How ChenMed is Building the Best Candidate Database in Value-based Healthcare

ChenMed is a fast-growing primary care provider that serves moderate-to-low-income seniors with complex chronic diseases. The privately held, physician-led company operates over 100 centers across 12 states in the United States. ChenMed is known for its value-based care model, which focuses on providing high-touch, VIP, preventive primary care. Unlike typical primary care providers, ChenMed maintains a much lower doctor-patient ratio, allowing for more personalized and attentive care. The company is recognized for its mission to help seniors live longer and healthier lives and has been featured in Fortune’s 2020 “Change The World” list. Additionally, ChenMed has been named a “Great Places To Work” and “Most Loved Places to Work” in 2021. The company operates under various names, including Dedicated Senior Medical Center, Chen Senior Medical Center, and JenCare Senior Medical Center.

When three out of every four professionals in healthcare are looking to leave the industry, providing a better talent experience is no longer optional — it’s critical to hire, develop, and retain the workers who are transforming care for the neediest populations. This is especially true if you’re a company in hypergrowth. Fast-growing primary care provider ChenMed knows this firsthand. Their value-based care serves moderate-to-low-income seniors with complex chronic diseases. The privately held, physician-led company has over 100 centers in 12 states, with 80% of roles falling into high-volume clinical support staffing. Christin Davis, Managing Director of HR Operations and Technology started her role at ChenMed in 2020, and quickly discovered several talent acquisition and management areas that had to be addressed to see them through the pandemic and beyond. First, they lacked a robust talent community from which to source and engage candidates — especially for roles in their primary location. “A lot of candidates in healthcare aren’t even applying because they’re in such high demand,” explained Davis, and “South Florida isn’t exactly a mecca for the skill sets we need,” she continued. “We do a lot of sourcing which requires the ability — almost like an executive search firm — to build and maintain a database and then market to it whenever and however we need to.” A reliable talent community where they could search and filter by skills, experience, interest, location, and more would allow Davis and her team to find best-fit candidates in the right areas and target them appropriately. Second, they were delivering a lackluster candidate experience for both external and internal job seekers. Applications were lengthy and lacked basic UX design — and they needed more actionable visibility into career mobility for employees. Without it, retention would be an uphill battle considering the competitive talent landscape. And thirdly, they needed to automate numerous TA processes en masse so recruiters could devote more time on high-impact activities.

To overcome these challenges and meet C-suite priorities, ChenMed selected Phenom’s talent experience platform to put power — and intelligence — behind their main goals: Hire faster and better. In healthcare especially, quality can’t be sacrificed for quantity — but time to fill is also a critical component to providing good care. Reaching candidates with the right qualifications quickly, and keeping them engaged, was paramount to ChenMed’s TA strategy. Being able to nurture passive career site visitors as well as previous applicants was a must. “We wanted the ability to invite someone back, especially if they resonate with our mission,” Davis noted. Make smarter talent decisions. On their way to hiring faster and better, ChenMed required more insightful candidate data and personas to ensure they were hiring the right people. “We needed to have better notes on candidates and know more about people,” Davis shared. “There’s a human life at the end of our supply chain,” emphasized Kara Lloyd, Enterprise Talent Strategy Effectiveness COE at ChenMed, “and getting the right candidate in the right position is vital. It not only ensures better quality of care, it means they’re more likely to stay.” Empower internal development and promotion. “Giving our people career ladders and opportunities is essential to retain them,” said Davis. But common to companies in hypergrowth, Chenmed’s number of external hires significantly outweigh internal hires. By investing in Phenom Talent Marketplace, the team can surface personalized opportunities within the org for employees to find and apply for new roles or gigs, see learning opportunities, chart their own career path, or seek relevant mentorship.

• The Phenom CRM and Phenom AI Discovery have been instrumental in ChenMed’s goal to make better talent decisions by building stronger talent pipelines with all career site visitors — even those who don’t apply for a job. Most importantly, ChenMed recruiters are using the CRM and Phenom Talent Analytics to uncover critical insights that inform their recruiting strategy and promote more meaningful conversations with candidates.
• With an accurate, continually growing candidate database, ChenMed now has a thorough understanding of their candidate personas — including employees — so they can serve them content they want to see. By making changes like this, their recruitment marketing efforts are soaring. In fact, one campaign alone resulted in 5% of their database applying for a new job at ChenMed. “We usually strive for a 1-3% apply rate on a campaign like that. We were thrilled to get five,” Davis reported.
• Using Phenom Talent Marketplace, time spent on ChenMed’s internal employee career site increased 21% in the last year — with 76% of employees who click on a job description applying to that position. And with Phenom Referrals, they’ve witnessed an 85% increase in employee referrals year over year.
• Through these combined efforts, Chenmed has grown their candidate database to over half a million candidates — and in just six months, increased both external and internal applications, reduced time to fill, and leveled off turnover precipitated by the pandemic despite their expansive growth.

• Increased applies 25%
• Increased employee referrals 85%
• Time spent on internal employee career site increased 21%
• 76% of employees who click on a job description apply to that position
• Grown candidate database to over half a million candidates