Welcome to the 2024 CandE Winner Case Study series.
Each year, the CandE Benchmark Research Program collects case studies from CandE Winners – the employers with above-average candidate experience ratings in our research. These CandE Winners answer the following questions:
- What recruiting and candidate experience improvements have you made?
- How did you build support and commitment to make these improvements?
- Which improvements were the most innovative?
- How will you use your CandE Award in your employer branding?
- Do you use any of your CandE data to quantify business impact?
These are the employers from our 2024 CandE Program that invested in improving their recruiting, hiring, and candidate experience, reaping the ultimate benefits of a positive business impact – candidates more likely to apply again, to refer others, to be a brand advocate, and to be a customer for consumer-based businesses.
This case study was from Northwell Health. Northwell Health is New York’s largest healthcare provider, serving NYC, Long Island and Westchester.
If you’re interested in participating in the 2025 CandE Benchmark Research Program, you can learn more about it here.
- What recruiting processes and candidate experience key improvements have you identified and completed in the past 6-12 months? What data or evidence prompted you to make these changes? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each.)
Northwell Health is New York State’s largest private employer and healthcare provider with more than 87,000 team members. At Northwell, our mission is to improve the health and wellbeing of the communities we serve through the care we provide, and through the programs, partnerships, and career opportunities we seek to deliver. Northwell hires for tens of thousands of different positions – clinical and non-clinical roles – every year, and our recruitment teams must find ways to attract qualified talent in what remains a competitive job market. Adding to the competitiveness is ensuring recruitment teams can meet the needs of candidates, which according to the CandE data we received is a desire for more personable connections, consistent and timely communications, and further transparency on the hiring process.
Given the volume of applications and inability to personally contact each applicant (as much as we would like to do so), we knew we needed to take a different approach to engaging with qualified talent while ensuring a positive experience for all. To do this, talent acquisition strategies are based on three guiding principles: (1) attracting talent by creating and sustaining an authentic and credible brand that reflects and supports a commitment to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDI&B); (2) engaging and building relationships by providing more opportunities for community members to connect with Northwell Health’s recruitment team; and (3) advising with career guidance and education by taking proactive steps to meet candidates where they are, helping candidates of all abilities, backgrounds, and ages be better prepared to obtain employment.
We believe this approach contributed to our low, well below average candidate resentment rate. In addition, it supports the themes from the CandE results noting helpful and professional recruiters given the guidance we are able to provide when meeting candidates across our numerous events and workshops.
A large part of our talent marketing strategy to improve our recruiting processes and candidate experience included an expansion of our outreach across numerous communities. What better way to reach talent than for recruiters to meet candidates where they are and to make careers more accessible for everyone — from more traditional methods such as job fairs and interview day events (both in-person and virtual) — to less traditional venues like community fairs, faith-based organizations, multi-cultural celebrations like the Hong Kong Dragon Boat Races, LGBTQ+ Pride parades and career fairs at underserved high schools and colleges.
And at many of the career events, Northwell Career Services offers guidance on career paths, resume writing tips, and step-by-step instruction on how to complete our job application, easing the way for candidates to apply. We also have multi-lingual translation services leveraging iPads available for all our events, and bilingual informational flyers in Spanish. As part of our communities at work program, we provide workshops at local churches, libraries, and community centers, sharing information on resume writing, interview tips, and how to build one’s personal brand.
During the past two years, we increased the number of events in which we engage with candidates by 140%, reaching 388 events through August 31 in 2024. In addition, between 2022-2023, when this increase of community activities began, we saw a 17% increase in total applications, with a 23.94% rise in external applications. This supports a positive impact of community events on application numbers in attracting talent to want to work for the organization and increasing visibility of Northwell careers as more people are applying. We look forward to seeing this continue in 2024.
- How did you build support and commitment within your team and the broader organization to make these improvements? How did you demonstrate and report on the importance of a quality candidate experience with your leadership team? (Be as specific as possible with examples.)
After we identified the areas of opportunity as a leadership team, we were also able to ensure our full department completed comprehensive customer experience training. We embarked on a communications road show across the organization that included increasing the visibility of the work being conducted by the Career Services team. This included ongoing quarterly meetings with leaders across all regions, presentations during select townhalls, and internal communications across a variety of channels such as our career experience e-newsletter and other company e-newsletters, social media posts on Northwell Life Instagram and Viva Engage, and our intranet. In addition, we revamped our Hiring for Success training series for hiring leaders and completed 175 hours of training for 600 hiring leaders in the first half of 2024 alone that included many elements emphasizing the importance of a positive experience.
- Which of these improvements do you think are the most unique and innovative and why? How do you know that your changes are making a difference? What data or evidence validates the innovative improvements you made? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each based on your people, your processes, and your technologies, and include any candidate quotes that validate the improvements made.)
We believe our presence and support in the community has contributed to an overall above average positive experience as rated by our job candidates above in this year’s CandE Research Benchmark program. Please find supporting data, inclusive of candidate quotes, on the results of a few of these initiatives below.
- 2024 Summer Talent Marketing Campaign: This campaign leveraged events, our new mobile careers van, QR codes, digital and print advertising, email, and SMS text marketing tactics to meet individuals wherever they might be — from community parks to ballparks.
In all, our 2023-2024 Summer Talent Marketing campaigns resulted in the following outcomes:
- 2 million+ impressions or views to raise awareness
- 2,000+ event attendees
- 64,000+ clicks of our digital ads
- 9,300+ influenced application starts
- 215+ hires
- Northwell Coffee and Careers: Northwell Health’s Coffee and Careers is a monthly careers event that provides an opportunity for individuals (offered to current employees and/or external candidates) to meet with a talent acquisition specialist for an in-person or virtual career coaching session, to provide them with career path guidance, resume review, exploration of clinical and non-clinical opportunities and/or more.
- Completed 736 total coaching sessions from April-August by Northwell Career Services recruitment team members.
- Direct feedback from our Coffee and Careers participants:
- “Not only did I gain a better understanding of how to advance at Northwell, but I also learned a tremendous number of helpful tips regarding my resume.”
- “I found the career coaching experience to be quite helpful in providing a general idea of how to navigate future career paths [at Northwell] and determine the direction to take. I highly recommend it.”
- “It was such a transformative experience meeting with my coach. She was knowledgeable, relatable, compassionate, and provided much needed guidance for long-term career planning within the health system.”
- Northwell Career Advisement: Program matches Northwell employees with mentors in various professions, connecting 200 advisees with 120+ advisors in the first half of 2024 and now expanded to offer a self-guided track.
- Northwell Communities at Work: Northwell has increased partnerships with community-based groups, faith-based organizations, and libraries in underserved communities to help inform and prepare individuals for employment, as well as introduce new job training programs.
- Since October 2023, there have been 321 participants across Harlem, Staten Island, Jamaica, Corona/Elmhurst, Brentwood, Central Islip, and Huntington (the Dolan Center) and 73 offers accepted for Northwell careers.
- Beginnings Orientation for new hires:
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- Northwell has also created an inclusive environment at our ongoing weekly Beginnings orientation sessions for new hires with multilingual welcome signs, an interactive photobooth where individuals can snap pictures to share their first day at Northwell on social media, surveys to gather attendee feedback on interviewing through orientation, and referral cards to invite friends and family members to apply for a job with us. As part of our Truly Inclusive culture, we also offer pronoun pins to help recognize individuality and spread awareness of respecting one’s gender identity and expression.
- Whether you’ve won your first CandE Award or multiple CandE Awards, how will you publicly use the CandE Award, and what it represents, in your employer branding and recruitment marketing? (Be as specific as possible with examples.)
We publicize the award in numerous ways, including:
- Sharing with all of Career Services, HR, and senior leadership
- Including in slides when we present across the organization and for external candidates as part of our Get to Know Northwell virtual monthly interest sessions
- Promoting the recognition on social media and on our careers website to increase visibility with candidates
- Do you use any of your candidate experience benchmark data to quantify and demonstrate financial, referral, and/or employer branding business impact to your leadership team, your recruiting, and/or hiring managers? If yes, how? (Be as specific as possible with examples.)
Yes, we conducted a comprehensive review and assessment based on the CandE data at each moment of the candidate lifecycle from awareness to onboarding. Our goal was to identify areas of opportunity to ensure a positive candidate experience at all stages of the lifecycle.
This assessment was conducted in two phases:
- Phase One: Review data from the 2024 CandE survey results, including identifying themes in the comments, and brainstorm with each team within Career Services what the areas of opportunity are, while leveraging our customer experience training (all of Career Services completed customer experience training in the second half of 2024)
- Phase Two: Synthesize the data and identify what is business as usual and what are enhancements to implement for 2025