In this episode of Talking Talent, we talk to Dr. Ekta Vyas, the Director of Human Resources at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford I Stanford Children’s Health, about the challenges she faced during the major hospital expansion of the new Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.
The Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford is nationally ranked and recognized in 10 specialties and has been for 13 consecutive years. The new expanded facility opened in December 2017, a more than half-a-million square foot building that doubled the size of the existing pediatric and obstetric hospital campus. It added 149 patient beds, bringing the total on the Palo Alto campus to 361. This new facility is America’s most technologically advanced, family-friendly and environmentally sustainable hospital for children and expectant mothers and has proudly earned the LEED Platinum distinction.
Dr. Ekta Vyas led the employer branding strategy and recruitment infrastructure development work. As a trained industrial/organizational psychology practitioner with 20 years of experience, Ekta is a regular conference and panel speaker and has been published in academic and practitioner journals. She is a regular contributor to Forbes.com, and also currently serves as adjunct faculty at San Jose State University School of Management (within Lucas College of Business).
Among the challenges facing the Human Resources group was the need to hire more than 500 new employees for a high acuity environment; the complexity of hiring in Silicon Valley along with the high cost of living and commuting barriers it brings; and synchronizing strategic timelines between Corporate Marketing, Hospital Expansion, and the Talent Acquisition teams. This hiring need was in addition to their regular average recruitment – based on standard turnover for normal business operations.
The success of this project is being widely recognized across healthcare and other industries and has been published as a case study in the Fall 2017 issue of Journal of HR People + Strategy. Ekta recently presented this work at the People in Healthcare (Talent Management Alliance) conference and as a keynote at NCHRA’s Talent Acquisition conference.
Ekta has been in the healthcare industry for 12 years and before this undertaking was a Director of HR at Stanford University Medical Center.
You can listen to our first Talking Talent podcast, How HR Technology Can Combat Staffing Shortages in Healthcare, here.
