A conversation between Charles Koch Foundation’s Ryan Stowers and University of Chicago Medicine’s (UCM) hiring team, Director of HR Services Erin Mandel and Director of Talent Strategy Betsy Rahill, regarding their partnership with Skills for Chicagoland’s Future (Skills).
Access, eliminating barriers to employment, and creating pathways to opportunity are the founding principles of the jobs-first model that formed Skills for Chicagoland’s Future (Skills). Chicago employers are looking for solutions to take their inclusive hiring plans and turn them into action. Skills makes it happen. Deep employer relationships and a robust team of HR and career development professionals set Skills’ job-first model apart from traditional training-focused workforce agencies. Since 2012, Skills has helped change the lives of thousands of individuals — placing them into quality jobs, providing strong recruiting in overlooked communities, and facilitating robust partnerships with local employers. Key to Skills’ model is an inherent belief that if employers change the way they think about hiring and the potential of all individuals to contribute, they will be able to find hidden talent in their own communities to fill in-demand roles. This model proves that good talent is everywhere and seeking often overlooked talent can result in more opportunities for under or unemployed workers and successful outcomes for employers.
The University of Chicago Medical Center (UCM) is a leader in both health care and civic leadership in Chicago. Their focus on community impact can be seen throughout the organization. When UCM recognized a need to hire more local talent from under resourced communities surrounding the medical center, they knew they needed Skills to help find quality local talent quickly. The partnership has resulted in hundreds of Chicagoans being hired into quality jobs at UCM.
The Skills model continues to have a significant impact, both in Chicago and at affiliate sites in Rhode Island and Phoenix. Skills for America’s Future endeavors to expand nationally so it can take its unique model to other regions that need a jobs-first model that brings together the local workforce and community businesses.
Ryan Stowers: What qualities are you looking for in new talent and how did you know you could find that talent in the local Chicago community?
Erin Mandel: Essentially, we’re looking for individuals who share the mission, vision, and values of UCM.
We’re seeking individuals who are committed to excellence and embody equity, take ownership, and make a difference for our patients and the community that we serve. We know that we have amazing people in our communities surrounding the University of Chicago Medical Center who have these qualities.
In addition to those qualities, we’re also seeking individuals who have a passion to really enter the health care field to be part of some of our pathway programs.
Stowers: There is a unique dynamic to the partnership with Skills and UCM. It is not common for an organization to focus on local talent in the way UCM has been able to. How have you been able to focus on local talent and place qualified individuals who may have otherwise been overlooked?
Betsy Rahill: We’re an anchor institution in the community, and one of the largest employers in southside Chicago. So, it’s difficult for our recruitment team to be able to touch every single one of those applicants alone. Our partnership with Skills creates the opportunity for candidates who might otherwise get overlooked to have an opportunity to be able to put their resume in front of UCM. We prioritize those applications because we know that they’ve been looked at by Skills.
Essentiality, Skills is an amplifier of our talent team.
Mandel: We know we have amazing, talented people in our communities surrounding the University of Chicago Medical Center. Skills has helped us connect to them. Skills ensures candidates meet the minimum qualifications for the roles we are targeting and make sure the candidates are coached and ready for the interview process, which is key.
The candidates excel in the process and our hiring managers really enjoy interviewing those candidates. They typically have drive because they want to get to work. They are from our community and are under or unemployed and ready to serve UCM patients, who are basically their neighbors from their community.
Stowers: It is incredible to hear you all talk about this dynamic. It’s reflective of challenges employers across the country are facing with the roles they are trying to fill. Can you talk about the mutual benefit between UCM and the local talent hired through the partnership with Skills?
Rahill: Skills targets local hires. From an employer perspective, we know we have higher retention rates when we hire somebody local. The retention rate of Skills’ hires is usually around 90 percent, consistently.
It’s also a huge priority for UCM to invest in a local workforce so that employees represent the patients we serve. We want to make an economic impact in the community since, as we know, employment is a social determinant of health and we’re committed to improving the health of our community.
And then for the employees themselves, as an employer, we provide amazing benefits. There’s a lot of opportunity for growth in health care. Our tuition reimbursement plans are substantial. It potentially allows someone to become a nurse at UCM at no cost.
There is also the pride of working for an organization that is in your backyard and invested in your community.
Stowers: That is powerful. Let’s take a step back. From your perspective, how can hiring managers, chief human resources officers and other HR professionals change how they think about hiring and the potential of all individuals to find hidden talent in their own communities?
Mandel: We need to let leaders know they need to be open-minded and consider candidates who align with the values of the organization. A lot of jobs, ours included, provide on-the-job training. So, aligning on values first can allow focus on the soft skills of the person rather than the job specific skills.
We need to look at the person, rather than making sure that they meet all the job description requirements. We need people who want to show up and contribute and who are invested in the organization. We can teach a lot of the skills that come along with positions.
It is hard for hiring managers and leaders to pivot. Many of them think they need someone who has done the exact job before. But I always tell hiring managers, these are green individuals that you can teach the way you want. You can mold them. A lot of it is just changing that mindset to be able to look at these individuals differently and get them into jobs that maybe they have not done before.
Stowers: What did hiring look like before your partnership with Skills and how has the partnership changed how you view talent? What value have the individuals hired through the partnership brought to UCM?
Mandel: We started working with Skills in 2014. Prior to that, we spent a lot of time vetting candidates to ensure they met the minimum qualifications and that they had the skills to perform the jobs.
Now, with our partnership with Skills, there is minimal screening that really needs to happen on our end because they are doing a lot of the work for us. They are handing over candidates who check all the boxes already. This helps us as an organization and as a recruitment team to really find good, qualified candidates quickly because Skills is doing a lot of front-end work.
These are invested employees from the community. They have a passion; they have empathy for the people in their community that they’re taking care of. We are benefiting them, but really, they are benefiting us.
Rahill: From a quality standpoint, our organization has become invested in looking at patient outcomes with our Black and brown patients compared to our white patients. Now that we are tracking the data, we’re able to see progress, improvements, and overall outcomes.
A part of that conversation has been that some of this movement is correlated to the employee, right? When you have a local workforce that looks and comes from the same community as our patients, you are going to see more synergy, more comfort, and more trust. I think you will see that there is a correlation and one of the benefits of having a local workforce is that there is a lot of pride and a lot of commitment to their work. When you have a committed organization that’s proud of the work they do, you are going to have results from those employees.
Stowers: I am so impressed with how you both talk about the opportunities for change you have in your roles. Your whole approach is based on the dignity of the individual and what that individual brings to the table. What would you say are the biggest challenges or barriers to driving this kind of hiring change in their organizations or at societal level more broadly?
Rahill: In health care, it is very easy to think about the immediate need and the short-term solution. As Erin mentioned, when you take a different mindset and hire someone with potential and hire for the right behaviors and allow training to meet the skill level, that is a long-term strategy.
We know we need to increase the labor force in health care. We need to look at these nontraditional talent pools to fill pipelines, and that will take time. These individuals are not going to come in with the five years’ experience that hiring managers want.
But if we do not take the time to build up a new workforce, then we are going to continue to be shorthanded. Investing in the long run and investing in these nontraditional talent pools and using organizations like Skills to find these talent pools is going to be critical to our long-term success.
Following the conversation with Rahill and Mandel, Stowers reflected on the impact of the relationship between Skills and UCM. “This partnership highlights the mutual benefit that comes from an employer recognizing the dignity and potential of those in their community to contribute,” said Stowers. “UCM recognized that there were individuals in their own neighborhood who could fill these jobs but were facing barriers that prevented them from applying or completing the application process. By partnering with Skills, UCM found overlooked talent, created opportunities for workers, and boosted their local community. That’s a recipe for success that more employers should replicate.”
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