Welcome to the Workology Podcast, a podcast for the disruptive workplace leader. Join host Jessica Miller-Merrill, founder of Workology.com, as she sits down and gets to the bottom of trends, tools, and case studies for the business leader, HR and recruiting professional who is tired of the status quo. Now here’s Jessica with this episode of Workology.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Welcome, welcome to the Workology podcast sponsored by Ace the HR Exam and Upskill HR. These are the two courses that we offer at Workology for HR certification prep and recertification for HR leaders with HRCI and SHRM. You can learn more about these courses and others over at workology.com. Now today’s podcast topic is looking at centers of excellence or COE model, which is common but not talked about enough in the HR function.
What is the Center of Excellence Model?Â
For a little bit of a history lesson, David Ulrich introduced the Center of Excellence model in the 90s as part of his effort to transform HR into a more strategic value-creating function. By centralizing deep expertise into small specialized teams, COEs help large organizations bring consistency, innovation, and best practices to critical areas like talent, learning, compensation, and culture.
And over the years, companies have adapted the model to support their most important priorities, including health, wellness, and overall workplace experience. What’s interesting is while this is all over the HR world, there is little data. It’s really sparse when it comes to COEs. But I did find a study from 2023 that found that approximately two thirds of surveyed companies reported to having a COE or an HR shared service model at their company. The most common areas of HR expertise and COEs are total rewards, which 89 % of those, talent management, accounting for 80%, and other areas are typically established for 50 % or fewer companies surveyed.
Today, we’re talking to a guest who has built a COE within the talent acquisition and sourcing function. And don’t worry, I will link to the COE report I just mentioned in the show notes. It’s coming from the Talent Strategy Group, so can head on over and review the data in the podcast show notes from 2023. For that model, the COE model being so popular, it’s really interesting that there’s so little information about design, development, and implementation, which is why I’m excited to introduce our guest for today.
Now, before I introduce our guest, I do want to hear from you. Please comment podcasts on the pinned post over on our Instagram. It’s at Workology blog. Ask questions, leave comments, and make suggestions for future guests. I want to hear from you. That’s Instagram and at Workology blog.
Meet Michael Goldberg, Senior Director of TA at US Renal CareÂ
So today’s guest, I’m so excited, is Michael Goldberg, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at US Renal Care. One of the nation’s leading providers of dialysis services, supporting thousands of patients across the country. Michael brings a rich background in talent acquisition, strategy and sourcing, as well as innovation and large scale hiring operations, particularly within complex healthcare environments where getting the right people into the right roles truly matters. Over the course of his career, he’s built and led high performing teams in the recruiting arena. He’s helped modernize TA systems and processes and develop sourcing strategies that strengthen pipeline quality while reducing things like time to fill in some of the most competitive markets.
At US RenoCare, Michael oversees end-to-end town acquisition for clinical and operation roles across a wide distributed workforce. He partners closely with clinical leaders, HR and operations executives to understand workforce needs and design hiring strategies that elevate candidate experience while ensuring the organization can continue delivering that exceptional care. His work includes building data-driven sourcing models, enhancing recruiter capability, improving hiring manager partnership, which you’re gonna hear about, and creating the infrastructure needed to support sustained organizational growth. I’m so excited to welcome Michael to the Workology Podcast. Excited to have you here.
Michael Goldberg: Jessica, it is great to be a part of your podcast. I’ve been following you. We’ve known each other for, it’s been well over 10 years now, you know, I like how you’ve taken the HR education piece and really are bringing best practices. Well, I don’t even like to use the word best practices, but you’re bringing practices, practical practices to the workplace. So that’s how people learn and evolve. And so that’s… very admirable. There’s not a of people that do that and you’re one of the people with the megaphone. So thank you very much for doing that and having me on.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Yeah, well, I feel like good resources and examples of what we’re doing need to be shared so that we can learn from each other. So talk to us about your background and maybe a little bit about your role now.
Michael Goldberg: Sure. So I’ve been doing, I started out actually in HR back in 90, well, what’s the say in the 90s, early 90s. And basically after doing 10 years of HR decided I wanted to focus on the good stuff. I was tired of going through, you know, the employer relations and the terminations. And I enjoyed learning about the laws and everything, but I just enjoyed the the good part, that was the talent side of it. And so I’ve been doing that since 2001 and have never looked back. I did have a generalist job in between in 2006 through 2008. I had a regional HR job and went back into it. But then was like, you know, like, oh, I think it’d be better if you focus on the recruiting side. That seems to be your first love. And so it’s been, so I’ve gone into organizations, helped turn them around. Really by looking at their processes, looking at the data that’s there.
And I think there’s a lot of people that say, oh yeah, we’ve got the data, but what are you doing with it? And so I grew into the ranks of, into a director in 2018, started my own business. And in 2021 or early 20, no, yeah, no, early 2022. I ended up jumping on with US Renal Care as a contractor. Six months later, I was asked to join the team full-time as a director. And then at the end of last year, so about 14, 15 months in, I was made senior director. And what I’m overseeing, or what I was able to oversee, is I took on sourcing, and I oversee the eastern half of the United States all the way through the middle of Texas. So if you draw a line through the country, all the way that way, that way, is Michael. I’ve got a great counterpart and a great leader too, a great VP of TA who I just enjoy working with both of them.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: How many employees do you have? And this is a global company, right?
When Your Company Goes From Local to Global
Michael Goldberg: Yeah, it is. So it just became global. I think it’s been about it roughly about a year, but we have over 500 clinics to US Renal Care. So we’re the third largest dialysis clinic based type of healthcare organization. And we reach out, we have 500 locations across the United States here, goes into Alaska, goes into Hawaii as well.
But then we also have, like I said, we just opened up offices in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and we plan on expanding there as well. Probably no more than 10 to 15 clinics, but we really see our global footprint. The big toe’s in, now the rest of the toes and the foot have to go in, and then I think we’ll be there. So I’m really excited about helping on the international front and working with the folks over there. So that’s been a treat.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Unfortunately, I know a lot about dialysis as of recent, definitely is an important part of health care and just the services that you provide individuals and their families to help them heal and just overcome.
Michael Goldberg: Yeah, it’s the second hardest field for nursing. The first hardest, pediatric oncology. Pediatric oncology is the most, is the toughest. You know, folks coming in for dialysis and diabetes, it’s what, nephrology is a very, very tough field. You know, we’re doing a lot of hiring, like when you look at who we’re hiring, we hire a lot of registered nurses.
We hire a lot of patient care techs. We hire LPNs, LVNs, and then you have charge nurses, clinical managers, and facility managers who manage the clinics. But in some locations you have high turnover, and so that’s been a big focus this year for us. Not from a center of excellence standpoint, but just from, we’re looking at our pockets of where we need to get in.
I’ve been asked to lead a project where in the first 90, we’re looking with the first 90 days, why people leave and what can we as recruiting do to prevent that from happening? We know on the other side, needs to be roll up the red carpet, streamers, breakfast foods, lunch foods, take them out to lunch, whatever, whatever it should be, right? That stuff, but that’s still, that still needs some work too. But for us.
What I’ve been asked is why are people leaving in 90 days? And what we’ve been able to figure out is there are certain regions in the country where turnover is higher for one reason or another. Could be management turnover, could be because of management pushing people out, Multiple learning opportunities we’re still in our findings, so nothing short yet, but I’ll fill you in if I can down the road.
But we have a very well-oiled machine. Total, we’ve got a team of 24 on our TA team. Most of them are here in DFW, but we do have a sprinkling around mostly in the southwest, southeastern part of the country. So Houston, Dallas, Austin, and then head east and even a little north up to think the Memphis is the further, maybe Kentucky, Louisville, is the furthest north was where one of our recruiters is from. But anyway, they do such an amazing job. And it’s interesting, you know, a couple of weeks ago I was on a team call. I kid you not this happened. And I was talking about, hey, so Michael, let’s talk about metrics. So I brought metrics up and what I was able to show is that because of a team, the team effort between the center of excellence within sourcing, and the recruiters, because we fine tune these things between iteration one and iteration two, which we’ll talk about, right? It was an amazing partnership so much that I began to cry on a call with the entire team on. You’re laughing, but it wasn’t funny. But no, seriously, was, it, but it was true because I felt like we had all built this together.
People started drinking the Kool-Aid or whatever they’re drinking. It just started, there were magical, I was at Disney world, okay. Or Disneyland, I prefer land. I was at Disneyland. I was, I felt for like two minutes, was self-actualization. I was at the top of that pyramid, damn it. And it took me a long time to get there, but I did it.
The Purpose of a Center of Excellence (COE)
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Well, I can’t wait to talk about this topic. We’re talking about centers of excellence. And let me set the stage. And I’m going to be reading just a short description. It’s a center of excellence, or COE, is a team, shared facility, or entity that provides leadership, best practices, research support, and or training for a focus area. This can exist within an organization or across different organizations. And the purpose of a COE is to drive innovation and improvement, share knowledge and enhance performance in a specific domain. So you were looking at a center of excellence for sourcing, which is what we’re talking about today, focused in an area of sharing knowledge as the best practices within the team and being innovative, right? To fill your open spots or to find qualified candidates, source those candidates to help fill your open role.
So talk to me about what that looks like. And then let’s also define sourcing because it’s different for everybody. So let’s level set and kind of first maybe talk about what sourcing is and then what your COE for sourcing looks like.
Michael Goldberg: Sure. So sourcing is very different, right? And the way we look at sourcing is interesting. I’m going to say it this way, okay? And here’s why. While our processes and our intent, the original intent of it, let’s start with that. The original intent of it was that sourcers would reach out via automation, indeed, LinkedIn, texting, right, the standard. And when we did that, they could talk to them, but they weren’t really doing a deep dive phone screen. It’s like, hey, here’s who I am. This is what we do. Right. Bounds are the standard stuff that everybody sends.
So what we did was it was just, it was okay. were still, it was like, think of it, it’s Play-Doh, right? And it’s mushed up and we had to slowly build things. you know, for, so to define what’s, let me go back to the definition, the definition of sourcing for us, talking to the candidates, to determine interest. And if they determined interest, we would then forward them on to the recruiter. And then it was up to the recruiter to schedule the interview and conduct the phone screen and then move it on to the manager. So we were doing everything through Excel, very healthcare of us, right?
It was just there and it wasn’t very shareable. While we had a shared SharePoint folder, it took some adoption. So that’s what we do when it comes to sourcing. But I want to back up for a second because before I took over this team, the sources were assigned by regions. Now they are today. They didn’t have any prioritization.
Right? So which recs were going to become priority for them? How many recs could they handle at once? And how many were they going to, how many, were they only going to be able to help, know, two or three recruiters at a time, or should we be able to help everybody within that dedicated region at the same time? And the answer is that. And that’s what we started with. Right. And so the other, so we have the, the antiquated Excel spreadsheet, we’ve got a process in place, which is basically taking, know, picking up the phone, emailing, whatever, through the normal standards, Determining interest, finding out what their salary requirements or what their expectations were right now, the requirements, their expectations.
And then if everything was aligned, then that’s when it pushed to the recruiter side. The recruiter would then, like I said, phone screen them. If they liked that person, they would send the person over. And you know what it is when you think you’re going, you think it’s good because you feel connected because you’ve given them the candidates and you’ve put it in the hands of somebody else and we’re picking up the phone and we’re calling. And we’re calling, hey, we need feedback. And we had built SLAs into this. Part of the process was to build that, within 24 hours of receipt, the recruiter needs to get back to us on the source candidates. Were they doing that? No. So it took a while for buy-in on the recruiter side. Conversations, you could tell, were admirable. No, they weren’t productive is what I guess I’m trying to say. Right?
What is a Service-Level Agreement (SLA)?
But you understand what I’m trying to say here is basically, look, we want to have some service level agreements. Does your audience know what the service level agreement is or should I tell them?
Jessica Miller-Merrell: I sure hope they know what they are. We have a sample one that I provide in my book as an example service level agreement, but that’s the agreement between the recruiter and the hiring manager for obligations for the different parties. So they know what they’re supposed to deliver and when they’re supposed to deliver it.
Michael Goldberg: Right. So we started scheduling sourcing intakes. So intakes with the recruiter. So at the end of December of last year, I’m kind of fast forwarding. If you want me to back up, can, but I kind of want to get to the good part. It’s December 23 or January 2nd. I’m looking at the metrics. And last year we started in April. We kicked off in April and we filled eight positions. Okay. Eight positions. That’s one a month. I have three sorcerers. So what I do in the fall of 23, because I knew that things just weren’t going where I could see the friction, I could hear the friction, because I’d hear it from both sides. I would easily hear it from both sides. So I’m doing this and so and so. I’m like, all right, talk to each other.
Ta-da, you know, if I had a light, I’d have it shine on me as basic common sense. That was my first advice to say, look, first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna have intakes with the recruiters. After they have intakes with the hiring managers, I said, however, if you build a good enough partnership, they’re gonna invite you to the intake call when it happens. That’s right, it worked.
So they’re on the intake calls. And so it’s not like a game of operator where something’s getting lost in translation. We’re still connected. We’re initially connected and it’s not here’s your recorder. You know, here’s your recruiter. Here’s your sourcer. It’s here’s your hiring team. Let’s go. Hiring team, one person, two people as one working together in tandem. The recruiters have weekly update calls, with their FAs and the regional directors. I said, you guys need to be on those. Why do we need to be on those? Because if you’re on those, then you’re gonna get updates on your position. You don’t have to rely so much on the recruiters waiting on the feedback. But we fixed that too, by the way, because they’re on all the different weekly calls now.
And then to address the recruiter issue, we started to throw… a little technology into it. It’s not wowz of stuff. It’s Smartsheet. Okay. But guess what? We have an expert on my team, a recruiter on our team who knows how to do Smartsheet. She’s really good at it. Why not? So she built us a sourcing dashboard. How cool is that? It’s really cool. And I so, so wish, I was on my computer and I could share, I probably would not allow to share it, but I would at least try to share what it looked like because it turned out really good. So basically we took what was in Excel and we said, look, you’re going to start entering information into the smart sheet and we’ll upload some history, but we’re not going to upload a lot of history because that’ll just take too long to mess with it.
This one recruiter who helps me on my metrics just did this amazing job to build out this sheet. And it was, it’s unbelievable. And we started measuring the one thing. I said, in the fall, when I started kind of looking at things, I brought in a contractor, the great Ronnie Bratcher. I don’t know if you know Ronnie or not. Ronnie’s out of Atlanta. He’s a great IT sourcer. He’s now working with, the big outsource group here in Dallas. forgot their names. I’m blanking out. But anyway, he’s employed again, which is great. But he said, Michael, he goes, the one thing that you’re missing out on, probably the biggest key metric that you need to pull in besides it’s not about the hires, because there’s too many different factors coming in that could prevent the hire. So I got the connection to go from knowing that I’m delivering the candidate and now we’re walking together along the process.
And within the smart sheet, when we send candidates, there’s a reminder email after two days, no, three days that says, Hey, you need to, I need feedback on the following candidates. And then if a second email goes out, I’m attached to it or the other directors attached to it to say, Hey, we need feedback. That’s the one that usually seems to work. Don’t know why.
But, you know, so it was just the little things like that on a simple smart sheet that allowed us to keep up. Well, guess how many we have filled year to date. 27 positions. Our sources have built 20.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: you to you today. So January to June.
Michael Goldberg: Yes, to May, to May, through May, through May.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Oh May, to May, okay. That’s great. I mean, you did eight.
Michael Goldberg: All year. That’s three and a half times. Three and a half times. That’s the math. That’s great. Three and a half times.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Thank you. I was like.
Michael Goldberg: I got you there. For some reason, because I’m now doing a lot of the data analytics for TA, my math skills have all of a sudden seemed to have sharpened pretty well. So hang in there, folks. When you’re my age, math still works.
Communication, Automation, Metrics for a COEÂ
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Those numbers are just phenomenal. so communication, like a little bit of automation, a focus on metrics, but a lot of communication, like continuous conversations to kind of refine this process. You mentioned earlier iteration. So what did iteration look like for you guys? I mean, it feels like it’s gonna be like a collaborative effort where there was a lot of conversations that were had in order to get to this point that we’re at now.
Michael Goldberg: No, absolutely. So, I mean, you know me, I’m extremely collaborative, right? So believe it or not, they were, they collabed on the first time too. So they were bought into that process of the first one and they knew they had to up their game. People were watching and people were saying things like, what’s going on? How do we get them to improve? Right.
And I was looking at it and I was listening in the background because I started hearing chatter, not just from recruiters, but from my boss and from my peer going, me, right? So I had to up our game. I didn’t put the, I put the fear in God in myself, but I didn’t put the fear in God in them. And I basically said, look guys, we got to show them what we’re made of. So what we do, we add, we built a scorecard and I said, all right.
What do you want to be able to accountable to? The hires metric is a team effort. And so it’s not an individual goal. It might get to that point if one brings in more than others, right? But right now it’s measured as a team, team success until we get lift off. When we get lift off, then I’m start looking at individual performance. Then we looked at their usage. Were they using the tools? HireEZ, LinkedIn.
Right. And indeed. Right. So were they using the tools and they had to hit a certain amount of reach outs per month as sources. And they had to have not just any engagement or acceptance or engagement rate, but a positive one, right. Where the standard was like 15 between 15 and 20%. Response rate, which meant that your, tools were working. Right. When we started looking at the individual metrics on indeed on LinkedIn.
I was like, all right, guys, what do you think needs, based upon what you see here, what needs to happen? So it wasn’t coming from me, right? It was coming from them. Looking at these metrics and sourcing for the year, what do we need to do? Okay, well, we need to do more reach outs on Indeed and more reach outs on LinkedIn. Yes, yes, keep going. We need to bring more candidates to the table. I said, yes. And I said, what is that a, a derivative of reach out on indeed LinkedIn, higher easy, right. So, and, and, and today they’re, they’re doing well. They’ve slowed down a little bit over the last couple of months, but knock on wood, we haven’t had a zero month, this year. So our highest one month, we filled 11, which was amazing. but you know,
The other key component to the second iteration was once I got their buy-in, had to get, right, well, what are going to be our baseline metrics? So I wanted to hear it from them. I wanted to get it from them. And they set the baseline. If I thought it was too low, I’d go, come on, a little more, a little more. And they know I’m going to raise the bar at some point. But I think if we can show in a groove will be good because it’s interesting. It’s, you know, the, sourcing spreadsheet is a place where we enter all the candidates. We manage all of our candidates. We communicate with our recruiters that way, but it shows me a candidate acceptance rate. See, so I can look at the end of month to see what their candidate acceptance rate is.
The Components of a COEÂ
So when you look at the components of the, of of the center of excellence, you have a side of it that is process-based. You have a side that is technology-based. You have a side that is, engagement based, especially for sourcing. How are you going to engage? What’s that approach? Be yourself, be genuine, promote the company. Right. Not just reach out to them one time and forget it. It’s reach out to them five, six, seven times, especially in the smaller communities.
You know, man, I wish I wish the there was a there was a major cell phone directory that you could purchase and then everybody was like it was like the remember the the old phone pages, the white what we call the white pages and the other pages, the white pages for I wish they had that for cell numbers now. I mean, you would think they’d be able to do it. They had it for the white pages.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: I don’t want them to call me. I’m on a permanent do not disturb. This would make it even crazier. True. Even crazier. At least we can organize them to LinkedIn and Indeed and maybe some of our email. would be the amount of text messages I would receive would be even more chaotic than I already had.
Michael Goldberg: Exactly. Exactly.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Let’s take a quick reset. This is Jessica Miller-Merrill and you are listening to the Workology podcast powered by Ace the HR Exam and Upskill HR. Before we get back to our guest, I do have a announcement that I want to share. We have a new marketplace of our favorite HR technology to start your research. Head on over to marketplace.workology.com.
Today, I am so excited to be talking with Michael Goldberg. He’s a senior director of TA at US Renal Care. And we’re talking about centers of excellence in recruitment and sourcing. Let’s get back to it.
I love the tools. I love the scorecard and then the activities that equal success. And then the communication, whether it’s between your team and you or the team and the recruiters and the hiring manager. It’s multifaceted and multi-layered in terms of what is taking to make this successful. And it didn’t happen the first time. Like it took some tweaks before it really hit and you saw some impacts, true impacts.
Michael Goldberg: Yeah, I mean, that’s the one thing that I think people need to be okay with. And that’s why you have a second iteration, but you want to give it a good six months. If you see it’s really not working immediately, then yeah, but I wouldn’t touch anything for at least three. But I would say if you feel like things are going okay at three, but could do better. I kind of wish I had tweaked just a wee bit earlier, but for the most part.
There was so much going on that I didn’t want to overwhelm them with, all right, we got to do this and we got to do this and we got to do this and we got to do it slowly. So it’s okay to. It’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay. You know, if you don’t feel it’s okay, you shouldn’t be working where you’re working because it’s not a very good culture to be working in. So that’s there.
That’s that. But, you know, overall, know that there’s going to be some bumps along the way. And I knew that there were going to be bumps. And the only minor tweak and why I said it was interesting at the very outset of the podcast is that I have one sources that does enjoy the candidate contact. And so he’s willing, he actually vets his candidates before they go to the, so that’s other ways that sourcing can be done in organizations.
But the other two do it their way and they do just well. So, and I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to rock the boat and say, well, you got to do it one way. We’ve got to be consistent. That’s not a good management style. And it’s not, you go with what works. And if the team has brought 27 hires, then perfect. Now, if we go to individual scorecards, might be a little different story, but we’ll see. But for now, it’s a team and I’m staying as a team, at least through the rest of this year.
Center of Excellence in Sourcing
So that’s the plan and I’m excited about it. I think my source and team, they couldn’t go to a hackathon at SourceCon and do the technology searches and stuff like that, but they weren’t hired to do that. We’re looking to hire on new, bring on RNs and patient care tech. Why? Because it’s our bread and butter.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Michael, this has been helpful and helpful for so many people. I like I said before we went on that I have never heard of a center of excellence for sourcing. And I love that you’re willing to share what’s what has been working and what didn’t work and kind of iterations. But you and I’ve known each other for a long time and I feel like you’ve approached your career that way as well. Right. Like continuous improvement, refinement curiosity to try new things. So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I’ll link to you. I’ll include Michael’s LinkedIn as well. He’s on the social media so you can find him all the places, but connect with him. he’s a teacher, obviously, a mentor. So some really good insights. appreciate you.
Michael Goldberg: Thank you. Feel free to connect and look forward to connecting with whoever’s interested. Thank you.
Jessica Miller-Merrell: Amazing. Thanks, Michael.
Thank you so much for joining me for this conversation on the Workology podcast. A huge thank you to Michael Goldberg for sharing his perspective using the COE model in a new and different way, which is in sourcing and talent acquisition. The COE model really can provide an organizational structure to any HR department as we’ve seen, providing things such as concentrated expertise, the standardization of leading practices, processes and programs, as well as enhanced innovation from those specialized experts, economies of scale, and finally, trend analysis with data being filtered and analyzed by those truly functional experts designed to help uncover those improved processes, systems and candidate pools. Finding the best talent in an industry like healthcare.
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with another HR or TA leader who’s thinking about the future of HR and talent acquisition. And as always, you can find more resources, courses and conversations at workology.com. Thank you for joining the Workology Podcast. It’s sponsored by our HR certification and recertification courses available at workology.com, as well as our new HR Tech Marketplace, head on over to marketplace.workology.com to learn and get started on your HR technology research. This podcast is for the disruptive workplace leader who’s tired of the status quo. My name is Jessica Miller-Merrell. Until next time, head on over to workology.com and listen to all our Workology podcast episodes. Have a great day.
Resources
Michael Goldberg on LinkedIn Â
Episode 381: Centers of Excellence With Lisa Woods From Walmart
