Health Plan One
Boosting Retention 20% Slashes Turnover Costs 50% Using PDP Global
Company Overview
Industry: Health Insurance
Location: Trumbull, CT
Employee Size: 3,000
Instruments Used
ProScan®
TeamScan®
JobScan®
Increase in Retention
Reduction in Turnover Costs
Turnover During Peak Season
The Challenge
- Rapid, Unanticipated Expansion
- Hiring the Right People
- Reducing Turnover During Peak Season
There are bound to be growing pains when an organization needs to hire 7x the number of employees than the year before. For HealthPlanOne, a leading seller of health insurance and medical plans, the stakes were especially high since practically all their revenue is produced within the span of two months each year. Unfortunately, by the middle of their busy season, 40% of the staff hired for the season would decide to depart. Turnover during that period equated to significant dollars out the door!
HPOne needed an easy yet effective system to foresee who would likely perform well during the stress and chaos of the busy season—before making the decision to hire them. Resumes and past work experience did not indicate future success in the role; the employees and HPOne alike didn’t truly know who would persist through the season. Plus, the logistics of hiring 7x the number of people (roughly 1,100) would overload their Hiring Manager. This is when they turned to Know Your Talents, a premier and trusted provider of PDP Global, to recommend a tailored and actionable solution using PDP’s Proven People Management System, which is known for inspiring culture and igniting productivity.
The Solution
- Behavioral Job Modeling and Matching
- Identifying Employee Strengths
- Manager Training and Engagement
To immediately address HPOne’s core recruiting pain point, the business management consulting professionals at Know Your Talents placed PDP’s JobScan as the central framework. JobScan offers behavioral job modeling to identify traits that naturally succeed within any role. Matching candidates to the predetermined model took the guesswork out of the hiring process, reduced time and energy spent during screening, and produced better hires.
After hiring candidates that matched the model profile, HPOne also wanted to check in with their employees during the height of the busy season to see how they were coping with the stress. Quick 10-minute ProScan Surveys objectively measure energy, stress, and satisfaction levels to show managers which employees are on the edge of burnout. Armed with that knowledge, managers could proactively address the situation..
The Implementation
HealthPlanOne’s leadership had an existing mindset for investing in their people. They had a trusting relationship with the CEO at Know Your Talents and saw the value of PDP Global, which made for a smooth implementation. After HPOne experienced clear success by utilizing PDP Global to resolve recruitment issues, they had no hesitations about expanding its reach to organically create engagement, improve communication, effectively coach, and motivate employees.
Objective and Insightful Job Modeling
To create the job model of an ideal hire, HPOne compiled and analyzed the ProScan behavioral assessments of past high and low performers in the role using PDP's JobScan®. HPOne indisputably found that certain traits fared better during the peak season and used that profile as the benchmark to make hiring decisions.
Adapting the Hiring Process
Recruiters started administering ProScan Surveys as part of the recruitment process, which saved them from blindly making soft-skill judgments about candidates based purely on resumes and past experience. Recruiters could instead compare ProScan responses to the JobScan model to make confident hiring decisions without involving the Hiring Manager, freeing him to redirect time toward other pressing initiatives.
“Hiring and retention of good employees is 90% of my job. Once you’re able to know what it takes for someone to be successful, and then you hire someone like that, all the other things like satisfaction, retention, and performance numbers, all line up positively. PDP Global is the best system that helps you understand a lot.”
- John Hernandez, Vice President Call Center Operations, MAQ Managemen
Flight Risk Identification & Support
Employee ProScan insights are extremely valuable for managers during the high-stress busy season. HPOne decided to re-survey each consumer-facing employee during that time to get real-time feedback about individual energy and satisfaction levels. By uncovering flight-risk indicators like excessive energy drain and low satisfaction, managers could check in more frequently so those employees felt connected and supported.
Essential PDP Global Certifications
The PDP People Management System includes varying types of certification so key team members can confidently oversee the distribution of surveys, correctly interpret reports, and apply behavioral insights in-house. Since most of HPOne’s challenges centered around recruitment, all HR members became PDP Professional certified, along with assistants of frontline leaders, directors, and senior managers for administration purposes. HPOne also established a Leadership Development role dedicated specifically to improving its management training curriculum.
HRIS System Integration
To incorporate PDP surveys into their hiring process seamlessly, HPOne approached PDP Global to custom-program an integration with HPOne’s applicant tracking and hiring platform, Greenhouse. Doing so meant that HPOne could trigger the delivery of ProScan Surveys directly from Greenhouse as well as automate PDP report upload into Greenhouse. When HPOne later transitioned to WorkDay, an Enterprise Management Cloud, PDP Global provided a similar custom integration.
PDP Global Representative Partnership
HPOne sees the value of PDP Global beyond just recruiting and looks to Know Your Talents to maximize PDP’s impact. After extending the PDP People Management System’s reach year after year, HPOne now relies on it as a holistic system for increasing employee engagement, improving leadership skills, and shaping team culture. The hundreds of coaching hours Know Your Talents offers primarily consist of new manager training (which every new manager completes within three days of hire) and biweekly webinars to capture success with topics like:
- How to Change Sales Tactics for High D Clients
- Which PDP Report to Use in Which Situation
- The Power and Strengths of Extroversion
- How to Keep Employees Motivated
- Tips to Communicate with Different ProScan Profiles
- How the 4 Traits React to Change
- Tangible Ways to Become a Better Leader
The Results
Increase in Retention
Reduction in Turnover Costs
Turnover During Peak Season
All-Time High Retention
HPOne’s retention skyrocketed by 20% to a staggering 80% rate after using the PDP People Management System to make the right hires from the start and intervene with employees close to quitting to support them. Of the 6% of the workforce identified as close to burning out during peak season, managers successfully intervened to retain every single one of them, contributing to a total 50% reduction in turnover costs.
Confident and Streamlined Hiring
Because recruiters could utilize PDP JobScan models to make informed hiring decisions, HPOne knew a 70% candidate match or higher would succeed in the role and perform well under the stress of the busy period. The Hiring Manager no longer needed to interview and give final approval for each of their 1,100 hires. When retroactively analyzing profiles of low performers hired before PDP Global was incorporated into the hiring process, HPOne determined that 75% wouldn’t have been hired in the first place had PDP job modeling been used.
Consistent Company Culture
HPOne’s company culture has always felt like being part of a family. But when Covid hit and that family shifted to remote working, it was harder to maintain that sentiment since employees weren’t experiencing the office community. PDP Global empowered the culture to grow in new ways, encouraging meaningful engagement from leaders and employees unique to their behavioral preferences. Colleagues attest that the culture still feels like a family: a fun environment with high integrity and accountability.
Leadership and Management Style Shift
Instead of leading and managing based on something “wrong” with an employee, the PDP People Management System shifted HealthPlanOne’s coaching perspective to capitalize and grow an employee’s strengths. Only after knowing someone’s strengths through ProScan can that individual be placed in opportunities to naturally succeed. HPOne used this behavioral knowledge to create small wins by giving certain tasks to individuals who genuinely enjoy doing them rather than someone who wouldn’t. Leaders appreciated hiring people who were not exactly like them because it created a more well-rounded team and released the pressure they often felt to be good at everything.
Moreover, HPOne’s HR department quickly realized that most complaints stemmed from simple miscommunication between people with different behavioral traits. ProScan equipped leaders and managers to conduct crucial conversations more effectively than before with insights into likes, dislikes, motivators, preferred communication methods, and logic styles.
“I have prior experience with DiSC, and the tools supporting you with PDP Global are so much better. Instead of leaders relying on training that happened a year ago to estimate what profile a potential hire is and maybe how they’re going to react to stress, I get great comfort knowing that we send out the PDP Survey and we’re going to have side-by-side reports, a unique motivational checklist, and information that really spells it out for you.”
John Hernandez
Vice President Call Center Operations, MAQ ManagementIs your company struggling with recruitment, retention, or culture?
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