I held several roles during my time at UPMC, but wanted to speak specifically to their centralized talent acquisition/recruitment function, which they call "TA" for short. I was a recruiter during my time in TA and have concerns about the way the overall recruitment process was managed.
While the recruiters had overall guidelines and "scripts" to use at various stages of the process, not all recruiters followed them. For example, even for professional, salaried positions, some recruiters did not feel it necessary to provide a benefits overview to the final candidate being made the offer. Since UPMC salaries very much reflect their non-profit status, the benefits package is an important selling point as part of the offer. I could not understand why the TA team leads and managers did not guide all recruiters to follow a consistent standard when making an offer to a candidate. Besides creating an inconsistent candidate experience, it also caused the recruiters who did follow the process of outlining the benefits in the offer to take a lot more time doing the offer (as they should), which caused them to get behind on other day to day recruitment tasks, like routing candidates onto hiring managers and posting new job openings.
While my requisition load was a bit lower than my team members, because I was doing the outline of the benefits during the job offer, I often had to come in early or stay late to keep up with these other tasks. I was also the one my team lead frequently signaled out to pick up extra work if another team member left or was on vacation. It was frustrating because it's an open office environment and I know my team lead could hear me making offers and my other team members making offers and the difference in what we were saying to the candidate. My team lead seemed to play favorites and if she liked you, you weren't required to follow the overall department policy of how an offer should be handled. This is not fair to the candidates and ultimately the patients because it's important to attract the right people into these roles.
Another big point of concern was the senior management of TA's focus on the number of offers we closed each week. Per team, we had a goal we were required to meet each week. While we were not commission-based, there was quite a lot of pressure from our team leads to make this goal and work into the weekend to meet it. I had one outstanding offer that I would not have been able to wrap up on a Saturday morning, due to a prior personal commitment. I alerted my team lead to my limited availabity during this one particular Saturday, and instead of letting the offer slide into the new week or asking another team member to help out, I was flat out told to pressure the candidate into accepting the offer on Friday afternoon. As an HR professional with 10 years of experience prior to taking this role, I was shocked that this was my team lead's solution to this particular challenge. I don't think it's ever a good idea or acceptable to pressure a candidate into a quick answer to a job offer. All this does is make them resentful of the recruitment process and possibly the company. Plus, there's nothing stopping the candidate from later rescinding their acceptance.
While yes, as recruiters, we don't want to have job openings lingering for a long time since that hurts the business and the patient experience, we also shouldn't be pressured to fill the job with the next available warm body. Most of these jobs involve direct patient care and it's so important to find the right kind of compassionate, caring person to fill the role. The company's reputation ultimately rests on the quality of patient care.
The goal seemed to be on TA to keep filling the openings (some of which were high turnover)and focus instead of examining why there was high turnover to begin with. Some causes I've seen for turnover have been low pay, mean managers, long hours and poor working conditions. If these underlying issues are not fully addressed in the company culture, TA will continue to keep spinning its wheels to fill and re-fill the same openings.
The typical TA employee is extremely young and rather inexperienced (hence the reason my twentysomething team lead thought asking me to pressure a candidate was OK), including its senior leaders, who are early to mid-40's at best. Having very few employees with significant and seasoned HR experience makes for a TA culture that has a limited view of how things should be done and ways to improve current processes.
Both during and after my time in TA, I witnessed team leads and managers having a lack of comfort when a process improvement was brought to their attention. Instead of actively listening and considering the pain points their customers were having, they spent a lot of time and energy defending why they were doing things the way they were. Those that will do well in TA will need to be extremely passionate not only about recruitment in general, but also with of TA's policies and procedures. They are looking for "Yes" men/women and not change agents within this department.
I often felt like I was a cog in the TA recruitment wheel, with a continual cycle of posting jobs, routing candidates to managers and making offers. There is very little variety in the work and the average number of openings per recruiter was around 70-80 requisitions.
