Dimitri Boylan
Welcome to another episode of The Talent Transformation Podcast. Today, we have Carol McDaniel, Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Providence Health. Carol has over 20 years of experience in talent acquisition, talent management and HR in general. I’m really excited to have you here. Thank you so much for coming.
Carol McDaniel
Oh, thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here.
Dimitri Boylan
Great. So you’ve been in the industry for a while. And, tell me about that. Actually, you mentioned to me before we started that you were a recruiter at heart, so let’s just go right to that. Because I was a recruiter, too.
Carol McDaniel
Oh, excellent. There’s a special breed of people that our recruiters, and they’re really either really spectacular or kind of creepy. So I’d like to think I’m more on the spectacular side than the creepy side.
Dimitri Boylan
I like to think that too. I might not be that self-aware. I don’t know.
Carol McDaniel
Well, you know what’s interesting about recruiting in general and talent acquisition as a whole? As an industry, you don’t ever really go to college and say, “I’m going to get into talent acquisition, I’m going to be a recruiter.” Ninety-nine percent of the people you talk to just kind of fell into it. And I would tell you, I follow the same suit.
I was in the military. I was in the Air Force for ten years. And post leaving the military, I found myself just again, like a lot of veterans, “I don’t know what my skills translate to. I don’t know what to do.” And I thought I had a really successful career in the military and then you leave and you’re like, “Who am I?”
By happenstance, I had a friend who referred me to a staffing agency and said, “She probably can be good about helping people find jobs, you know? So let’s put her in this.” Back in the day, I won’t name a company because it really dates me. But I started working, as an account executive and placing people in jobs. And that’s where it started. And I just… It’s that satisfaction joy you get from, like, I found your dream job or I’m helping you pay your bills, whatever it is. And it’s just started there.
Dimitri Boylan
So you didn’t stay in that, obviously. No, you moved to other things.
Carol McDaniel
So, really, what drove me out of that, being an actual frontline recruiter, one of the first outside of the staffing industry, I was recruited into a client, and it was my favorite job. And I tell the story a lot. It was recruiting outbound telemarketers.
If you want to wean someone out of recruiting, put them in that job, because it’s probably the most… You know, it’s basically butts in seats, right? How many people can I get through the door and so that was short-lived. But it teaches you a lot again, about, you know, how we need some technology here. I can’t listen to these recordings all day. You know, people wanting to get this job.
So quickly I moved on to be more of an in-house recruiter and then more around really helping to be a manager, motivating the recruiters, being part of a team, which, you know, you just take that path and it’s not perfect. You just kind of go through the motions. You learn what you love. You learn the industries that you love. And I’ve always said, you know, throughout my entire career, recruiting is recruiting. If you’re a great recruiter, if you understand the talent acquisition space. Gosh. And I remember my first stint in healthcare when the vernacular changed, you were no longer… It wasn’t recruiting, it was talent acquisition.
I’m an elevator with my healthcare badge on, “Carol McDaniel, Director, Talent Acquisition.” And patients and other, you know, team members in my organization looking at my name tag like, “So what do you do?” Well, you know, do we need to dance for you? It’s like, “It’s talent acquisition. It’s the more contemporary version of recruiting.”
So you kind of see how that changed. And really, you know, getting people to understand that it wasn’t just butts in seats. It’s really about building the organization and bringing in the talent that’s going to grow your business. You know, and how important it is.
Dimitri Boylan
So you moved then? How did you end up in Providence?
Carol McDaniel
Well, I’ve had a very interesting career. I’m a native Floridian. I never planned on ever leaving the state. And I got a phone call from Delta Airlines. I was recruited up from healthcare—I was in at Johns Hopkins—recruited up to Delta. I had to leave Florida.
Dimitri Boylan
You didn’t go far. Wasn’t that just to Atlanta?
Carol McDaniel
But Atlanta’s like, you know, Mars, when you’re living in Florida, you really don’t want to be there. You like, okay, this is not my ideal home, but we made the move and Delta was an excellent opportunity.
And through you know, due to Covid and some other crazy…
Dimitri Boylan
It’s a great company.
Carol McDaniel
It’s an excellent company. It was you know supposed to be the the end game for me. And obviously, Covid had a different intention in mind. So we basically all lost our jobs and so I kind of, you know, was trying to decide what to do.
And I had this amazing opportunity to work, got an offer from a startup in New York. “Would you be willing to relocate up to our offices in the World Trade Center?” It’s a food technology company. And I’ve never worked for a startup before, and I thought, you know, the beauty of a startup is—and you obviously know this— is the decisions you make, literally on the fly, the impact is immediate.
Dimitri Boylan
Immediate. Yes.
Carol McDaniel
And it’s a huge gratification, you know, that feeling, that immediate gratification. You get it, or it’s a disaster immediately. And so I loved that thrill; it was just so exciting. So I made the move. I lived in Connecticut, up there for a year, and completely restructured the company. Then, all the people team members were let go. So back to Atlanta I came.
And through networking, I was introduced to my now leader. And Providence is in a very interesting place where they’re kind of on the cusp of some really amazing innovation and technology, especially in the recruiting and talent acquisition space.
I really didn’t want to come back to healthcare. It’s a grind.
Dimitri Boylan
Healthcare’s tough.
Carol McDaniel
Nurses are never going to be fully staffed. We’re never going to get past that shortage if you’re not innovative in how you utilize your staff and your workforce, you’re doomed.
Dimitri Boylan
My mother was a nurse and managed to have a couple of floors.
Carol McDaniel
So you get it. And it’s it’s painful. And literally, when your hands are tied, you can’t… What can I possibly do? I can’t build a nurse. I can’t create a nurse. So it’s super stressful on a recruiting team and you never get that gratification of filling a job because you’re always behind.
So, Providence, I don’t know if you’re aware? We have a BPO in place. So our BPO manages our HR service center, payroll and talent acquisition. So all core recruiting is outsourced, so I thought it was super interesting. You don’t see that in healthcare very often. So how does that work? And what is the team internally do? And what we’ve been able to do in the year that I’ve been there is build this core strategic solutions provider innovator type of team that I call our core team.
No matter if we brought it all back in and fully staffed actually function or we stayed in an outsourced model, this core team is who we will always need.
Dimitri Boylan
So you’re not trapped in the day-to-day delivery.
Carol McDaniel
I’m not. And our team is not. We do consider ourselves a service delivery organization and we deliver excellent service and, through our partnership with our BPO, very high level of, expectation we have and how they perform and ultimately we’re all held accountable for it. So there is a vested interest for them to be successful.
But, yeah, I don’t have that day-to-day, “Where’s my nurse for the night shift?”
Dimitri Boylan
Well, that’s really one of the biggest problems in recruiting departments is that they can’t separate the day-to-day from the strategic. They can’t get to do the strategic because the day has such a high workload that you’re trapped in a reactionary mode.
Carol McDaniel
That’s right.
Dimitri Boylan
With every individual recruiter having 30 requisitions open, the manager having to try and swap out recruiters based on capabilities, but not having a system to really do it. Not really being able to analyze the data because they don’t have time to design the system that will give them the data that they really want.
Carol McDaniel
Exactly.
Dimitri Boylan
And so you kind of landed in a nice structure there. That was fortuitous.
Carol McDaniel
Yeah. I mean, I think there are challenges in it for sure. But I feel very fortunate that I can take, you know, 25 years of experience and come in and say, “There are some fundamental things we continue to do and elevate from a service perspective.” But there’s then there’s that opportunity to really be innovative and say, you know, “We’re going to partner differently with the business. We’re going to talk about things that the business talks about.” And the needs. We talk about vacancy rates. We talk about workforce planning. We’re strong partners in that area. And when you have leadership that supports that and just, you know, they’re not in your business every day. They like you understand the vision and the mission and the values and you go forward. And it’s it’s a really wonderful place to be. I feel very, very fortunate.
Dimitri Boylan
Oh, that’s great, that’s good. It’s nice to be able to craft a vision and do the things that shape it. And it’s kind of a luxury for you because a lot of people are not in that situation.
Carol McDaniel
No. And it’s not lost on the fact that there are still parts of healthcare as a whole, as an industry. Still, there are parts of it that are very, you know, thinking of talent acquisition, and frankly, HR as a transaction. Right?
So it’s building your brand in the organization, which doesn’t happen immediately. It’s that reinforcement of the data, reinforcement of the why behind what we’re doing, reinforcement of why we’re changing this workflow. Why now do we want you to do this or don’t do this anymore because we’ve got it? We’re going to take care of that. A lot of the communications are that what we do is really teaching and helping the business understand that we’re your partner. We’re not the transaction.
Dimitri Boylan
Well, I’m not an expert in healthcare, but one thing I’ve noticed over the last decade is that- because we have healthcare customers.
Carol McDaniel
Here we are.
Dimitri Boylan
They have become much more brand-focused. You know, 20 years ago, it was just the healthcare institution next to you and that was yours. And now, you know, you’ve seen over the years that that they have brands based on innovation based on sometimes in some vertical care capabilities. Right? And I think that the industry has gotten more sophisticated in that way. And it probably has a big impact on recruiting, right? Because, you know, recruiting is always about telling a story and people respond to stories.
If people just respond to compensation to salary offers, you might not have the right person. The people that respond to the story and to the idea of what the company is and what it can be and what it means, and being part of that, that’s kind of like your highest value candidates, right?
Carol McDaniel
You’re exactly right. And it’s just as you said. A lot of healthcare organizations now are brand-focused. It’s a consumer-driven market, right? It’s expression-centric, but it’s consumer-driven. So recruiting has taken that turn on saying, you know, “I’m I’m selling opportunities. And so in order to do that effectively, I have to align with the brand of the organization and tell that story effectively, consistently and get people to buy into that brand.”
You might not be the highest compensation deliverer—you might be a little below market—but if you have a great story to tell and can showcase people in the organization who look and are relatable to the potential candidate, you can tell that story and it has impact and people make a preference. Right? People prefer a certain brand of chips or a certain style of soft drink, whatever the case may be.
Making the case for a preference for Providence will always be our journey. Right? And how we tell that story through the many channels, whether it’s, you know, through social, whether it’s through community activation, whatever it is. We continually push on that story. And that’s, I think the work, as you mentioned earlier, we get to do now… We get to shape and tell the story of our own employees who started out…
Our own incoming CEO was hired into the organization as a security officer, and he’s the incoming CEO. I mean, his story is quite incredible, but there are hundreds of those in our own organization that people have come in as a housekeeper, cleaning up on the night shift, and now I’m running a scrum team, or I’m a nurse manager in the NICU. It’s incredible.
Dimitri Boylan
And a lot of people in healthcare have actually done other jobs and then went back and studied nursing or studied to become a medical technician. And they actually have other journeys that they’ve experienced.
Carol McDaniel
That’s right.
Dimitri Boylan
And I’m assuming that they’re kind of moving into it… A lot of them are moving into it having done other things, having other life experiences and kind of choosing healthcare. It’s a very particular business. You know, you have to really care about people. It’s very hard to be in that business if you don’t care about people.
Carol McDaniel
If you don’t feel grounded in the work and you don’t feel you’re contributing or you’re valuable. You know, I would also say, though, that, it’s also kind of a misnomer around healthcare that if you are in data science, you’re a systems engineer. There are incredible career opportunities in what, as you mentioned, healthcare’s becoming… Healthcare companies are becoming much more innovative. They’re looking at AI from a patient-physician perspective to that.
And so, you know, there’s incredible opportunities and non-clinical roles that can really, you know, expand your career and your knowledge and your skills. So that’s another part of the story, right? It’s not just when we go to colleges or high schools for that matter. You know, people are like, “But I don’t want to be a nurse. I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t like blood.” Whatever it is. “But how about data science? Epidemiology, where you’re focused on research.”
There are incredible opportunities. And I think sharing that story at the right levels is how we’re going to get there.
Dimitri Boylan
So, AI is really rocking the scientific and healthcare communities right now; it’s having an incredible impact. Are you thinking about AI? How do you think about AI and technology in your group? Because your groups kind of defined the vision for how you provide this service.
Carol McDaniel
That’s a loaded question, I would say, and it’s okay on the consumer side. So patients, physicians, people who are direct patient care… There’s tremendous work that’s already been done with AI by our leaders who are helping physicians spend more time with their patients. Right? AI relieves them from a lot of the tactical, day-to-day things that take them away, in front of the computer, notes and things of that nature.
From a talent acquisition strategy perspective, we’re approaching it with eyes wide open. We are looking at all the ways in which we can enable our BPO partners to utilize AI. We’re looking at ways we can enable our strategists within TA to create better experiences for our caregivers, as we call our employees, and better experiences for our hiring managers and get away from that, “I’ve got to hit five buttons to get a req open. What do I need to do? What can make this easier?”
So, you know, our toe is in the water. We’re looking our first kind of pass, which is digital assistants. So how do we help people along the way? We have to really be careful. But not afraid. And that’s kind of our balance. We’re just being careful to ensure that we’re not crossing areas where we will have a compliance issue. I think it will be the same way within a heavily regulated environment like Delta Airlines. You have to really just be sensitive to what you’re doing and the preferences that you’re making with AI and what you’re allowing AI to do for you versus where we need to lean in with the human touch.
And the team is very much on board with tech-enabled with the human touch. In healthcare, I find in a lot of the areas that we recruit in, there is still a huge amount of need for that human touch. People still want to talk to someone. But what can we let go of?
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. I always thought it was just how much time I could spend talking to hiring managers, who are my customers, and how much time I could spend talking to candidates that was really the gating factor for how many connections I could establish.
Everything else was really just something you had to do.
Carol McDaniel
That’s right.
Dimitri Boylan
And, you know, I went from really zero technology back then. Right? Telephone between the two people.
Carol McDaniel
Yes, I understand.
Dimitri Boylan
You know, we really were very bullish on the technology, but never to the sense that it would take away from the human component just simply to be able to figure out who the right person was to talk to.
Carol McDaniel
That’s right. And it’s interesting because, when you talk to just anyone in the organization and they say, “Technology is replacing humans. We used to be able to pick up the phone and call our caregiver relations, employee relations, and talk to a human.”
Dimitri Boylan
You can still pick up the phone.
Carol McDaniel
You can still do that. But you can also fix your tax withholdings. You can also print your payslip. You can also change your address. You don’t have to talk to anybody. And after a year or two of that centralized model through our BPO partnership and through technology, we put things like that in place and people can’t remember… Here’s to say you can still talk to somebody, but now you can do things at your convenience in the middle of the night when you wake up at 4 a.m. and go, “Oh my gosh, I forgot to change my tax buildings or my address change when I got married.” And you can do these things at your convenience now. And so people now look back and go, “Oh yeah, I guess that’s right.”
Dimitri Boylan
Well, I think in recruiting, the big thing for us when we were building technology was that we would have conversations with people, but we wanted information. And right away the technology was better able to give us information that we needed. And I think that’s not done yet. So I think AI is going to be really good at that.
Carol McDaniel
I agree 100% with you. There’s that whole piece and I don’t know if you ever read any articles about recruiter enablement and giving the recruiter function the tools and the technology they need to have the information. And to make, whether it be how you market to a certain population or just having access to all the information you need to tell people what they need to know to make the decision. And that enablement piece is really, really big.
It’s a little different in our current model, but it’s still having those tools and technology at your fingertips as a recruiter to get immediate…
Dimitri Boylan
Because really, on the back, the challenge, you know, is, is and I’m sure that’s true at health care, you know, you have a recruiter who’s talking to an oncologist about your oncology program. And then the next minute they’re talking to your data scientist candidate about the epidemiology department and what kind of work they’re doing. And it’s very hard, without information… It’s very hard to know all those things. And I think AI is going to offer them the ability to understand more quickly what they have to communicate.
And obviously they’re going to reshape that as they communicate based on how the communication is going. But information making information available, it’s hard to beat AI on that.
Carol McDaniel
I agree. I’m looking forward to kind of implementing some of those areas where we can really just enable people to be better and more effective.
Dimitri Boylan
Better at their job because they have more information.
Carol McDaniel
That’s right.
Dimitri Boylan
I mean, also to be able to identify trends in your organization in terms of how those experiences happen. You know, how the recruiting experience is happening. I always say, if every recruiter was really great at every single thing they recruited for, you’d have a really nice department to be really easy to manage. But, you know, that’s not the story.
Some people are better at telling a story. Some people are better at dealing with critical issues that candidates have. Some people are better at describing one area of the business, but they don’t really feel confident with describing the other area of the business. And if you look at the patterns of the way you deliver your service. And AI is very good at looking at patterns as we know. You might discover that the way you use your own manpower to get the job done is really needs to be adjusted.
Carol McDaniel
You’re exactly right. I mean, putting people where they’re where they’re their love, what they’re doing, they’re better at their jobs. And it’s great for retention and it’s great for being better brand ambassadors, if you will, for the organization because they’re comfortable where they’re sitting.
I think there’s also, and healthcare is no different that, that high volume need. There’s, a place for the story. There’s a place for the courting, if you will, and the selling, the opportunities. But there’s also people who want to interview Sunday evening and start on Monday or, you know, interview on Monday and start on that next Monday.
And so how do you utilize technology and AI to help move people through the process much quicker without missing anything and still giving them a great experience? Because that’s, you know, we’re leaning into, right? Is that experience of experiencing our brand, experiencing our mission through the process, how do we do that in a high volume capacity? And then slow it down, pump the brakes and do it in a very executive recruiting way or with a very valuable nurse that we’re trying to bring over from another competing organization. It is so important.
Dimitri Boylan
And that’s the scaling factor. It has to scale so that it can move up and down in terms of capacity.
So, it sounds like things are going pretty well though. So that’s…
Carol McDaniel
Yeah, I mean, Providence as a whole has a pretty large footprint on the West Coast. We have about 124,000 employees and 51 hospitals. It’s a pretty big footprint. But I would tell you that we made 40,000 hires last year, and our vacancy rates are at a some of the lowest they’ve been historically, which is really great.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have huge needs. That doesn’t mean we’re not always recruiting. But, I’m really liking how we’re moving the needle, not only with your standard numbers, your recruiting metrics, but we’re really changing the experience. That’s why I mentioned earlier that this team’s focus is on solutions providers and innovators, really honing in on that strategy and helping our leaders understand that based on utilizing what we call our predictive hiring analytics and saying, “Habitually, this is what we’re looking at for you for 2026 or 2025.” This is what we want to start doing now and getting way ahead.
You know, they get nervous, “I don’t want to open 40 more reqs.” “It’s okay. We got you. Let’s do this and start pipelining and get people through the process.” And so that’s where I’m really excited. And I think we’re really moving the needle there. And so hopefully, we’ll never get over the nursing shortage. It’s just going to be our lives. But there are other areas. Diagnostic imaging. There’s a lot of areas where you know we don’t have enough curriculums. We don’t have enough teachers teaching these things. And so we’re growing our own, we’re going to figure this out, and we’re putting people through training classes and certifying them and trying to build our retention numbers up so we can keep you.
There’s a term out there we’ve used a couple of times: six figures in six years. You know, we’re going to get you there.
Dimitri Boylan
Oh! That’s a nice story.
Carol McDaniel
So we’re going to get you there.
Dimitri Boylan
If they can learn enough.
Carol McDaniel
And how quickly we can do that. Because sometimes you can’t see past the next month. If you can see in three months we can get you into a CNA program, and in six months we can get you into nursing school, etc.
Dimitri Boylan
And the jobs are there.
Carol McDaniel
The jobs are there.
Dimitri Boylan
And they’re six-figure jobs and the value add is really high for society. So you feel good about that. So yeah, six figures in six years. That’s a nice one. That’s got a good…
Carol McDaniel
Yeah. Our CHRO, Greg Tell, he talks about that a lot. It’s a good little motivator. And people hear that and they’re like, “Wow! Can we do that.” “Yes you can.”
Dimitri Boylan
Well that’s really interesting. It seems like you… I would be more stressed out if I was recruiting for 50 hospitals than you are. So I’m glad you seem to be…
Carol McDaniel
That’s why you get your hair color, you get a little… It’s still a heavy job and it’s a big responsibility. But yeah, I think we’ve got the right people in the right seats now and we’re, we’re, we’re moving forward with a really great vision and I’m just thrilled.
Dimitri Boylan
Well good luck with that. I mean it’s great. Thank you so much for stopping by.
Carol McDaniel
Oh thank you.
Dimitri Boylan
I think that experience, it was an interesting story. And I love to talk to you again.
Carol McDaniel
I would love that.
Dimitri Boylan
Thank you.
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