Recruiting, hiring, and retaining impactful leaders is vital in every industry, but the stakes are even higher for health care companies, who must juggle both organizational challenges and high-stakes medical decisions. Finding the right executive health care talent requires companies to look beyond the standard job boards and go deeper than a resume— it requires a dedicated, trusted recruiting partner who understands the unique structural needs of the community, has a robust understanding of cutting-edge industry trends, and supports the long-term goals of the company.
M3 is not a transactional recruiting firm: we’re high-touch advisors and partners committed to supporting our clients’ unique talent strategies. As we’ll discuss below, our work with the healthcare company Crouse Health, one of the largest employers in Central New York, showcases how our differentiated approach to recruiting and hiring exceptional executives can lead to sustainable business success in the healthcare space, and how that approach can benefit health care companies nationwide.
“M3 has the reach and resources of a national recruiting company while still feeling like a local, small business embedded in our community. They’ve been a vital partner in helping us find the kind of exceptional healthcare leaders who not only drive long-term business success, but also ensure we take great care of our patients.”
Kevin Randall, CFO of Crouse Health
Highlighting Crouse’s Unique Challenges and Opportunities
Crouse Health has been keeping Central New York healthy for over 130 years and serves as both a major regional healthcare provider and significant economic anchor, delivering care to a 15-county region while maintaining deep community roots and innovative clinical capabilities. They employ over 3,000 people, making Crouse one of the top ten employers in the region, and boast cutting-edge maternity, educational, and robotic surgery centers.
Both the organization’s large scope and the complexity offer unique challenges and opportunities for attracting talent, and Crouse worked with both large and local search firms prior to M3 without much success. Whereas the largest recruiting firms had the reach to identify top talent, they lacked a personal touch and nuanced organizational understanding, leading to misalignment and truncated tenures. Smaller agencies, on the other hand, didn’t always have the tools, reach, or network necessary to find outstanding candidates who could thrive in Crouse’s high-stakes and rapidly evolving corporate environment.
Eventually, Crouse CFO Kevin Randall turned to M3 when searching for a new Head of Human Resources. While Crouse is an exciting and industry-leading organization, companies outside of major metropolitan areas must often overcome the inherent difficulty of attracting and retaining high-end talent from larger markets. Doing so requires not just the reach of national firms to find candidates, but the deft cultural understanding of local firms necessary to place the right candidate in the right role, long-term. As Crouse later discovered, only M3 could offer both.
Crafting a Tailored Recruitment Strategy
Long before we interview candidates, we interview our clients. In many cases, hiring the wrong candidate is worse than hiring no one, and we believe that attracting the high caliber of talent that leads to long-term organizational success requires a deep understanding of the organization, first. To do so, we:
- Engage key stakeholders early and often. We interview key stakeholders including the CEO, CFO, and any direct reports for the role in order to understand what they really want out of their next executive, both operationally and culturally.
- Examine recent successes and failures in talent strategy. What exactly wasn’t working with prior search firms? What are the reasons employees are giving for any talent attrition issues? What, in the client’s eyes, does a successful hiring process look like?
- Uncover the company’s broader employee value proposition. Compensation is about more than just a paycheck. Understanding the unique benefits of Crouse’s growth trajectory, opportunities to make an impact, and regional perks allows us to market the position more effectively and find the talent most receptive to Crouse’s mission.
When we approach talent, our goal is never to appear like an external search firm, but instead present ourselves as a natural extension of the client, allowing us to attract not just any talent, but rather the right talent.
Finding and Attracting Top Tier Candidates
Drawing on our prior industry knowledge, deep roster of potential executives, and sophisticated artificial intelligence systems, we developed a signature search strategy specific to Crouse’s needs. For a health care system in upstate New York, we first focused on candidates with a prior connection to the region, especially those who might relish the opportunity for a high-impact role in a smaller market.
Together, we found an exceptional candidate who not only had the right experience but also personal ties to the area, even though they themselves had not initially considered a position like the one open at Crouse. Finding this candidate, however, was only half the job.
Helping Crouse hire someone who might leave within a year, or end up being misaligned with the organization’s goals, is not an outcome we consider successful. One of the differentiating factors at M3 is our ability to act as trusted partners at all stages of the hiring process, not just recruitment. To do so, we:
- Provide honest feedback about the role and talent pool. We pride ourselves on thinking outside the box with recruitment, and engage in significant dialogue about the exact requirements, compensation, and targets for the role. If we believe that expanding the search beyond the initial criteria might unlock a wider pool of viable candidates, we aren’t afraid to get creative.
- Personalize outreach to individual candidates. Rather than waste people’s time with mismatched opportunities, we garner candidate interest directly from the very first communication. Furthermore, we openly represent the unique challenges and opportunities of our clients to the talent, ensuring there are no “rug pull” moments later in the process.•
- Market the unique benefits of the role. We understand that interviewing is not a one-way street. M3 endeavored to highlight Crouse’s recent investments in new facilities, history of regional leadership, and cutting-edge opportunities in order to showcase the unique value of a career with Crouse. We utilized Visit Syracuse and I Love NY pages to best represent the region’s unique natural beauty, cultural legacy, and lifestyle opportunities.
- Help craft competitive compensation terms. As the process advanced to the offer stage, we remained actively engaged, facilitating key conversations around compensation and expectations that can make or break an offer.
Throughout, our team at M3 ensured the hiring team at Crouse was a fully informed, trusted collaborator. As Randall later noted, M3 had “the ability to provide exceptional candidates that we were unable to attract otherwise, and their attention to every detail throughout the process created a memorable experience for the candidates and the Crouse team.” We take great pride in that experience, and our work with Crouse validates how successful such an approach can be. Since hiring their HR leader, we have helped Crouse Health hire several more roles at both the executive and managerial level, continuing our partnership to this day.
“M3 demonstrates a high level of professionalism and the quality of the candidates are impressive. As both an applicant and an employer, I am continually impressed with the time they take to understand your people, needs and culture.”
Becky Houde, HR Director of Crouse Health
A True Partner for Health Care Companies
At M3, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all recruiting. Plenty of recruiting firms can post a job and send over a few résumés. But when it comes to building a strong, lasting team in today’s fast-moving healthcare world, the most effective talent consultants transcend traditional recruiting and serve as strategic partners. The best matches are built on authentic connections, thoughtful listening, and a willingness to dig deep.
Our rare blend of local insight, national reach, and top-tier recruiting tools, means you never have to choose between feeling understood and accessing national talent pools. For healthcare organizations, especially those deeply rooted in their communities, having the right leaders in place makes a difference for patients, caregivers, and the community. With M3 by your side, you don’t have to find those leaders alone: “All the candidates we’ve hired through M3 have been incredible additions to our team,” Randall said, “and all of them are still here today.”
