Live from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Jason Pistulka—Assistant VP of Talent Acquisition Operations at HCA Healthcare—graces us with his presence to drop some truth bombs on recruitment. Spoiler alert: he's not here to hand out AI participation trophies. Jason throws shade at the industry’s blind faith in AI as a recruitment savior, arguing that maybe, just maybe, getting your operational act together would be a better idea.
He spills the tea on HCA's branding game—giving their hospitals local names to charm their markets—and flexes their scale and healthcare cred like a boss. Oh, and remember the COVID hiring apocalypse? HCA brought on 200 new recruiters like it was nothing. Now that the chaos has died down, it all seems almost quaint.
Jason also calls out vendors for struggling to grasp the size of HCA’s operation (hint: it’s big) and says they need a crash course in "How HCA Rolls." He’s all about their talent transformation roadmap and teases some snazzy automation initiatives to make recruitment smoother and data capture less of a dumpster fire.
As for AI picking candidates? Nah, Jason’s not buying the hype. But he’s here for automation that makes life easier, proving that even skeptics can be pragmatic. It’s an insightful chat—if you’re into operational excellence, vendor rants, and the occasional AI side-eye.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (cometh)
Podcast Intro: Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
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Joel: Who are you and why are you here?
Jason Pistulka: I'm Jason Pistulka, AVP of TA Operations for HCA Healthcare. Part of the reason why I'm here is because my office is two miles down the road.
Chad: Convenient.
Jason Pistulka: So yeah, p it makes it easy and speaking some of this afternoon. But a large contingent of the HCA team is here at the conference. Came last year. Enjoyed it. So yeah, it's on my regular conference tour now.
Chad: Nice, nice.
Podcast Intro: Well, especially since it's here.
Chad: So right out of the gate, what... Moving forward into 2025, what piece of advice would you give your TA peers...
Jason Pistulka: Sure.
Chad: For moving forward in 2025?
Jason Pistulka: To me the biggest gap that exists in almost every recruiting organization out there is operational excellence. When you look at lots of people try to bring a magic pill in to solve all their problems but most of their problems still come to lack of operational excellence, and there is no magic pill to solve for that. So mostly now everybody's promising the entire world with AI. How AI can solve everything. I say AI has two definitions, artificial intelligence or artificial ignorance and there's a lot of artificial ignorance being sold out there. A lot of people who had a simple keyword matching that they decided, we're gonna rebrand it to AI 'cause that's what the cool thing is. And so a lot of people I think are chasing phantom wishes to solve their problems that again, their long pole in the tent comes back to that operational excellence, whether that be within their own recruiting teams or within their hiring teams.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I'm waiting for that startup that has, we use no AI whatsoever on their website. I'm always intrigued in healthcare from a branding perspective. As an outsider, this hospital system, this system, this system. They all look the same. You're not Coke and Pepsi. How do you look at branding and separating yourself from the other options that are out there?
Jason Pistulka: It's a multifaceted story with HCA because some of our hospitals do have an HCA brand on them but a huge portion of them don't at all. When you buy a great... If we were to buy Vanderbilt, we wouldn't wanna strip Vanderbilt off and slap HCA on. So it depends on what market you're in. If you're in Austin, we're St. David's. If you're in Denver, it's Swedish Medical Center. So in some cases our hospitals have a great brand. They're offering premium services that aren't available in other markets. Other hospitals are more of a community hospital and they don't have the same kind of pizzazz that a big name brand hospital can have. When we're selling to candidates though, the thing where we as HCA can sell is on scale and excellence. So as I like to tell people, HCA births more babies in Sweden and Switzerland combined. That means something to people. As a result, we know how to run a labor and delivery center like no other. And if you're in a community hospital in New Hampshire, you're getting the benefit of that company-wide knowledge. We have AI teams that analyze and can identify early onset of sepsis and things of that nature.
Jason Pistulka: And all of that excellence is pushed out to the smallest of hospitals out there, which is why if you look at health grades for hospitals, our hospitals outscore the average hospital in the country and it's because of that operational excellence that we drive as an organization. Which is interesting on the HR side because we have leaders that are so used to data and excellence, and prove it to me that it makes us to have to be just as data savvy as they are in the clinical world.
Chad: So in 2024, looking back, what surprised you the most?
Jason Pistulka: It's hard to surprise me after COVID and dealing with... So if anything...
Chad: Being in healthcare, I bet. Yes.
Jason Pistulka: So if anything, I guess what surprised me the most is that we came back to a sense of normality. And so if you look at before COVID, we had about 25,000 open jobs. We peaked in COVID at 43,000 open jobs. We're back into that upper 20s again. We're back to more typical turnovers and everything else, and it felt like we wouldn't get there as quickly as we did. So I'd say that's probably my biggest surprise and that the market has improved significantly for us in employment. So normal, I guess is what's surprising me 'cause I've been stuck in abnormal for quite a long time. We hired... During our peak we hired 200 new recruiters in a year. So we were onboarding, onboarding, onboarding, onboarding and just running at such a pace that everything in comparison right now, I hate to say seems easy. I don't want our senior leadership to see that but in comparison...
Joel: It's not easy.
Jason Pistulka: In comparison to that, that was a stressful time.
Chad: Yeah. I bet.
Joel: We talk to a lot of vendors, people who are selling you stuff. You mentioned hiring a lot of recruiters. I'm sure you get a ton of calls. They're not hiring technical people the way they used to. The economy's slowing down in some places but healthcare is that beacon of money, that pot of gold that vendors want to get. Talk about how you filter the services with the number of recruiters you have. Is there a process? Is there a testing period? Talk about that.
Jason Pistulka: The typical vendor does not operate on scale very well and they try to take... I was just having this conversation with Jeremy from RecruitBot, they try to take their model that worked in financial services or worked in IT where when I worked in that space, we were spending $10,000 a hire. And bring that model into healthcare where our cost is a fraction of that. We operate at a whole different level of efficiency and the recruiters carry a significantly different rep load. So you can't expect the same level of recruiter behavior and engagement in your tool when you're carrying 100 reps as you do with somebody who's carrying 15 IT reps. So they don't think about how that scales financially as well as actual adoption-wise in an organization. And they don't think about, how do you make that adoption happen across a huge team? I mean, we have 20-ish divisions of recruiters that sit all over the country and I compare to when I ran a team in the pit and we all sat in the pit and I could hear every conversation, I could drive everything.
Jason Pistulka: It's completely different when you have to monitor and drive through data. So how do you provide the data and the guidance to a team like us to drive that? What we find is most people can't. What we do is we educate them on here's how we do it. We educate them on the needs and we build them capabilities, which is probably the biggest reason why so many people end up really loving being with HCA and valuing HCA is because we drive them to make them better. We typically break their software and we typically find all of their warts. So many of our vendors, we will identify problems before they know it's a problem because no other customer was big enough to hit it. 'Cause it only happens one out of every 5000 applicants or whatever. When you're our size and you get three and a half million applicants a year, that happens on the quite frequent.
Chad: Yeah. Scale.
Jason Pistulka: Yeah. So that level of scale ends up really giving vendors chops and see the world in a different way of how do you do change management, how do you do adoption, how do you build tools to do that? And so it's one of the things that I personally enjoy is being that product consultant back into them and here's why you need to think this way and here's the challenges of a large organization.
Chad: So let's look forward to 2025. For you, what is gonna be your top priority?
Jason Pistulka: My top priority, we're delivering a roadmap that's a talent transformation effort that we've been working on for two years and we're just coming into the piloting phase this fall and we'll start rolling out more broadly after the first year. I'm actually leaving the organization at the end of Q1, so I'm trying to get as much of that laid out before I do and get those tracks laid.
Chad: Nice.
Jason Pistulka: So a huge portion of what I'm doing at this point is trying to make sure that the organization is well positioned and this has been a multi-year process for me.
Chad: Now, is this tech as well being rolled out along with this?
Jason Pistulka: Yes.
Chad: Okay. Okay. So that's a big undertaking.
Jason Pistulka: It is. We have multiple avenues. One, we're going from a single workflow to multiple workflows in our ATS, which is a huge lift and shift.
Chad: But smart.
Jason Pistulka: Yep. We're doing a huge automation effort in onsite interviewing that we're using sense to do. And that is a custom build that we're doing that is going to allow recruiters to have most of it automatically driven right out of the ATS and capture really great data for us. Again, to recognize the bad human behavior that happens in the field. We've already rolled out BrightHire across our whole organization that we're using...
Chad: Nice.
Jason Pistulka: For a cooler quality across not just interviewing, they'll offer extensions.
Chad: Really?
Jason Pistulka: We're gonna start doing it for intake sessions...
Chad: Awesome.
Jason Pistulka: Et cetera because again, we're trying to speed the first conversation, quality of first conversation, speed the interview. That's what our whole impact is in this transformation effort. And it's been exciting and challenging.
Joel: Automation, you talked about it from a recruiting side where most industries I think are fearful of automation. If a robot can flip burgers, you don't need a cook. But I feel like in healthcare I would wanna work in a system that had tools that would help me do my job better, take away some of the monotonous work. How do you as an organization or as a system think about automation and how does that tie into recruiting? You're gonna be working with the best tools with us, you're gonna be innovative. How do you look at automation from the big picture to the employee coming in?
Jason Pistulka: In recruiting on the automation front, what I've found is so many people don't use the tools that they have. The number of... I solicited obviously for jobs. One of my favorite things to do is go out and apply for a job on their website. And when I see these major corporations that don't ask any job-specific knockout questions, don't do anything. And you're saying you're making your recruiters review every applicant and not only can you ask the question so I can stack, rank and mass disposition, but in most ATSs you can even automate disposition actions on those things. So people aren't using the basic automation that they do. So they're out there searching for AI. When I say you don't need AI, which some of the automations that you already have at your hands are so helpful. And so we've done a lot in that space. We've always been big users of knockout questions and things of that nature. We have a new function that's rolling out that's gonna be an automated compensation knockout for our recruiters that we custom built with our vendor. It's really cool. And then we're using Sense Journeys to build some automation follow-ups with people.
Jason Pistulka: So we're gonna have automations that after an interview happens, say 60, 90 minutes delayed, will send a text to the hiring manager and saying do you want to hire this person? 1, 2, 3, 4? And then automatically updating the ATS what those things are. So none of that's AI. It's just all automation and using different things. And so, so many companies including HCA were skeptical of AI. Obviously there's a lot of legal issues with AI and how you're using it in applicants, and there's studies that are showing that candidates don't like or trust AI. And now with these... In these states where you have to say, well, here's how we're using it. I don't care for the AI on candidate selection just from the candidate experience piece and I kind of want to keep it out of that funnel. But that doesn't mean there isn't all kinds of automation that can make your recruiters faster, more efficient, more accurate and get yourself to better results. And those are things that we have pursued and we continue to pursue.
Chad: 100% agree. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us. If somebody wants to connect with you or I don't know, maybe apply for a job, where would you send them?
Jason Pistulka: Yeah, cool. To connect with me, I'm easy enough to find on LinkedIn and happy to accept that connection. If you just search for careers HCA, we will pop up. We are well advertised out there and we operate in 20 states so we've got a lot of jobs floating around out there.
Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.