UnitedHealth Group Leverages Predictive Analytics for Enhanced Staffing and Retention
Judy Sweeney
Within the health-care industry, it’s safe to say that the human resources (HR) challenges can be as complex as they are numerous. While health-care organizations share many of the same staffing concerns as other types of industries, certain variables are unique to this sector. Indeed, the issue of hiring and retention in the health-care industry is a major concern because of a shortage of qualified medical personnel such as nurses. In addition, the 24/7, year-round nature of the industry creates unique full-time and part-time employment problems that need to be solved.
In addition, the high-stress nature of the profession means that the HR department needs to be particularly prepared when creating retention strategies. Many HR departments, however, still operate in silos, separated and largely disengaged from other corporate functions. This situation, combined with the challenges of staffing shortages, aging staff populations, and increasing demands for services, often leaves health-care organizations plagued with turnover, performance, and budgetary issues.
Health-Care HR for the Twenty-First Century
The challenge facing the health-care industry is to streamline and optimize its HR management while maintaining high-quality patient care. A solid human capital management strategy is needed to emphasize staffing, recruitment, and retention. This includes monitoring and tracking the requisite metrics to tackle staffing shortages, tighter government regulations, and intense competition for top professional talent. To meet these HR needs, successful firms in the health-care sector are looking to dramatically improve their technology processes. This search includes ways to leverage the benefits of predictive metrics so as to prioritize goals and align current actions with future objectives.
What Is Predictive Analytics?
Predictive analytics is a method for leveraging business intelligence (BI) tools such as data mining and statistics to make predictions of future events. The predictive analytical model enables HR departments to be more proactive and agile in identifying unexpected staffing and performance opportunities and to anticipate problems before they happen. In effect, by using the predictive analytics model in day-to-day HR operations, health-care companies can be more effective in running the business of talent.
As a leading health-care organization, UnitedHealth Group (UHG) is one such company using predictive analytics to improve care and HR concerns in an increasingly challenging environment. Today, UHG is one of the largest health-care operators in the United States, with access to more than 340,000 physicians and 3,200 hospitals, and whose policyholders submit tens of thousands of health claims and related documents daily. UHG’s mandate is to combine outstanding clinical insight with consumer-friendly services and advanced technology to help people achieve optimal health.
To this end, the company consists of five distinct business segments and offers services ranging from network-based health-care coverage for small, medium, and large companies; to global drug development and marketing services for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries; to investment capital for start-up and early stage companies that operate in the areas of health and well-being.
According to Michelle Fernando, Manager, International Recruitment Operations, the company faces many human capital management challenges in today’s health-care environment. These include improving the quality of care and patient satisfaction while decreasing costs in an environment where hiring is an ongoing concern.
Workforce performance management, or recruiting, hiring, and retaining top talent, can significantly enhance health-care financial and operational performance. Therefore, UHG determined that migrating to a talent-management software solution that leveraged predictive metrics would be the best solution for its HR—and company performance—requirements. For example, across its international locations and businesses, HR managers were all reporting recruitment metrics differently, leading to a need for greater data consistency. Not only was there an overlap of work being done, but there was also an excess number of reports trying to capture the needs of each business partner.
In UHG’s example, the company sought to improve its internal hiring processes on a global scale. This includes increasing international focus on employee hires. In the case of the company’s India offices, the firm needed to increase its internal hiring percentages.
“The recruiting culture in India is very volatile; career opportunities and turnover rates are very high in a highly specialized health-care industry. It’s a unique business with specific skill sets. It was a challenge for us to engage the employees, keep them happy, and give them reasons to stay,” says Fernando. “In these offices in particular, we were looking for innovative ways to boost internal hiring percentages to improve overall staff retention. Using analytics helped us get a handle on the issues and gave us clear ways to measure and improve our processes.”
UHG as a fast-growing organization must continuously recruit large numbers of candidates. UHG needed to come up with a consistent approach to measure the quality of hires. How were the qualifications, skills, knowledge, and experience of new hires meeting expectations as compared to initial requirements, as well as assessing time to productivity, department and organizational fit, staff turnover rates, and overall quality of hire? Simply put, the organization needed a more effective way to identify and diagnose its situation and in turn to make improvements in these areas. “HR reports were also done manually and requests were taking too long to fulfill. This was translating into increasing costs, inconsistent business information, and reduced productivity,” says Fernando.
Developing a Talent Management Strategy
Wanting to quickly address its business challenges and streamline its HR and workforce performance processes, UHG worked with talent-management solution provider Taleo to develop and deploy a new technology environment that leverages metrics to help companies be more predictive, thus making better business decisions and creating stronger career-pathing solutions for new and existing staff.
Specifically, UHG is using the Taleo Enterprise Edition to enhance its talent management processes for HR managers and employment candidates. Taleo is an on-demand, Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that is ideal for complex global companies like UHG. “The goal was to leverage technology to provide data-driven information on our staffing processes to identify opportunity areas and make improvements. The Taleo-based talent-management platform has helped us to streamline HR processes and analytics to better identify qualified candidates and improve the overall quality of hire,” says Fernando.
UHG used the Taleo platform to develop its International Recruitment Operations Dashboard, a self-service interactive Web 2.0 portal that allows staff at UHG to easily view and download relevant HR information. In order to ensure that the right resources and skills are available to execute a successful hiring and retention strategy, UHG is using a technology platform that helps capture the desired job knowledge metrics and requirements and match them to the skills, competencies, and knowledge of the candidates—all from a centralized global database. This is accomplished using four key metrics or measurements: quality of hire, source of hire, percentage of internal hires, and system utilization. These metrics enable them to ensure competent, qualified staff and high staff-retention rates.
For example, the “quality of hire” measurement is crucial for United-Health Group to determine that the employees hired are the right people and a good fit from a cultural, productivity, and experience perspective. This system also helps the company reduce the number of “quick quits” and improve employee retention—helping to keep staff engaged because they are a better fit in the first place. Thus, new hires are more prone to develop high-quality relationships with their peers, and UHG has seen a reduction in first-year attrition rates.
In terms of “source of hire,” having a centralized database allows the company to more easily streamline its global hiring practices by being able to trace back to the original source to weed out poor recruitment practices and firms. For example, the system now allows the organization to track and monitor data such as the specific career fairs or organizations that have provided a successful candidate in the past.
“Using a predictive analytical model, we can better analyze the employers that people came from and the sources we hired from. As a result, we can determine if there’s a specific company that has a high percentage of quality of hires and we then know that that’s a company we may want to target. In terms of sourcing and recruitment, this is useful information for us, as it may lead to better hires in the future,” says Fernando.
The Measure of HR Success
By using predictive analytics and having metrics available on a global scale, UHG is now better equipped to improve the quality of hire and staff retention worldwide. “Quality of hire is important for us. Having access to this data allows us to predict workers who are a better fit for the organization and become more productive quicker. We are now able to leverage our data and make stronger business decisions,” says Fernando.
To improve HR staffing processes, HR developed a central reporting portal for all international reports. This enables staff to leverage predictive metrics and access a single set of global reports that can be filtered as necessary to allow for a consistent set of data from one region or organization to another.
Users, for instance, can access the International Recruitment Operations Dashboard directly through an online interface that features detailed report information, including location, organization, business segment, and job function. The dashboard is refreshed on a daily basis, allowing users to have access to the most up-to-date HR data across the organization. This means that recruitment metrics are now more accurate and consistent across the organization. As the solution is hosted online, the new reporting model requires minimal maintenance from UnitedHealth Group’s International Recruitment Operations team. In addition, with the improved reporting and analytics tools, UnitedHealth Group can better target areas for improvement throughout the staffing process.
For dashboard reports, each metric has a description and a benchmark goal, and all metrics have a link to the detailed report where the measure originated. This enables management to better determine staffing costs, staffing cycle times, and overall productivity. For example, the organization now has a more detailed skills-based candidate relationship database. It allows for better capture skills, ability, and experience in a central database for both active and passive candidates with self-service profiles. In fact, the organization conducted a user survey in its Asia Pacific region, where 93 percent responded that the dashboard was easy to navigate and 86 percent said that the detailed reports were easy to understand.
Ultimately, the talent-management platform in place at UnitedHealth Group is helping the organization to significantly improve its recruitment and retention processes in order to boost its financial and operational performance. Technology tools help organizations like UHG to break down silos, streamline operations, and allow workers to have centralized, real-time access for mission-critical information and transactional data. “We really needed to be more methodical and analytical about our use of HR technology,” says Fernando. “The enhancements we have made help UnitedHealth Group to better analyze employee turnover trends and the effects of this turnover throughout our entire organization.”