Written by Michelle Jokisch Polo for Every Child Thrives.
In 2010, Trinity Health in West Michigan was struggling with staff turnover. While they had multiple openings across their hospital and health care systems, they just weren’t finding people who wanted to stay in the jobs.
“We saw that as an opportunity to try something different … to try what we used to call the evidence-based selection process,” says Shana Lewis, vice president of Talent Acquisition and Workforce Development Programs at Trinity Health.
When they began the program they looked to improve some key metrics, including reducing the time it took to fill vacancies and lowering first-year turnover rates. “At the time we weren’t really after increasing the diversity of our workforce, although that’s always been a lens for us at Trinity,” Lewis explains. “But we were more focused on not having an adverse impact on certain populations through the use of this process.”
In other words, Lewis and her team were looking to remove bias from the hiring process, something companies across the country have been struggling to figure out for decades.