How a Top 1,000+ Employee Healthcare Company Uses Live Chat to Hire Empathetic, Knowledgeable, and Responsible Chat Care Coordinators
This case study has been anonymized to protect the identify of our customer and the individual who was interviewed for this case study.
“Healthcare is such a scary experience and environment with so many unknowns, and it's so personal, that we need people who care, and who can actually make this atmosphere warm, inviting, friendly, and who can be knowledgeable without being condescending… but you can't really measure that unless you're giving an experience.”
Steven Levert, Recruiting Coordinator, Top Healthcare Company
75% of admin time cut from the hiring process
3,000+ applicants assessed via live chat
Hundreds of high-quality Chat Care Coordinators hired
Recruiting teams across the company are adopting live chat for assessments and screenings
The Challenge
Trying to measure empathy in Google Forms … for thousands of candidates
In December 2021, Top Healthcare Company was in the middle of a hiring surge—but they didn’t have the tools they needed to assess candidates efficiently and effectively.
“Previously, we used Google Forms to administer all of our assessments and technical screens with our candidates—which was not an efficient system,” says Steven.
At the time, the person who administered and sent the assessment would be the one who received notification of and access to the results, “so it was difficult for us when one of the Recruiting Coordinators was out of office or didn't have access to it,” Steven explains.
Steven says their old system “was difficult to track,” and “made us look messy.”
He remembers instances when two different recruiting team members accidentally sent the same assessment to the same candidate because there was no easy way to see who’d already sent what—and that just didn’t look professional.
And on top of all that, “there was no way to archive it and upload it into our Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which is Lever,” Steven explains. “A lot of times we would have to copy and paste it into a Google Doc, and then save that as a PDF and upload it—which is not efficient at all.”
“We really needed a solidified, one-stop station where we could access all of our candidates' technical screenings, and a place to house that data, so we could upload it to our Applicant Tracking System,” recalls Steven.
And beyond being clunky, hard to track, and time-consuming, Google Forms just wasn’t cutting it when it came to identifying the highest-quality candidates among thousands of applicants.
Steven used to work on the frontline as a Chat Care Coordinator, so he knows first-hand what skills a candidate needs to provide quality virtual care.
He says that empathy is especially important in healthcare, because it’s “such a scary experience and environment with so many unknowns, and it's so personal.”
So, when it comes to hiring the best care representatives, “we need people who care, and who can actually make this atmosphere warm, inviting, friendly, and who can be knowledgeable without being condescending. People who lower their pride and really give a taste of friendliness and hope.”
Steven says this has always been important, but it’s even more so now since the pandemic, which “really hurt a lot of people, and especially hurt a lot of trust in healthcare for some.”
When their Chat Care Coordinators are live chatting with Top Healthcare Company members, Steven wants to make sure that they can read in between the lines. He explains that they need to both “take at face value who this member is, no matter what their identity is, but also cater to them specifically on who they are and what their identity is.”
“Through a Google Form, we would honestly just send them a few questions, look at their responses, and see if they were able to answer,” remembers Steven. “It was easy to measure if they got the question right or wrong,” but when it comes to empathy and other intrinsic qualities, “you can't really measure that unless you're giving an experience.”
In search of a hiring process that would cut down admin time and identify higher-quality candidates, Top Healthcare Company started testing Assess With Care—the healthcare recruiting software that helps HR professionals find the best chat coordinators faster, by evaluating what they’ll actually be doing on the job.
“We want to make sure that our Chat Care Coordinators can read in between the lines… that they take at face value who this member is, no matter what their identity is, but also cater to them specifically on who they are and what their identity is. So, empathy is a skill that we all need to be successful.”
The Solution
Understanding candidates’ empathy, responsibility, and humility through live chat
Steven says the “experience” they were missing from the recruiting process was the chat itself. “It's the interaction that we need in order to really figure out what is going on here and how people are interacting.”
“When it comes to the live chat,” Steven explains, “that is qualitative data. We're able to see the intrinsic qualities of our candidates and see skills and personalities that can't be measured by numbers.”
Assessing Chat Care Coordinator applicants via live chat allows recruiters to see how candidates would actually perform on the job.
“When it's live like that, we're able to really see if they know what they're talking about,” explains Steven. “We can also see if their interviewer is able to say, ‘Hey, wow. I’m loving this conversation with this candidate, and it makes me want to trust them more and tell them all of the medical things that I don't usually trust strangers with.’”
In other words, Live chatting gives interviewers a good sense of how a candidate interacts with people, and helps determine whether or not the candidate can provide members with the quality virtual care they deserve.
And unlike static Google Form answers, a live conversation allows interviewers to evaluate a candidate’s “empathy and ability to connect with the member during that mock chat,” says Steven.
Ultimately, it helps evaluators “really figure out what skills that we can't necessarily teach are present in the candidate themselves — the skills are going to make them a great addition to the team.”
In addition to empathy, the Top Healthcare Company recruiting team uses live chat to measure candidates’ responsibility, humility, and relationship-building skills.
“Instead of just sending a Google Form and us docking their answers as right or wrong, during a live chat, candidates are able to make mistakes, but then also correct themselves,” explains Steven.
Then interviewers can “see if candidates are able to take responsibility for that, and if they're able to lower their pride and be humble.”
Interviewers also evaluate “if they're able to make a connection with the member” by paying attention to the candidate’s “friendliness, and their ability to establish a relationship and build trust.”
Steven also says that live chatting is as important for interviewers as it is for prospective employees. On the one hand, live chat helps the recruiting team identify those intrinsic qualities that candidates need to be successful at Top Healthcare Company. And on the other, it gives candidates “a little bit more of a taste and experience of what they would have to work with,” says Steven.
“It gives them a reality check and really helps them figure out — as much as if we want to choose them — if they want to choose us.”
The Results
75% of time saved, thousands of applicants assessed, and hundreds of high-quality chat coordinators hired
“Assess With Care helps us administer all of our assessments and technical screens with our candidates,” says Steven.
“It's been wonderful in administering that to the candidates, making sure that our team really keeps track of our candidates, and in making sure we efficiently improve our processes as well.”
Steven says that Assess With Care has helped the team critically think about how their rubric needs to look at more intrinsic qualities, and that it’s helped them “make a decision on what type of talent we want, rethink that, and reshape our pipelines.”
Most importantly, Steven says Assess With Care helps him and his team hire only the very best people for the job.
“The biggest thing is that we're able to really hone in on our candidates and just see who they are,” he explains. “We're able to see what their values are, and if they coexist and align with ours, and if they're headed on the right track to working with us.”
Since rolling out in January 2022, Steven estimates that his team has used Assess With Care to evaluate upwards of 3,000 candidates.
Among the thousands, they’ve been able to identify the highest quality candidates, and hire hundreds of exceptional Chat Care Coordinators.
And ultimately, those new hires provide Top Healthcare Company members with quality care, and help the company live out its mission on a broader scale.
Of course, effectiveness and efficiency go hand-in-hand. Steven says Assess With Care “is a huge time-saver for screening and having to connect with interviewers.” He says it “really makes everyone's job easier, but without cutting a corner.”
“From the Recruiting Coordinator perspective, those administering the assessments are able to save time by 75%,” because there’s no more going back and forth via email to reach out and connect people.
He also says that the live feed, notifications, and mobile access help keep his team on the same page and make all the information they need more accessible and actionable. And once candidate results are in, team members can click one button and immediately upload them to their applicant tracking system, Lever. No copying, pasting, or downloading necessary.
Steven says that Assess With Care has “saved time for the candidate, for the recruiter, for those administering the assessments, and also for the graders.”
And, he says that Brendan from the Assess With Care team “helped customize it to our needs, our candidate's needs, our recruiter's needs, and our hiring managers needs. We know we can rely on him one hundred percent.”
Steven says that the software being so versatile is part of why it’s skyrocketing beyond just the Member Care Recruiting Team at Top Healthcare Company.
“The Behavior Health Team needs an efficient system as well, so we created and improved our licensed clinical social worker screenings, and our psychologist behavioral health screenings. And we're able to input that into a written assessment as well.”
He says the Engineering Team, Management Team, and the Corporate Team are also figuring out how to use the tool for recruitment, and “to really build the foundations of talking virtually.”
“This is a fantastic tool,” says Steven.
Here at Assess With Care, we love working with Steven and the Top Healthcare Company team. We’re really looking forward to continuing to improve our software — so they can find the right people to help them work towards their mission of raising the standard of healthcare for everyone.