How to Hire Hospital Staff in Volume and Maintain Quality

In an interview at the anniversary of her first year as vice president of human resources at Christus Health, Marty Margetts discusses how she accomplished her primary objective—the hiring of 700 new employees to staff the health system's new headquarters building in Irving, TX. It opened January 23 and will eventually have over 1,000 employees.

Margetts oversees 30,000 employees domestically and abroad at the non-profit Catholic health system's 350 facilities. She has 23 years of healthcare experience.

HLM: What opportunities or challenges does hiring at such a high volume provide an HR department?

Margetts: I've looked at it as an exciting time for us because it's very rare, with the exception of a startup company, that you would ever be able to bring in a set of talent at the magnitude that we are able to.

It's been a very exciting time, and it's given us an opportunity to provide a lot of standardization around our recruitment and culture. We've been able to articulate our culture more effectively over a broad group of people.

It's challenging from the logistics standpoint. There's such a short period of time, and your workload is harder, but also from a human resources perspective, you want to provide that same level of service as if you were fully staffed and bringing [potential employees] in to be interviewed one or two at a time.

So it's definitely challenging to make sure that our onboarding is the most efficient as possible and all of the new associates are being given the same level of service that we would normally provide. But overall, I think it's a very exciting type of challenge to be in.

HLM: What strategies should HR execs implement to make sure the quality of hires isn't lacking because of the volume?

Margetts: You have to be really clear about who you're looking for. Spend time on the front-end outlining those things related to the job and the cultural attributes you're looking for with the hiring managers.

Make sure you're very clear and work very closely with the hiring managers. It's extremely important that they are a partner in this and that the managers spend a significant enough amount of time to interview the choices.

It's also important to assess where you're sourcing your candidates from. We've tried to be very diligent about getting out in the community, especially vocally, since we're a new part of the community. We've made sure we're going to Irvine job fairs and local events, etc.

So I think tapping into that local talent is a good strategy. We have paid more attention to our assessment processes, too, to make sure that people do, to the best of our knowledge, fit into the organization and the culture. We have assessment tools to make sure that potential employees meet some basic behavioral criteria for fitting into our organization.

HLM: What should the priorities for HR budgets and resources be this year?

Margetts: It certainly keeps me awake at night thinking about our company and how we will accomplish our business goals. To do that you have to make sure you have the right players and skill sets. Talent management is an essential focus.

I would like to see us spend more of our resources in that area, but in order to do that you have to address the administrative functions. You have to make sure your transactional functions are taken care of—that they're streamlined and effective, without variations.

HLM: What is the most inefficient use of time in human resources?

Margetts: Transactional work—especially when we don't have the information systems to communicate properly. There's a lot of paperwork and filling out forms everywhere you look. So that does tend to consume a lot of your time when you don't have efficiencies to be able to manage those

HLM: What do you think HR executives should consider when they're looking at a new year and setting their own goals?

Margetts: That depends on what the organization's goals are. What I encourage HR professionals to do is to understand where the company is going. Align yourself with the goals of the company. What issues keep your leaders awake at night?

If you know what those are, then you should try to figure out how you can solve those issues... My advice would be to think about what are the goals of your business and then figure out how your services can help to service those goals.

HLM: If a human resources executive doesn't have a close relationship with the C-suite, what are strategies for working around that?

Margetts: When you can bring value to the organization, that's when you get the attention and the invitation to be a part of that leadership. So you have to look for ways that you can bring that value and find how you can help further the organization's goals.

Whether that's spearheading projects that are important to the organization that match your skillset and expertise, or to partner with the CEO on talent development and succession planning, you have to find those key projects.

I also think analytics are really important. Most business people respond to that and for HR nowadays, you have to provide the data to bring your perspective on the business to light.... I'm an industrial engineer by training, so I have a bit of a unique background in human resources too.

I'm much more slanted towards using data and implementing process efficiencies. I do think that's very important today in the business and knowing how HR can transcend that.

HLM: Is the size of your HR staff growing as your organization expands?

Margetts: I wouldn't say that our HR department is growing, but we're transforming... So we're looking at opportunities to deliver our services differently. Just like anyone in healthcare right now, we're all needing to transform our services to do things a little differently because of healthcare reform.

Everybody needs to look at how they're delivering services and ask is the way we've always done things going to work for us in the future, because it's probably not.