Trust Issues with AI in Recruiting w/ Jason Pistulka – The Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Ep. 13

[Music] thanks for hanging out with us sitting down for a moment uh who are you and why are you here yeah uh I’m Jason pistola I uh AVP of ta operations for HCA Healthcare um part of the reason why I’m here is because my office is a few miles down the road convenient um so yeah makes it uh easy um speaking some this afternoon but a large contingent of the HC team um is is uh here at the conference um came last year uh enjoyed it but uh so yeah it’s on my regular conference tour now so nice nice well especially since it’s here so right out of the gate what moving forward into 2025 what piece of advice would you give your ta peers for moving forward in 2025 to me the the biggest Gap that exists in almost every recruiting organization out there is operational excellence yeah um when you look at lots of people try to bring a magic pill in to solve all their problems but most of their problems still come lack of operational excellence um and there is no magic pill uh to solve for that uh so mostly now everybody’s promising the entire world with AI how AI can solve everything I say AI has two definitions uh artificial intelligence or artificial ignorance and there’s a lot of artificial ignorance being sold out there yeah a lot of people who had um you know a a simple keyword matching that they decided we’re going to Rebrand it to AI because that’s what the cool thing is um and uh and so a lot of people I think are are chasing um Phantom wishes to solve their problems that again their long pole in the tent comes back to that operational excellence whether that be within their own recruiting teams or within their hiring teams yeah I’m waiting for that startup that has we use no AI whatsoever on their on their website I’m always intrigued in healthc care from a a branding perspective as an outsider this hospital system this system this system like they all look the same you’re not Coke and pepsy how do you look at branding and separating yourself from the other options that are out there it’s it’s a multi-faceted story with HCA because um some of our hospitals do have an HCA brand on them but um a huge portion of them don’t at all when you buy a great if if we were to buy Vanderbilt we wouldn’t want to strip Vanderbilt offens lap HCA on right so it depends on what Market you’re in if you’re in Austin We’re St David’s if you’re in uh um Denver it’s Swedish Medical Center you know so in some places our hospitals have a great brand um they’re offering premium Services um that aren’t available in other markets other hospitals are more of a community hospital and they don’t have the the same kind kind of pizzazz um that a big name brand Hospital can have when we’re selling to candidates though the thing where we as HCA can sell sell is on scale and Excellence so as I like to tell people um HCA births more babies in Sweden and Switzerland combined um that means something to people as a result we know how to run a labor and delivery Center um like no other and if you’re in a community hospital in uh in New Hampshire you’re getting the benefit of that companywide knowledge we have um uh AI teams that analyze and can identify early on set of sepsis and things of that nature um and and all of that Excellence is pushed out to the smallest of hospitals out there which is why you know if you look at Health grades um for hospitals our hospitals outscore the average Hospital uh in the country and it’s because of that operational excellence that we drive as an organization which is interesting on the HR side because we have leaders that are so used to data and excellence and prove it um to me that it it makes us to have to be just as data Savvy as they are in the clinical world right right so in 2024 looking back what surprised you the most what surprised me the most in 2024 it’s hard to surprise me after covid and uh and dealing with healthare I bet yes well so if anything I guess what surprised me the most is is that we came back to a sense of normality okay um and and so if you look at before covid we had about 25,000 open jobs okay we peaked in Co at 43,000 open jobs we’re back into that upper 20s again okay um we’re back to more typical turnovers and everything else um and it it felt like we wouldn’t get there as quickly as we did um so I I’d say that’s probably my biggest surprise um and uh you know that the market has improved significantly um for us in employment um but uh so normal I guess is what’s surprising me cuz I’ve been stuck in abnormal for quite a long time and we we hired uh during our Peak we hired 200 new Recruiters in a year so we were onboarding onboarding onboarding on boarding um and just running at such a pace that kind of everything in comparison right now I hate to say seems easy I don’t want our senior leadership to to to see that but in compar in comparison to that um you know that was a stressful time yeah we talked to a lot of vendors people who are selling you stuff you mentioned hiring a lot of recruiters I’m sure you get a ton of calls they’re not hiring technical people the way they used to the economy is slowing down in some places but healthc care is that Beacon of money that pot of gold that vendors want to to to get talk about how you filter the services with the the number of recruiters you have is there a process is there a testing period like talk about that um the typical vendor does not operate on scale very well um and uh and they try to take uh I was I was just having this conversation with Jeremy from recruit but they try to take their model that worked in financial services or worked in uh it where when I worked in that space you know we were spending $10,000 a hire right and and bring that model into Healthcare where our cost is a fraction of that we operate at a whole different level of efficiency and the recruiters carry a significantly different wck load so you can’t expect the same level of recruiter behavior and engagement in your tool right when you’re carrying 100 wrecks as you do with somebody who’s carrying 15 it wrecks um so they don’t think about how that scales financially as well as um actual adoption wise in an organization and uh and they don’t think about how do you make that adoption happen um across a huge team I me we have 20ish divisions of recruiters that set all over the country and I compare to when I you know I ran a team in the pit and we all sat in the pit I could hear every conversation I could drive everything it’s completely different when you have to monitor and drive through data so how do you provide the data um and the guidance to uh a team like us to drive that what we find is most people can’t we what we do is we educate them on here’s how we do it we educate them on the needs and and we build them capabilities which is probably the biggest reason why so many people um end up really loving being with haa and valuing HCA is because we drive them to make them better we typically break their software um and we we typically find all of their warts um so many of our vendors we will identify problems before they know it’s a problem because no other customer was big enough to hit it because it only happens one out of every 5,000 applicants or whatever well when you’re our size and you get three and a half million applicants a year that happens on quite frequent so um scale yeah so that that level of scale um ends up really giving vendors chops and and see the world in a different way of how do you do change management how do you do adoption how do you build tools to do that um and so it’s one of the things that I personally enjoy is is being that product consultant back into them and here’s why you need to think this way and here’s the challenges of a large Oran ization so let’s look forward to 2025 for you what is going to be your top priority yeah well my my top priority we’re we’re delivering a road map um that’s a talent uh transformation effort that we’ve been working on for two years and we’re just coming into the the piloting phase this fall and we’ll start um rolling out uh um more broadly and after the first year I’m actually leaving the organization uh at the end of q1 so I’m trying to get as much of that laid out be uh before I do and get those tracks laid um so a huge portion of what I’m doing at this point is is trying to make sure that the organization is well positioned and this has been a multi-year um process this Tech as well being rolled out along with this um so that’s a big undertaking it is we have multiple Avenues one we’re going from a single workflow to multiple workflows in our ATS which is a huge lift and shift but smart yep um we’re doing a huge automation effort in on interviewing that we’re using sense to do okay um and uh uh and and that is a custom build that we’re doing that um is going to allow recruiters to have most of it automatically driven right out of the ATS um and capture really great data for us again to recognize the bad human behavior that happens in the field um we’ve already rolled out brigh hire across our whole organization that we’re using um for call Quality across not just interviewing they’ll offer extensions we’re going to start doing it for intake sessions um Etc because again we’re trying to speed the first conversation quality of first conversation speed to interview that’s what our whole impact is in this uh transformation effort and uh it’s been exciting and challenging automation you talked about it from a recruiting side yep where most or where most Industries I think are are fearful of automation you know with if a robot can flip Burgers you don’t need a cook but I feel like in healthcare I would want to work in a in a system that had tools that would help me do my job better take away some of the monotonous work how do how do you as an organization or as a system think about Automation and how does that tie into recruiting you’re going to be working with the best tools with us you’re going to be uh Innovative how do you look at automation from the big picture to the employee coming in yeah I mean in recruiting on the automation front what I’ve found is so many people don’t use the tools that they have the number of you know I get solicited obviously for jobs one of my favorite things to do is go out and apply for a job on their website and when I see these major corporations that don’t ask any job specific knockout questions don’t do anything and you’re saying you’re making your recruiters review every applicant and not only can you ask the question so I can stack Rank and mass disposition but in most ats’s you can even automate disposition actions on those things yeah you know so people aren’t using the basic automation that they do so they’re out there searching for AI when when I say you don’t need AI what you some of the automations that you already have at your hands um are so helpful and so we’ve done a lot in that space we’ve always been big users of knockout questions and things of that nature we have a new um function that’s rolling out that’s going to be uh automated compensation knockout um for our recruiters that’s we custom built with our vendor it’s really cool um and uh and then we’re using sense Journeys um to build some automation follow-ups with people so we’re going to have automations that uh um after an interview happens say 60 90 minutes delayed they’ll send a text to the hiring manager and saying do you want to hire this person you know 1 2 3 4 and then automatically upd in the ATS what those things are so um none of that’s AI you know it’s just all Automation and using different things and so so many companies including H we’re skeptical of AI obviously there’s a lot of legal issues with AI and how you’re using it in applicants and uh um and and and there there’s studies that are showing that candidates don’t like or trust Ai and now with these in these states where you have to say well here’s how we’re using it I don’t care for the AI on candidate selection just from the candidate experience piece and I kind of want to keep it out of that funnel but that doesn’t mean there isn’t all kinds of automation that can make your recruiters faster more efficient more accurate um and uh and get yourself to to to better results and those are things that we have pursued and we continue to pursue 100% agree well thank you so much for sitting down with us if somebody wants to connect with you or or you know I don’t know maybe apply for a job where would you send them yeah um go to connect with me I’m easy enough to find on uh LinkedIn and happy to accept that connection if you just search for careers HCA um we will pop up we uh we’re well advertised out there um and we operate in 20 States so we got a lot of jobs floating around out there so excellent we’ll enjoy the show thanks for hanging out thanks guys take care [Music]