One Medical Focuses on Authenticity in the Candidate Experience 

Second in the Tech Employers Leading the Way Series

Editor’s Note: This blog is part of a new series, Tech Employers Leading the Way, which recognizes companies that innovate and work to improve the hiring experience for both their hiring managers and the tech candidates they seek. In this series, we’ll dive into what works for them and what they’ve learned. Sharing these stories and learnings supports our company vision to make hiring more equitable, efficient, and transparent.

Hired’s list of 2023 Top Employers Winning Tech Talent highlighted companies across a variety of segments and industries creating tech hiring processes and experiences embracing principles such as equity, efficiency, and transparency. 

Among those leading the way is One Medical, an organization transforming healthcare through its membership-based primary care practice. John Beard, Senior Director of Corporate and Technical Talent Acquisition, shares how One Medical offers a refreshing interview process and crafted its updated employer branding to foster an authentic candidate experience. 

Related: How to Identify Value-Driven Employers in the Job Search

About One Medical

For more than 15 years, One Medical has continuously proven there is a better way to deliver primary health care in the US. We have a hybrid model of both brick-and-mortar medical offices and online services. One Medical has more than 200 offices across the country and robust on-demand virtual services. We’re uniquely positioned to provide a wide range of services for our members. 

These include wellness and prevention, everyday care, chronic conditions, mental health, women’s health, LGBTQIA+ services, urgent concerns, sexual health, senior health, pediatric services, and many more. 

At One Medical, we also know that every minute matters when it comes to our members’ health. Our human-centered and technology-powered approach empowers our providers to spend more quality time with our patients and less time on paperwork.

This gives our members the undivided attention and care they deserve, rather than looking for a quick fix to get them out the door. Our providers have the time and space to consider our members’ current concerns and needs within the picture of their overall health. That way, they receive higher-quality care. 

We take the same human-centered approach with our own team members. It’s always about the people. It’s our biggest competitive advantage. No matter the role, the people of One Medical are singularly-minded in delivering on our goal of transforming primary care.

Tell us about a process you implemented to improve candidate experience and the hiring process.

While going through the interview process, I realized One Medical is doing the whole process of interviewing candidates much differently than everybody else. It starts with preparing candidates before their interviews. 

We found it is critically important for candidate experience to proactively answer questions we know they have. They should know what the process looks like and what we’re evaluating them on. Then, we give them friendly reminders about the unique aspects of our culture and what we expect from candidates. 

For instance, we welcome being able to admit mistakes because it is a learning opportunity. The better prepared a candidate is for the interview, the more comfortable they will be. That results in us getting better information from them. This helps us make sure we’re evaluating their skills rather than any cultural, communication, or environmental biases. And we all know we have them to some extent. 

It’s really about communicating with the candidates. We’re not trying to play “gotcha” with them. We’re not trying to surprise them even in our coding interviews or paired experiences so they have an opportunity to ask questions and be more interactive than usual.

What are some of One Medical’s strategies for maintaining a strong employer brand?

We embarked on a refresh of our employer brand last year. That started with listening. We conducted focus groups to hear why people were attracted to One Medical and why they stayed. We used that to build messaging around why One Medical is a great place to work. 

A strong employer brand needs to be authentic to the employee experience. The brand is not just ‘marketing speak’ to attract candidates. It should also be used to retain employees and reinforce why they choose to build a career here. We say it’s very aligned with our people experience team and internal communications to make sure what we say is accurate and consistent. 

We know from this work that one of the most powerful parts of our employer brand is the mission. Our technology team values the ability to have real, tangible impacts on our patients and clinical teams. They get to work with the people who use the technology they build every single day. That’s really exciting. On the recruiting team, we agree. That’s why many of us are here.

Related: One Medical shares some insights about building a better employer brand in this eBook.

How has collaboration between hiring managers and TA teams improved efficiency?

We’re very fortunate in that our hiring partners see recruiting as a shared responsibility. They will help their recruiter learn how to identify the proper candidate pools and they see it as an equal responsibility to convince those people to engage. They prioritized acting on candidates quickly, even if that’s early in the process. 

When we’re setting up a search boolean, critiquing our messaging, or reviewing profiles, they understand the importance of moving quickly. In fact, when it comes to scheduling candidates, we have the freedom to overwrite their calendars. 

We have a rubric we built in conjunction with our hiring teams that tells us what on their calendars can be written over and what can’t. That keeps us moving quickly in the process. Often, that’s the difference between an offer accept and an offer decline.

Related: One Medical adds expertise to this eBook about collaboration between hiring managers and TA teams.

How are you using tools and technologies to improve your hiring process?

We do have a robust tech stack for our TA team. This enables and optimizes speed, efficiency, and candidate experience. Sourcing, engagement, interview scheduling, candidate experience, interview prep, reporting, analytics, and debriefs each have a different tool that fits into our TA stack seamlessly. It enables recruiters to work with increased velocity and efficiency.

Hired specifically provides a warm handoff between One Medical and potential candidates because there’s mutual interest present from the beginning. The entire process goes much faster with the candidates we engage through Hired. 

In fact, the Hired platform is now our number one source of engineering hires. So thank you, Hired!

Interested in sourcing top tech talent? See all of Hired’s products and services in action with a demo.

Check out all the other featured tech employers in the series so far: 

1. Firstup Puts People First to Help Companies Speed Up
2. Veho’s Multi-Faceted and Candidate-Centric Interview Process for Better Alignment
3. Cisco Turns Talent Acquisition Professionals into Talent Advisors
4. AutoFi Showcases Culture & Employee Development to Strengthen Employer Branding
5. Daemon Cultivates a Culture of Feedback & Collaboration for Successful Hiring