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Now Hiring: Healthcare Experience Not Required

Analysis  |  By Philip Betbeze  
   May 04, 2017

With an eye toward developing a customer-centric ethos, many hospitals and health systems are looking outside the industry for established senior leaders. IU Health's HR chief is one of those breaking the mold.

Liz Dunlap never thought she would work in healthcare. Why would she? She's held top human resources jobs with some of the most recognizable consumer brand names in the country: Panera Bread, Christie's, and Godiva (then part of the Campbell Soup Company).

Which is why she thought the recruiter who called her about an opportunity at IU Health in Indianapolis about 18 months ago had the wrong person.  She was in St. Louis at the time, working as chief people officer at Panera, one of the more successful quick service food companies in the nation, which has built its brand on healthy eating.


How Real is Healthcare Consumerism?


He assured her that "they were interested in talking to people from outside the industry about their open [executive vice president and human resources officer] position," she says.

Still doubtful, Southern California native Dunlap and her husband took their first-ever trip to Indianapolis to discuss the opportunity with the leaders at the 15-hospital academic health system led by then new CEO Dennis Murphy.

The executive recruiter told Dunlap that she would know within an hour of meeting the leadership at IU Health whether it was something she'd want to consider.

The recruiter was right. She was ready to take the job after the one-and-a-half-hour meeting.

"What got me excited about coming in was the quality and caliber of leaders I would be working with on the leadership team and the ability to have an impact on their mission," she says.

'A Little More Creative'

Michelle Lee, a consultant in the southern California office of healthcare executive search firm Witt/Kieffer, who was not involved in placing Dunlap, says hiring from outside the industry is happening more as healthcare organizations seek to adapt to a rapidly changing environment that is placing a greater emphasis on the consumer.

"Healthcare as an industry is looking outside for ways to be a little more creative," she says. "That's doesn't necessarily come from folks who are entrenched in healthcare."

Lee sees three areas healthcare organizations are searching for outside talent: hospitality, life sciences, and other consumer-facing industries.

That said, the learning curve for those who have no history in healthcare can be steep, and hiring someone who has consumer experience is certainly no panacea.

"It's not an easy industry to learn," Lee says. "One quality they need is curiosity. The execs who have been successful are curious. They keep asking questions and they really listen."

Dunlap's early experience was no exception.

Steep Learning Curve
Learning healthcare's many acronyms and its different vernacular was challenging. "My first couple of months were a deep learning curve coming up to speed," she says.

But overall, the job is similar in focus to what she was used to. Ultimately, it's about getting the best talent into the organization, then engaging, and most importantly, retaining them.

One unique challenge for Dunlap has been recruiting nurses. There's a widely acknowledged shortage, and it's getting worse. Experienced nurses are retiring at greater rate than new nurses are entering, and demand for their services is spiking in nontraditional areas, such drugstores and other retail outlets, urgent care centers, and freestanding EDs.

"That forces us to be creative," says Dunlap. "We need to create a place where elite nurses want to work. It's not only about creating that environment, but [also] effectively communicating that to candidates."

Dunlap says she's working hard on taking the "friction" out of the hiring process, so IU Health can move more quickly than competing sources of nursing jobs. That means making it easier to find the jobs, apply for them, and getting candidates through the interview process quickly.

"Then we make them an offer," she says. "My goal is that the competition can't move as quickly. Of course, we have to live up to our value proposition once they're here."

Applying Lessons from Consumer Businesses

Toward that end, she's working on instituting tools that provide more frequent, consistent, and regular feedback from employees, and the health system is currently evaluating such tools.

"The whole point is a very shortened set of two to six questions, that will be measures of engagement but also topical issues important to our team members," she says. "Why did they come? Why do they stay? We need to communicate that message to recruits."

She's also focusing on making exit interview data more useful in training and retraining managers, because, as she says, people join organizations, but leave bad managers.

"We are starting to measure leader quality, because we understand individuals need support to be a better leader," she says.

She's also borrowing from her past.

When she was at Panera, guest satisfaction was a key measure. There, the most important metric was not "messing up" orders, where 60% were customized. Along with a warm and friendly greeting and food quality, she says, "we knew there were four to five things we needed to deliver on to drive frequency of business and the number of times customers would come in a quarter."

Patient satisfaction provides similar important measures for healthcare, she says.

"IU Health needs to focus on the development of our leaders, she says. "Consumer-facing businesses, whether retail or other, have better processes in place for developing leaders. That's an opportunity area for us."

Philip Betbeze is the senior leadership editor at HealthLeaders.


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