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Recruiters at Cross Country TravCorps help place nurses and other professionals (known as travelers) in healthcare facilities for 13-week assignments. A division of Cross County Healthcare, CCTC has established industry leadership in part by acquiring smaller companies. The price of such a strategy often includes operational limitations, contradictory business processes, and a patchwork IT infrastructure. CCTC found itself no exception to this rule. Meanwhile, CCTC realized they urgently needed to increase the effectiveness of their talent management system, so they called Cooper for help.
Over the course of a lasting and strategic business-design engagement, Cooper collaborated with CCTC to revolutionize its talent management system to seamlessly blend multiple channels of communication for the benefit of nurses and staff. In addition to delivering interaction design and visual design services, Cooper provided business insights into the needs of travelers and recruiters; helped build CCTC's design competencies; improved its software development process; and established better executive governance over the service-definition process.
Cooper observed and interviewed dozens of travelers and recruiters around the country to determine their motivations, habits, and contexts of use. The personas and scenarios Cooper created during data synthesis shed light on several business-critical issues. These insights allowed CCTC to make course corrections on key IT infrastructure projects, and to change important protocols related to their information processing.
With these decisions made, Cooper turned its attention to the design of the traveler and recruiter services. The integrated suite of features relies on advanced web development technologies, and includes a dashboard and alerts that allow recruiters and travelers to work in sync. Cooper's visual design solutions also put a professional and friendly face on CCTC's operations.
The previous web portal offered plain-text job searches with multiple drill-down steps, no personalization, and little up-front information. Even experienced travelers were forced to get on the phone with recruiters (during their available business hours) to learn the most basic details of a position.
CCTC's Job Search for travelers was one of the first enterprise-level Google Maps mash-ups. It has powerful yet simple searching, filtering and flagging capabilities. With the new traveler web portal, customers have:
- Immediate access to rich job information and job application services unlike any other staffing company
- Anytime/anyplace access to the system's web-based tools for seeking jobs and maintaining credentials, which provide ease-of-use and control to travelers while reducing recruiter workload
- Ability to envision the realities of each new locale (such as housing and transportation), thus improving travelers' self-service capabilities
- Personalization based on the traveler's past searches, nursing specialties, and lifestyle preferences
Compared to the previous system, job search activity in the new traveler portal has increased by 77%. John Chaffins, CCTC's Senior Director of Product Development & User Experience, also estimates that by increasing travelers' web self-service capabilities their company has avoided upwards of $200,000/year in support costs.
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Recruiters were forced to use a bewildering, redundant, and error-prone array of steps to process critical documentation, and their workarounds were even less efficient than the original processes. Cooper's challenge was to capitalize on the ingenuity of CCTC's staff without automating the misery of the current system.
CCTC's new Recruiter Center relies on rich visual displays like those provided to travelers, but which also include managerial features such as task lists and alerts. By migrating away from their confusing and inefficient mainframe systems, the web-based suite of features for recruiters provides:
- Ability to support more travelers with less effort
- Visibility into travelers' immediate needs and ongoing status, which includes sharing a traveler's view of open positions
- Greater confidence in IT systems that require fewer steps
Before engaging Cooper, CCTC attempted a robust round of system improvements that relied upon a Use Case Methodology, but they abandoned this effort when stakeholders were unable to exert quality control over the user experience of the systems they were building. According to John Chaffins, CCTC's adoption of Cooper's Goal-Directed methods provided management with clear visibility into and appropriate influence over the products and processes they require to run their business. These methods allowed CCTC to set reasonable priorities for internal technology investments; create roadmaps for future product development; and obtain high productivity and quality from its offshore development teams. Additionally, as technology and market factors changed over the course of the long-term consulting relationship, Cooper quickly reassessed design solutions to keep them feasible and appropriate.
Finally, the ongoing close collaboration between Cooper's design team and CCTC's development teams, as well as Cooper U classes, facilitated learning and knowledge transfer.