BROOKFIELD, WI – SSM Healthcare is a St. Louis-based network of 20 hospitals and two nursing homes with 22,700 employees. It’s the second-largest health system in St. Louis, a market teeming with healthcare providers of all sizes.

In other words, if it can’t find the right person to fill a job vacancy, someone’s in a lot of trouble.

Last year, SSM outsourced its recruitment services to Pinstripe Healthcare, a Brookfield, Wis.-based provider of talent acquisition and management services. In doing so, SSM has become one of a growing number of healthcare networks to outsource all or part of their human resources departments, with the goal of improving the bottom line without affecting patient care.

“When it comes to (capital expenses), we’re up against a piece of medical equipment,” said Debbie Walkenhorst, SSM’s regional vice president of human resources. “We knew we were going to have to get more creative to fill our staffing needs.”

Pinstripe, whose list of healthcare clients includes the University of Pennsylvania Health System and the Kansas City, Mo.-based Carondelet Health System, focuses on a full range of human resources duties. According to Jill Schwieters, the company’s founder and executive vice president, Pinstripe provides a valuable resource to health systems that typically don’t or can’t spend a lot of time or money on the HR departments.

“We’re their recruitment partner,” she said. “It’s very important in healthcare that they find the right person for each job, and we can screen the candidates and hone in on those candidates who meet the ideal qualifications quicker and more efficiently than they can.”

According to Walkenhorst, SSM “had a very passive style of recruitment” before contracting with Pinstripe. By matching up better-qualified candidates with open positions, she said, health system officials “were being proactive and developing leaders.”

In addition, she pointed out, the system reduced its overtime and contingency costs, boosting core staff use to better than 80 percent.

While helping healthcare providers fill open positions, the company also offers off-boarding and stay-connected services, which help providers deal with departing employees – both voluntary and, in the case of layoffs or terminations, involuntary.

Schwieters said it’s important for a healthcare provider to be able to handle job losses properly,
“I don’t think it’s a service that organizations spend a lot of time on, but when it’s done wrong, it ends badly,” Schwieters said.