Covered California – like most government agencies – has a critical mission: ensure that Californians are able to choose from a variety of affordable, brand-name health insurance plans that best meet their individual or business needs.
To accomplish that mission, the agency needs the right people with the right skills and the right amount of focus. Which is precisely why they’ve completely revamped how they hire and develop their employees over the last four years.
“It’s been a complete transformation,” Assistant Deputy Director of HR Rachael Mccord said. “It’s something our other state agencies can look forward to and learn from.”
How Covered California transformed how they’re hiring talent.
In 2017, Terri Maley was hired as Covered California’s first recruiter. At that time, the agency relied on a “post-and-pray” approach, where jobs were posted on the agency’s website and they hoped good applicants would apply, Maley said.
Maley focused on replacing that with a more proactive hiring approach, where Covered California could attract great candidates by developing their employer brand and reaching out to top talent. To execute that strategy, the agency invested in LinkedIn Jobs, LinkedIn Recruiter and a LinkedIn Page.
“LinkedIn was really the only platform where we could proactively source talent,” Maley said. “We felt like, at the time, the other sites were a place to post our jobs, but we couldn’t engage with talent.”
This proactive approach paid off immediately. Within three months, twice as many people came to Covered California’s career site and applied for jobs, leading to significantly stronger talent pools and a quicker hiring process.
Seeing those results, the agency continued to invest in recruiting, developing a team under Maley. As part of that team, Maley brought on Kaley Cooper to lead Covered California’s executive recruiting team.
That also had immediate results.
“Within the past three years, we’ve been able to save hundreds of thousands of dollars we’d otherwise spend on executive recruiting firms,’ Cooper said.
Concurrently, Maley, Cooper and their teams have helped change how managers approach hiring. Now, each hiring manager meets with a recruiter to discuss what their perfect candidate looks like, which helps them crystalize exactly what they’re looking for.
Equipped with that information, Covered California uses LinkedIn to source that talent. Sometimes, that’s proactively, using LinkedIn Recruiter. Or, it’s through LinkedIn Job slots, where they are better able to show off their employer value proposition and mission of helping Californians find their right healthcare plan.
Because of this work, for the past year, Covered California has maintained a vacancy rate of less than 10%, on average. And it’s been better for all parties involved.
“It’s allowed us to fill positions faster with the right people,” Cooper said. “Plus, beyond the numbers, we’re creating a better experience for everyone – job candidates, hiring managers and recruiters.”
How Covered California transformed how they’re developing talent.
As Covered California transformed the way it hired, the agency put a stronger focus on how it was developing the talent that was coming in. That focus intensified when Covered California realized many of its managers were not taking the 20 hours of biannual training they were expected to.
Why?
Up until a year ago, Covered California employees primarily learned via in-person training. That was both expensive and inconvenient, as managers had to take time off from their day-to-day responsibilities to go somewhere for an in-person class.
Gina Palamidessi and Joyce Haggard – who run Covered California’s online learning portfolio – knew there was a better way. So, they began looking for an online platform where managers could learn around their schedule.
That search led them to LinkedIn Learning, which had what they were looking for.
“It had content mapped to our core competencies, so it made it so easy for managers to take the training they needed,” Palamidessi said. “And there were hundreds of courses on each topic. The volume and the quality of the content really stood out.”
In June of 2020, Covered California rolled out LinkedIn Learning. And the convenience was felt immediately – now, instead of taking a day off to go to a leadership course, managers could watch one of many courses on leadership on their desktop or phone, at a time that works for them.
“It’s just made it so much easier for our managers to learn those soft skills,” Haggard said.
Plus, there have been cost savings as well. If a Covered California employee takes even one course online in lieu of an in-person class, it more than pays for the cost of their license for the year, Haggard said.
“It’s been crazy cost-effective for us,” Palamidessi said.
Why being good at both – hiring and developing – is key for Covered California’s continued success.
From Mccord’s view, both of these efforts make each other stronger. Yes, building a great agency starts with bringing in the right people. But developing those people is equally critical, as that keeps them engaged and doing their best work.
“Bringing in the right skillset is important,” Mccord said. “But having that growth mindset is even more important. Because you might have the skills to do the job, but if you don’t have the mindset to want to get better – that’s the difference-maker right there.”
Mccord’s point: even great employees will swing to a fixed mindset, instead of a growth one, if they aren’t given an opportunity to develop. Therefore, it’s critical to invest in tools that give employees that opportunity to grow, so they stay engaged.
On the development front, because Covered California has been able to bring in stronger talent, employees are more open to development. And, on the hiring front, investing in development is just one more reason for someone to choose Covered California.
“As recruiters, we are salespeople, selling our organization to candidates,” Cooper said. “And having a tool like LinkedIn Learning that shows our commitment to development just makes it that much easier to sell our organization and ultimately get the best talent to want to work with us.”
