the digital process flow and automate the process flow of like collecting documentation and coordinating schedules and things like that with an eye towards capturing that talent interaction. So, we can gauge that talent in future points. But by doing that, the system can create 300 to 400 unique new candidate profiles on a monthly basis. And that's just passive inbound talent. And we find that usually about 10% of that is like a near term actionable talent. If you're looking at historical talent pools, you know, we're seeing 75-90% engagement with our outreach, and then 33% are in a place where they'll click right through to look at jobs. So, they're kind of demonstrating with their feet that they are ready to look at opportunities and they're willing to look at opportunities. And previously, they wouldn't have even been engaged because we're getting these from old stale former rotating students.

Host: So, it sounds like it not only saves time, but it helps you get the best candidate. Would that be right?

Zach Fleitman: Absolutely. I mean, if the 1A problem is qualified candidates and the 1B problem is attrition and retention. For a lot of systems, you may even flip that, you can fill the bucket all you want, if it's leaking on the back end, it's really challenging. One of the reasons it's leaking is that sometimes when you have shortages, if they're severe enough, you're kind of taking what you can get, not getting the right candidate.

But the other end is, like, you want someone that's familiar with your culture, right? And who's more familiar than someone that's already interacted with you, already been within your four walls, already gone through a process and been really interested in you. So, you're not only are your kind of like existing talent pools and your existing kind of community talent pools, low-hanging fruit in terms of you already had that relationship. They also are the ones that are most familiar with who you are and kind of least likely to turn over in the first 90 days because, " Oh wow, this didn't match my expectation. This isn't the type of organization I want to be a part with," they kind of already know.

Host: So Zach, how does WorkUp work with your customers? When you come in, how do you work with them?

Zach Fleitman: Yeah. And it's a great question I'm a child of late '80s, early '90s. And so, you know, I grew up loving Choose Your Own Adventure Books. And I feel like we take the same approach, right? We know that not everyone's in the same place in terms of what they want us to focus on and how much resources they have to dedicate to us. And, you know, maybe I'll even be a little bit more aggressive in saying, "Hey, if we have to have iT resources dedicated to us early on, right? That's going to delay implementation at most systems by at least 18 months." So, we like to offer a zero integration, zero implementation approach at a bare minimum.

What does that mean? It's like we we'll, one, just take CSV exports from your CRM and ATS, HRIS platform, Excel lists that people are kind of manually keeping track. We'll actually just ask for introductions to who are managing the clinical rotations for kind of, once again, the highest need and the hardest to fill roles. And that's ranged everywhere from PDF resume packets and pictures of signup sheets to one of our partners who had Post-It notes. And we're sending those pictures of Post-It notes. Not ideal, but we can handle it. We can ingest that. And then, they don't have to set up anything. Like I said, we have our AI agent, look at their job site and get an understanding of all their roles that are out there and which are the ones that are hardest to fill. And then, we'll just do all the engagement on behalf of our partners. And our goal is to push this talent to apply to an open requisition. That's our success, is someone that's actually applying, actually getting hired.

We'll obviously do exports into our partner CRMs so that they have it as a source of truth. We'll do integrations if someone wants an integration. And then, we'll do like implementation where we'll actually start looking at where are the administrative pain points in terms of managing these populations. We'll streamline that. But that's all deeper levels of implementation and integration than where we'll start. And so, we'll let our partners kind of tell us what they have the stomach for and what they have the appetite for immediately. And we are happy to just have it be super light lift, prove out our value, and then deepen the relationship over time.

Host: So if a nurse leader has a position open, and they're using your system at WorkUp, do they just call you and say, "Hey, I have this position, this is open. Deliver me five candidates." Is that kind how it works?

Zach Fleitman: One step more proactive from our side. The second the job is posted on the job site, we're promoting it. So once again, if they want to be zero touch with us, they can be completely zero touch. We know this system fatigue, right? A nursing leader, an HR leader, right? Their team is in seven, eight different systems. We don't want to be another system if they don't want to have to do that. So, the second that job is posted, we will be promoting it. And similarly, we keep a perspective on the job site, we can see which postings are sitting the longest, and we can promote those to relevant candidates.

So, we'll proactively-- we call it like the equivalent of like a sponsored job where when we send a follow up to a candidate, "Hey, it was really nice to meet you at this career fair. It was really nice to see you at this dinner. We haven't talked to you in a while after your rotation. Here are three, here are four jobs we think are a good fit for you." Three will be based on their profile, like really high confident matches. And then, one's going to be a sponsored post of, "Hey, have you considered this? It's attractive because, even though it's night shift, it pays a little bit of extra and you can have your days off to do other things with your life, right?" Things like that where we're promoting the sale points of each position and trying to include a harder to fill position.

But yeah, we will obviously ask our partners, "Hey, are there any positions that are hypercritical for you that you want us to focus on? Are there any positions you don't want us at all to focus on? You have too many candidates as it is, and we'll take that feedback and adjust our algorithm and kind of educate our AI agents. But left to our own devices, we'll just go based off of what's on your website, what's taken a long time to fill. And if there's something new, it's immediately out there in the network.

Host: Yeah, that sounds good. Well, this has really been interesting, Zach. I love talking to you about how to leverage existing community talent pools to mitigate clinical staffing shortages. Before we wrap up, Zach, anything else you want to add?

Zach Fleitman: Yeah. I mean, listen, as the son of two clinicians, married to a clinician, all of my siblings and my wife's siblings are also clinicians, you know, I'm the only one that wanted to be the black sheep and not actually provide patient care. I mean, this is a mission thing, first and foremost to me.

At the end of the day, I want to see the teams in hospitals get to focus on patient care and get to feel like they're appropriately staffed to deliver the high quality care that they know they need to deliver. So, we are constantly talking to our partners, constantly listening to our partners, getting their view of where we should focus next.

And I think that's the relationship that every technology partner should have. And this is my third health tech platform focused on providers that I've taken from pre-product, pre-revenue and scaled out. So, it's not a transactional life. It's a partnership life. And we're excited for feedback as much as we are for partners. So, anyone that wants to reach out, give us some thoughts, we'd love to hear it.

Host: Yeah. I like that it's not a transactional life. It's a partnership life. So, I think that's very well said. Zach, thank you so much for your time. This has really been interesting.

Zach Fleitman: Thank you, bill. It is an absolute pleasure.

Host: Absolutely. Once again, that is Zach Fleitman and we want to thank WorkUp for sponsoring this podcast. For more information and insights and resources, you can visit them@WorkUp.health. That's WorkUp.health. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you. This is Today in Nursing Leadership. Thanks for listening.