Latest / Off the Chart: A Business of Medicine Podcast / S1 Ep195: Using AI to fix the hiring mess AI made, with Dina Taylor of HireVue
Transcript
- Speaker 1 0:00 The reality is, if you post a job and get 1000 people apply in the course of a week, which happens all the time, no human has the time or the space to read through all of those resumes and make informed decisions. It's literally impossible with everything else that's going on, but AI can help. Speaker 2 0:31 Welcome to Off the Chart, a business of medicine podcast featuring lively and informative conversations with healthcare experts, opinion leaders, and practicing physicians about the challenges facing doctors and medical practices. My name is Lawson Latrell. I'm the associate editor of Medical Economics, and I'd like to thank you for joining us today. In today's episode, Medical Economics managing editor Todd Shryock sat down with Dena Taylor, chief evangelist at HireVue, to talk about how artificial intelligence is changing hiring. Today, job seekers can use AI to write a polished resume and apply to dozens of openings at once, and the qualified clinicians and staff that a practice actually needs are getting buried in the pile. So Todd and Dina get into how hiring teams can use AI themselves to sort through that volume while a human still makes the final call. Why skills like empathy matter more than what a candidate puts on the paper, and why better matched hires tend to stay longer. And a quick note before we get started: Physicians Practice is hosting a Practice Academy event on Thursday, October 29th, from 12 to 4 p.m. Eastern. The theme of this event is protecting your practice's revenue. It covers payer contract negotiations, Medicaid and managed care changes, and supplemental reimbursement that often goes missed. You'll find a link to register for that in the show notes below. With all that said, Dina, thank you for joining us. Let's get into the episode. Speaker 3 2:01 I'm here with Deena Taylor, the chief evangelist at HireVue, to discuss hiring trends in healthcare. Dena, thanks for joining me. Speaker 1 2:08 Thanks for having me, Todd. Speaker 3 2:10 So, Dina, if you ask anyone running a medical practice or or a healthcare facility, they'll probably list staffing as one of their top challenges. Why is that such a problem right now. Speaker 1 2:22 Well, gosh, I mean, I think in healthcare in particular, staffing is always a critical challenge, and these days even more so than usual. Simply because it's the staff that you have on board that has that direct impact to patient care, and that's really what everybody is focused on and and kind of passionate about day by day, so not having a team in place, not having kind of those shifts filled, that directly impacts people's lives and people's health, and that really is fundamental and paramount to paramount to what this team is doing and focusing on every single day. We are also living in a world where there is a rise of so many applications and so many interested people in so many open roles, and healthcare in particular is one of those spaces, as you well know, that requires some pretty specific skills and some pretty important skills to fill those open roles. So, asking hiring teams, doctors, medical professionals to sift through all of that data and all of those resumes to find that great talent when that volume continues to grow exponentially. That makes that job harder now more than it ever has been. Speaker 3 3:30 So I'm assuming AI has played a big role in this, whether it's creating resumes or cover letters for people. Like, talk to me a little bit about what kind of impact that's having Speaker 1 3:41 completely. I mean, candidates now, and we hear this, you know, across all industries, and it's happening a lot in healthcare as well. AI has made it really easy to write a resume. It's made it really easy to write a cover letter. It's also made it really easy to apply for a lot of jobs in a short period of time. You know, it used to be applying for a job took a minute. You had to sit down. You had to complete an application. You had to go through this process. AI has made that process a lot simpler for the candidates, and that's kind of contributed to this rise in so much volume and so much data for hiring teams. Speaker 3 4:14 So, what what does that mean for the the hiring team? Does that mean they're getting applicants who maybe aren't as serious about the position and are just kind of throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks, rather than people who are genuinely interested in the position. Speaker 1 4:31 I think it's actually both. At the end of the day, what it means is they're getting a lot of people applying, and there are going to be some people who really aren't don't have the right skills for that job, but they're just doing everything they can to find a job out there. So they're applying, even though this might not be the right one for them. And that volume is keeping that super highly qualified, highly skilled talent kind of buried in this kind of application mess that has occurred, and it means that the. Really strong talent are really really hard to find. Speaker 3 5:03 So how do you deal with this? How do you sift through everybody and find the person that actually has the skills you're looking for and is a good fit culturally at your organization? Speaker 1 5:13 You know, it's funny because we were just talking about how the rise of AI has made it easier for candidates to apply. The rise of AI can actually solve this problem statement for hiring teams as well. We recommend, and we've seen over and over again, using that AI for good, and having hiring teams leverage AI in order to uncover that strong talent that's buried in those applications. Speaker 3 5:36 So, are we getting to a point where we have AI applications being sorted by AI hiring teams, I mean, I feel like it's sort of like the battle of the robots to define the best person. Speaker 1 5:47 Oh, I'm so glad you said that, and that's where I think it comes down to using that AI for good. And so we don't want the AI to ever take the place of the human and kind of do the work for the human. We do want the AI to make the human's work easier and kind of help the human do what they're super super good at. So from a like practical tactical perspective, we have the opportunity to leverage AI to uncover those skills that are so required and so critical for that role, and do it in a way that's really fair and unbiased, and in a way that focuses on the core critical requirements of the job, the reality is, if you post a job and get 1000 people apply in the course of a week, which happens all the time, and I know your viewers have had that happen as well, no human has the time or the space to read through all of those resumes and make informed decisions. It's literally impossible with everything else that's going on, but AI can help. AI can help do the sorting. AI can help uncover the information, and then that human in the loop validates what the AI is uncovering. Speaker 3 6:50 And so, what does this actually look like? Then, would the hiring manager get a list of you know a pared down list of like, hey, we the AI believes these 20 people or whatever are the best fits, and then they kind of take it from there, doing it the same way they used to do it. Or I guess explain what the process looks like. Speaker 1 7:12 Yeah, I think that's an important question too because there are a lot of conflicting kind of not conflicting, but there's a lot of different rules and a lot of different processes that are out there in place on what I mean by using AI for good. So we never want the AI to be the decision maker to say Todd is a better fit for this job than Dina. What we want the AI to do is kind of evaluate all of the data and then present all of the information over to the hiring manager for their consideration. So instead of maybe a top 20, it could take all 1000 people that have applied, go through, create summaries of what everybody has kind of provided, bubble up the relevant information for the hiring manager and the hiring team in order to make those informed decisions. Kind of have everybody listed in order of prioritization, but making sure that everybody is still considered in a really fair way. So it's truly the thing that prioritizes and helps make the job easier. Physicians Practice 8:15 Hey there, Keith Reynolds here, and welcome to the P2 Management Minute. In just 60 seconds, we deliver proven, real-world tactics you can plug into your practice today. Whether that means speeding up check-in, lifting staff morale, or nudging patient satisfaction north, no theory, no fluff, just the kind of guidance that fits between appointments and moves the needle before lunch. But the best ideas don't all come from our newsroom. They come from you. Got a clever workflow hack, an employee engagement win or a lesson learned the hard way-I want to feature it. Shoot me an email at kreynolds@mjhlifesciences.com with your topic, a quick outline, or even a smartphone clip. We'll handle the rest and get your insights in front of your peers nationwide. Let's make every minute count together. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next P2 Management Minute. Speaker 3 9:07 So, is it difficult though if everyone's using AI to create resumes and cover letters? Is it harder to kind of ferret out the good candidates from people who are maybe you know using AI to help pad the resume a little bit. Speaker 1 9:23 Well, this is where skills validation becomes so important, right? Because the reality is, you and I can use AI to create the exact same resume, and we look like the exact same kind of type of person and type of skill. We're talking a lot about leveraging AI to support kind of that top of the funnel and that resume. But what we really believe in, and what we partner with, kind of our healthcare clients as well, is to look past the resume. The reality is, humans are far more than the bullet point and the word that they put on paper. And so you're right, leveraging AI in order to sift through resumes only gets you so far. But asking meaningful questions, digging into your skills. To your behaviors, to your personality traits, understanding whether or not you display the right amount of empathy to be a great healthcare provider, or the organizational skills necessary in order to work in a clinical environment-that's what matters more, and that's what the AI can evaluate. Not just what you write, but also how you respond and what you believe in and what you say. Speaker 3 10:21 So the AI can help you find that cultural fit as well as just the skill set that you're looking for. Speaker 1 10:28 It can. We have a lot of customers, healthcare customers as well, who will say, you know, we'll we're we can train on these five skills over here. But what's really critical is the behaviors aligned to our culture and these core skills and certifications that you are required to demonstrate in order to be an effective clinician, we'll focus on digging into those things and then let you train the other skills that are necessary. Speaker 3 10:54 So, if a practice manager has never used AI before, a question might be like, "Well, where do I fit into this. Am I still interviewing? Am I still asking questions the same way? Like, how does their process change in all of this? Speaker 1 11:08 Totally, I would say yes, 100% to the interview. But your interview really then becomes a conversation to validate the information that you have. So it's less meeting the candidate for the first time and more you're walking into the conversation already knowing so much about the individual and what their potential is. You now have the opportunity to have a conversation with them, validate that information, make sure that you know this is the right thing for them and the right thing for you before you move forward toward an offer. But it becomes a really personalized, meaningful conversation instead of a more perfunctory interview that happens earlier in the process. Speaker 3 11:47 If you get the right person by using the right process, do you find that the retention is better in the long run? Speaker 1 11:55 Absolutely. This process that we're describing, we've been talking a lot about the AI managing the efficiency, which is completely true, right? Neither one of us are capable of interviewing 1000 people in a short period of time. Neither one of us are able to read all those resumes and not go cross-eyed. But there's also an element of kind of what happens on the outcome side once you hire great people. They stay longer. They have higher patient satisfaction scores. They are embedded into the culture and into the organization. They might be promoted more quickly or move into a different role, and we have the ability to track all of that data and prove out all of that goodness along the way. Speaker 3 12:32 What's the biggest mistake you see healthcare hiring teams make, whether it's trying to move fast or in just how they screen candidates? What what are some errors that they tend to make? The Speaker 1 12:43 biggest mistake that I've seen that we've seen is being afraid to start because we think someone's going to say no, and so it'll be like healthcare has always done it the way that we've always done it. We can't use AI, we can't use technology. This is just too new for us. I think that tone is starting to shift simply because I think that technology and AI are now becoming so ubiquitous, people are realizing they're left behind if they don't lean in. But I do think that like legacy assumption that this would be really hard to do in healthcare is still living out there a little bit, and that I think is the biggest mistake that gets made. Speaker 3 13:19 So looking out in the next five years or so, how do you see the hiring process changing? Are you seeing even more AI, or you know what's going to happen? Speaker 1 13:28 I think what's going to happen is we're going to be thinking and continuing to think more about the skills and the behaviors and less about the job itself. And here's what I mean by that: There's all these studies that show that like the greatest data scientists that are out there are actually philosophy majors and philosophy degrees, and there are so many individuals who are entering into healthcare fields later in their career after having done something else along the way because they've learned that they have the compassion and the empathy that might really make them a great fit for that role. I think that's going to continue. I think that we're going to continue to see sort of the rise of transferable skills because AI is also changing the landscape of what the jobs are so much, and so we've spent the last 18 months or so learning how to use AI. The world has spent the last 18 months learning how to use AI and applying it to what we've been talking about. Now I think it's going to redefine the jobs in a really exciting way. Speaker 3 14:22 Is there anything else that you think physician practice owners need to know that we haven't talked about? Speaker 1 14:27 I I think we've talked about it, but I'm going to double down on it and double click. And I would say lean into innovation and don't be afraid to try. The hardest part is knowing where to start, but once you start, really really good things happen. Speaker 3 14:40 Great, Dina. Thanks for joining me. Speaker 1 14:42 Thank you. Speaker 2 14:53 Once again, that was a conversation between Todd Shryock, managing editor of Medical Economics, and Dena Taylor, chief evangelist at Higher View. Don't forget to join Physicians Practice on Thursday, October 29th, from 12 to 4 p.m. Eastern for our virtual Practice Academy series, Protecting Your Practice's Revenue. You'll hear practical strategies for strengthening payer contracts, keeping up with Medicaid changes, and capturing reimbursement that too often slips through the cracks. A link to register for that is in the show notes below. But my name is Austin Latrell, and on behalf of the whole Medical Economics and Physicians Practice teams, I'd like to thank you for listening to the show and ask that you subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. As always, be sure to check back on Monday and Thursday mornings for the latest conversations with experts sharing strategies, stories, and solutions for your practice. You can find us by searching off the chart wherever you get your podcasts. Also, if you'd like the best stories that medical economics and physicians' practice published, delivered straight to your email six days of the week. Subscribe to our newsletters at medicaleconomics.com and physicianspractice.com. Off the chart, a business of medicine podcast is executive produced by Chris Mazzolini and Keith Reynolds, and produced by Austin Latrell. Medical Economics and Physicians Practice are both members of the MJH Life Sciences family. Thank you.