Aya Healthcare Helps CHOC Children’s Find Top-Quality New RN Grads to Fill Residency Program Positions

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

CHOC Children’s (CHOC), a Magnet-designated facility located in Orange County, opens about 35 new graduate nurse positions for their residency program two times a year. They typically receive hundreds of applications for these few positions.

CHOC opened their new grad residency program application process for seven days and received 776 applications. The facility’s policy is to screen every applicant for interview consideration. In addition, they promise all internal candidates an interview. Onsite interview days were scheduled and all candidates needed to be screened and interviewed before then. Currently, the HR department is transitioning to a new
HRIS system and is intensely focused on the technology changeover project.

“With two and a half internal resources handling all nurse recruitment and other HR duties, it was evident that it would be impossible to screen and interview all applicants in time,” said Mark Steiman, Executive Director of Human Resources at CHOC. “That’s when we turned to Aya Healthcare.”

CHOC outsourced the screening and initial interview process to Aya’s Clinical Services team, who utilized a virtual interviewing tool to establish a standardized set of interview questions based on CHOC’s internal interview template and individual unit input. Interview templates were further differentiated by unit type as applicants are only allowed to interview for one unit. Links to complete the interview were sent to all 776 candidates.

The Aya clinical team screened and interviewed 560 applicants within eight calendar days. The remainder of the candidates were disqualified from the review process, either due to lack of initial qualifications or failure to interview.

Each candidate was then stack-ranked using a customized scoring rubric that Aya’s clinical team created. CHOC was supplied a stack-ranked list of candidates, by specialty, according to their overall weighted average rubric scores. CHOC leadership was also able to request one-off score sheets for internal candidates and special referrals. The top three candidates for each requisition opening were invited to interview onsite.

Over 120 onsite interviews were conducted by CHOC hiring managers during the two-day interview event, resulting in offers to fill all 35 available positions. Three soft offers were made on the spot during the interview, which has never happened before.

“It’s because of Aya’s intense screening and vetting process that we found the best-of-the-best candidates from such a large application pool,” said Steiman. “They saved us a tremendous amount of time and administrative burden and we’re so thankful they helped us achieve this goal.”