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Meadville Medical Center "hires for fit" with Behavioral Assessments
Learn how HealthcareSource behavioral-based assessments exceeded their expectations in how they are able to evaluate employees, conduct a structured interview process and improve their hiring decisions.
About Meadville Medical Center
Location: Meadville, Pennsylvania
Overview: Meadville Medical Center is an outstanding community hospital located in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The hospital continually works to meet the community’s needs by maintaining up to date and state-of-the-art facilities. They are a leader in health care in northwestern Pennsylvania, with the newest technology, including the latest generation of ultrasound, CT and MRI technology.
Employees: 1,300
HealthcareSource Solutions: Position Manager®, Performance Manager®, Physician Recruitment Manager®, Staff AssessmentSM, formerly known as TestSource® HSI
Hospitals know selecting individuals who are most likely to be successful within their organization is key to their talent strategy. Hiring employees who don’t fit the needs of modern medical facilities can have significant negative impact on organizational effectiveness, quality-of-care, and patient outcomes. To identify which candidates are most likely to succeed within their organization, hospital recruiters are increasingly turning to HealthcareSource Staff AssessmentSM, formerly known as TestSource HSI, a behavioral-based, pre-employment assessment designed by Hospitals for Hospitals.
Meadville Medical Center (MMC) is a community hospital serving 75,000 individuals in Pennsylvania’s Crawford County, and an additional 150,000 people in northwestern Pennsylvania through a state-of-the-art medical center, a free-standing cancer center and rural health clinics. With more than 1,300 employees, MMC and its subsidiaries is the largest employer in Crawford County.
MMC’s commitment to quality and process improvement is illustrated through its accreditation by Det Norske Veritas (DNV) and prides itself on being the first hospital in Pennsylvania certified in ISO 9001. Additional accolades include designation as a “Community Value Five-Star Hospital™” (by Cleverley + Associates) for the hospital’s leadership example of “financial strength and reinvestment, cost of care, pricing and quality.”
Strong commitment to behaviors for quality patient service
“As our motto, ‘People you know. Care you trust’, suggests, hiring applicants that are a good fit is more important than ever,” says Greg Maras, Vice President of Human Resources at MMC. Beyond first-rate facilities and new technologies, Maras believes the quality of MMC’s employees is the single-most significant contributor toward quality of care. “As a small community hospital, we can best deliver patient-centered care by leveraging our talent. By working together as a team, dedicated to a process of never-ending improvement, we will proactively improve the overall health of our community.”
MMC is a tight-knit community of dedicated employees, many of who have worked there for decades. With MMC’s employee turnover averaging only 10% a year, Maras says “finding and retaining employees who are a strong fit is especially important.” “Whether it’s screening the 115-120 new employees we hire each year, or evaluating employees for internal transfers or promotions, it’s essential that we put the right person in the right job.”
MMC doesn’t just pay “lip service” to being patient focused. Each and every employee signs a “Customer Service Standards of Performance” agreement, pledging their commitment to “behaviors that all employees, volunteers, contracted services and vendors are expected to practice while on duty.” To fulfill that pledge, MMC selected a behavioral-based assessment to ensure the applicants hired, support the MMC’s values and service culture.
Choosing the right solution
Since 2002, MMC has relied on HealthcareSource Position Manager® to streamline the sourcing, hiring and onboarding of its employees. Because of its favorable prior experience using that system, and its more recent deployment of HealthcareSource Performance Manager®, Maras saw HealthcareSource Staff Assessment, formerly known as TestSource HSI, as the logical choice to meet MMC’s needs for behavioral assessments. TestSource was acquired by HealthcareSource, but had been a long time partner prior to that with strong integration.
“We chose Staff Assessment because of its features, ease of use and synergies with our other HealthcareSource software. Staff Assessment has exceeded our expectations, giving us a scientific way to evaluate employees and significantly improve our hiring decisions.”
Whether a job opening attracts lots of applicants or only a handful, Staff Assessment helps MMC narrow the field to the top 3-5 candidates. Once identified, detailed Feedback Reports provide managers with quantitative scores along with custom interview questions to probe any “low” scores and discover how they might behave if they were to work for us,” Maras describes. “Staff Assessment gives hiring managers all they need to be better interviewers and to learn more about how candidates are likely to behave on the job,” says Maras.
Beyond its value for assessing new hires, Maras envisions that hiring managers will increasingly use Staff Assessment to consistently compare external and internal candidates for all job openings, including promotions and transfers.
Putting it all together
Before HealthcareSource, most HR activities were performed manually at MMC. Input on candidates and employees came in through an inefficient collection of emails, handwritten notes, and other sources.
Because Staff Assessment integrates with Position Manager, MMC managers can now track the entire lifecycle of its employees: Staff Assessment identifies service-oriented applicants, Position Manager automates the recruiting and onboarding processes, and Performance Manager automates and improves the employee performance appraisal process.
“Through its exclusive focus on serving healthcare facilities, HealthcareSource, has proven they understand the talent management requirements of hospitals like ours. I can’t even begin to count the time saved and headaches we’ve avoided by bringing all the information and processes into one online system. HealthcareSource puts it all together,” says Maras.
