Phil Hodges

When Phil Hodges started his role at Keck Medicine of USC in 2019, he knew there was an opportunity to leverage his expertise to mature the talent acquisition program. Less than a year later, Covid-19 hit, and the pace for the needed changes picked up rapidly. That’s when he knew he had to act fast to change the game.

Hodges’ first priority was to ensure they had enough avenues for engaging contingent talent. He implemented a vendor-neutral two-party MSP model, which opened new talent channels and provided broader exposure to what was happening in the nursing market. Next came ensuring internal buy-in to the model. With vendors historically struggling to fill roles and hiring leaders scrambling, building a bridge between the two parties was paramount. “I knew I had to balance both what the providers and internal leaders were saying,” Hodges says. “It’s all about trust.” With that trust and a new model, turnover rates came down, and fill rates went up.

While the high demand of pandemic has passed, the new model continues to prove successful. Keck Medicine now uses contingent workers as a temporary stopgap for open full-time equivalent roles and has built a registry of 500 on-call temporary staff to ensure 100% of shifts are fully staffed. The biggest compliment to the great work he has done is in the form of “no news is good news,” Hodges says. “The noise from the chief nursing officers is all but gone. That’s how you know you’ve been successful.”