Jason Pistulka didn’t wait for permission—he just started solving the real problem.
As AVP of Talent Acquisition at HCA Healthcare, Jason helped scale a recruiting organization that hired hundreds of people per day and turned a fragmented HR operation into a well-oiled, data-driven machine.
In this episode, Jason talks about the bold moves he made to overhaul recruiting from the inside out—why he insisted on building his own team, how he used data to earn buy-in, and how he coached his teams to operate like high-performance business units.
We spoke to Jason in his last week at HCA Healthcare. His next move? Independent consulting. We’ll drop a link to his LinkedIn profile below.
Jason also shares:
Connect with Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonpistulka/
Jason’s consulting firm, StratTech: https://strattechconsulting.com/about
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[00:00:00] Jason Pistulka: 30 many candidates fly in for interviews and then the hiring manager does not even be there. And so I got the leadership to send out a message that if I, the CEO send you an invite for a meeting that conflicts with an interview, I expect you to respond. I can't come. I have an interview and so. Trying to get where you have the culture, the philosophy of the organization, that this is the most important thing.
[00:00:24] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, President of ZipRecruiter and on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses.
Today's talent All Star is Jason Pistulka, and we caught him in his last week on the job as a VP of Talent Acquisition at HCA, one of the country's leading healthcare providers. Jason's moving on to work as a consultant and as you'll hear today, he has a lot of wisdom to share. So let's go back to the beginning of Jason's journey.
Like many of our guests, his talent career got started kind of by accident.
[00:01:06] Jason Pistulka: I didn't even know I wanted to work in HR. I went to Notre Dame for my MBA, and like an enterprising young man. I looked at the lists of concentrations that I could do and said, which one of these pays the most? That was general management.
I said, okay, I'm gonna do that. And then I start looking at the overlap between general management and HR concentrations, and it was really the HR classes and the case studies, and you're reading about all these. Companies that are just awesome and, and the differentiator for those companies were their people practices.
[00:01:38] Dave Travers: After earning his MBA, Jason did some consulting. He also worked for Microsoft and learned data analysis and financial modeling. Those skills prepared him for an HR management role at Asurion, where he noticed a big opportunity.
[00:01:52] Jason Pistulka: The thing I found out really quickly is my managers weren't confident that if they fired their poor performer, that TA could hire a better performer.
And so I, I finally decided I can't be successful as an HR business partner if I'm not controlling the talent pipeline. And so I went to the head of HR and convinced him to let me take over recruiting and build a team. And I always said that I would never work in recruiting. It's the most thankless place you can be in hr, and that was true until I was able to build it.
Build it the way that I wanted to build it. And at Asurion, recruiting was their biggest bottleneck. And specifically in tech, they were not able to put projects through fast enough, have the uptime and stability that they needed in their systems, and, uh. They were two-thirds staffed offshore, largely 'cause they couldn't get the onshore talent that they wanted.
And, uh, over the course of the next almost five years, I helped shift them to where there were two-thirds plus staffed onshore. And we grew their overall IT organization by several fold. And, uh, by building a real recruiting team and, uh. Teaching people how to really recruit, source, all that kinda stuff.
Um, when you look at the All in recruiting costs, we cut the recruiting costs by about 70%. Um, even though we were hiring vastly more. And that was a lot of fun. And, uh, you know, my time at, uh, Asurion, uh, I started to get bored and, uh, wanted to do something different and there wasn't really anything at Asurion.
For me. And, uh, I ended up coming over to HCA as, uh, they were in the process of just building, uh, so at the time when I joined HCA in 2014, it was a decentralized HR function, so there were no true centers of excellence. We have 14 divisions at the time in the field. Um, not to mention all the out. Patient and corporate areas, and those divisions all ran on their own.
Some of them had generalist models, some of them did have recruiting organizations. Some were RPO. It was just kind of everything, and they decided they wanted to create a center of excellence, pull all those employees into a a common group, and really build out some standardized process, policy, procedures, all that kind of stuff.
So when I came in, I took over the corporate areas and the outpatient areas and built that, centralized that, um, over time. And, uh, that was my foray into, into healthcare. So I, I find it interesting when I left Asurion in one year, and at that time we were hiring IT, finance and HR and my team, we hired 497 people.
As I tell people now, that's a decent day at HCA, so it's just a complete different world. Uh, not one's not better than the other. They're just different. In my time at HCAI took a lot of what I knew, learned, and applied as an HR business partner, and how you build high-performance teams, you know, how you measure performance, set goals, and drive goals.
And I applied that in my teams and, um, we got to where we were very disciplined in how we rate our recruiters. We had on twice a year, calibration processes and tons of data that we used to rate our recruiters. And uh, I started just kind of off the side of my desk building data and spreadsheets and sharing what I had done in my team for the rest of the organization.
And I started doing tech work, um, and looking for different solutions to bring in. And I really do well in the, uh, I'd rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission space. And, uh, thankfully, my leaders at HCA tolerated that pretty well. And over tim,e as I kept bringing in more stuff and, and we kept advancing the tech agenda, um, some of the marketing agenda and sourcing agendas, at some point they just said, well, we're gonna give you this.
And they started giving me those teams to manage. At, at some point, uh, no longer even, um, you know, manage recruiters anymore. I was just doing centralized support functions, uh, in the organization. And about three years ago, I, I came to HCA and I said, um, I'm looking to leave. And, uh, they asked me if I would stay to help them through, uh, TA optimization project, which we are in the delivery motive right now.
Um, and I said yes and, um. So that's got me to where I'm at today. My actual last day at, at HCA is a week from now. And then I'm just gonna do consulting full-time.
[00:06:09] Dave Travers: So Jason, you are, uh, like so many talent acquisition leaders. You are someone who clearly likes to solve problems and clearly enjoys seeing the impact on both organizations and humans when you solve problems.
But I think one of the things that's, that's different when I hear you describe yourself is you describe yourself as a data guy. I don't think everyone in HR thinks of themselves as a data person. So how has that been a tool and how do you work with other people that are on your team who, who may have chosen HR? Because data's not their thing.
[00:06:41] Jason Pistulka: So we've pushed data hard in our team. I mean, I, I can't tell you how many people I've sat down and turned, uh, uh, taught them how to build pivot tables and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And I've always said that any HR or or recruiting leader. It needs at least some good core Excel skills because I don't care how good a dashboard somebody builds you, some leader wants to see some view, that's different.
You can't have your data. People have to customize everything everywhere and and a lot of times you're just doing exploratory work. I have a hypothesis and so I need to go in. I don't wanna, I can't ask somebody to build a dashboard around a hypothesis. I, I need to, you know, work with some flat files and raw data and figure out is there, is a juice worth a squeeze, you know, before I really engage people in that space.
And I'm lucky that I synthesize data well, it's something I've, I've naturally always done, and I understand the domain. I understand not only the, the domain of recruiting, but the domain of, of healthcare in this case. To understand what are the things in the business that drive these behaviors that you see in the data?
And you kinda have to pull all of those things together and, uh, be curious, be very, very curious with the data. Working in HCA is fabulous in that regard because, so operationally driven and there's so many operational leaders who are just like me, and so you put us in a room. And we bounce our ideas off of each other and, and before you know it, you know, we're uncovering new hypotheses and new things that we're digging into.
So it's a, uh, bit of a pit. You can continue just to dig and dig and dig until you hit China on this. But we enjoy doing that and it, I think it's pretty, the biggest differentiator that we have.
[00:08:13] Dave Travers: What I love about how you frame that is that among the things that you do is you are willing to say, Hey, you may not be a data person yourself.
But rather than ignore data and pretend like it doesn't exist and it's not critical, sit down and let me show you how the pivot table works. 'cause some level of data is gonna be necessary for you to be successful for yourself and for me.
Yeah. The number of people, and mostly with me leaving now and have people going like, you turn me into a data person.
And it's funny because it's intimidating. You look at pivot tables and stuff, and for somebody who just doesn't know you go like, oh my God, that looks so difficult. And, and as you know, a little research, little Google a few, uh, training classes and before you know it, you're going like, well, this is actually quite easy and very powerful, as most of the tech tools are now, or they don't survive.
Um, as you know, in this world, uh, needs to be user-friendly. And so yeah, we've gone a long ways to teach people about data. And the other thing that we've had the luxury is I have hired and built a data team within recruiting that this is all they do. And so they have such deep domain knowledge that now when we say we want a dashboard around this subject, they already know like how we would want it to look, how to build it in a way that's consumable by the end user and and things like that.
And it's just amazing that our first draft comes out 90. To 95% spot on, and the speed of which they're able to deliver it too 'cause the recruiting data is complex. It's dirty and trying to figure out why this is. Goofy is something that you have to have, um, a little bit of investigator in you, and willing to do, and that's where we see our best data.
People at HCA is. They're not just, okay, well these are what the numbers are. They start to really look in. Why is that that number looks goofy and dig in? Everything at the end of the day is subject to human behavior. If you don't understand the human behavior or misbehavior, you know, you can't understand the data.
And, and then what we do in as a tech team within recruiting, as we're doing transformation, we we're trying to see how can we design it differently. That gives less opportunity for misbehavior, um, by our recruiters, hiring managers, others, you know, creating shadow processes and all those kinds of things that you don't want.
And then the second thing is, is how do we get more better data where we can see the misbehavior and then we can go and address that and coach and, and work with people. So it's so data-intensive. Um, and the sheer number of dashboards we have is a bit overwhelming. It's where I, I guess where we find our joy.
[00:10:45] Dave Travers: A hundred percent. I share that joy, so. Another way I've heard you describe yourself, which I love, is that you're very comfortable in the ask for forgiveness rather than permission space. And I think this is very counterintuitive for a lot of people and HR leaders where compliance is a competitive advantage and things like that, where I'm a person who finds chaos and I bring compliance and order to it, which is also a valid sort of framework for seeing the HR world, but it sounds very counterintuitive, therefore.
So how do you reconcile those two aspects of being an HR leader?
[00:11:23] Jason Pistulka: So don't misconstrue that for angering all the attorneys, of course. So we're smart enough when it comes to, um, the things that we want to do. Which of these is legally hairy? And we really try to stay a long ways away from, um, legally Harry as an organization.
So when, when the beg for forgiveness around ask permission thing is, is more around, you know, driving change within our organization. Things that, you know, may be resistance of people over. Driving evaluations of, of vendors and products and everything else, and getting to the point to where a lot of companies would've said, Hey, can we investigate this?
We're going, we're not gonna ask to investigate this. We're gonna figure it out. We're gonna bring what the value prop is, and we're gonna do a whole lot of work that other people may have seen as well. It's just wasted effort unless you have permission. Uh, the salesperson in me can't stop. I need the data.
I need the information so I can be an effective salesperson and sell these ideas into our leadership within our organization. So that's where our big for forgiveness is if we get the company in legal trouble. I'm sorry, there's not much forgiveness. It probably wouldn't work there anymore. So we, we know where that, that line is, it's pretty clear and, and we steer pretty clear of that line.
[00:12:33] Dave Travers: Okay. So one other thing you mentioned, is that an, an organization as complex as HCA, so many hospitals, so many patients were, you know, counting on you to deliver and make sure the people are there to be able to deliver healthcare, uh, that people count on. You have tremendous internal resources, but you can't do everything yourself.
And you mentioned vendor selection and vendor management, which I know is something that you have done a lot of. How do you decide what should we do internally and what should we look. To a third party to do. And if it's like, if this is something we shouldn't do, how do I get expert at the process of going and finding a third party who's gonna help me do it?
[00:13:11] Jason Pistulka: As you can imagine, HCA, because of our size, we can justify internal stuff, right? That a lot of other, other places can't. So, you know, when I started this, we didn't have anybody. Operations. There was not a recruiting operations person. Now there's an entire team of recruiting operations people, but we, we have 400 plus recruiters, right?
So if I can increase the productivity of a recruiter by two or 3% by adding a person in there, I can justify that in a team that size, right? So most of what we do, we do internally, you know, obviously we buy external tech. We don't build all of our own tech, although we do build some. And a lot of that is, is, you know, it doesn't matter how much resource you have in-house, when you have a vendor that works all day, every day across industries and different customers, they just have exposure, um, to things that, you know, we can't all get it HCA, we're smart, but we're not all knowing. And so you have to, you know, pick and choose accordingly. And, you know, the other thing that we do, uh, a lot of times people choose to build internally because, well, the vendor doesn't have exactly what we want. Well, because we're HCA and because we're big enough, a lot of times we can say we will buy if.
You're gonna build this, this, and this for us. And so we've done a, a lot of product design. Um, I can't tell you how many features my vendors have that they're selling now today that I, I designed and built and, and my kind of approach to this thing always has been, I don't, I. Ever want to ask my vendors to build something that somebody else wouldn't want.
Right? And if we do, then obviously that's a customization that we pay for. And there's always something that you have a, a unique integration need or something like that. But product wise, the sales person to me flips my hat on and goes, if I was selling for your organization. Here's how I'd be selling this product idea.
And I drive that. And that's also what gets me to vendor to build it. 'cause I can sell and I'm selling to them as to uh, why they should build these things. And that's just another fun part of the job.
[00:15:08] Dave Travers: I think that is such a powerful golden nugget you put in there at the end, which is, I. You're selling to them.
So if you can explain, hey, I'm a big customer. I can make this worth your while, but in addition to that, I know a lot of other people in my position they're gonna want this too. It's very worth your while vendor to do exactly what I need. That is a very powerful way to get them thinking, Hey, this isn't just the single customer I'm serving.
There are 10 or a hundred more I'm gonna be able to sell if I build this thing that's gonna help out HCA.
[00:15:40] Jason Pistulka: Well, it's, it's interesting. I had a product I wanted to buy and, and to bring in a new company and product from the outside is, is an arduous task. Um, at, at HCA are high bars and standards and, and there's only so much that we can push through that funnel of evaluation at any given time as a company.
I went, God, this one's not gonna hit the radar. I'm not gonna be able to get it pushed through. So I took a whole different approach and I just convinced a private equity firm that owns one of my vendors to buy 'em and roll them into their product. And that way I got it delivered to me without having to new do a, uh, a new MSA and everything else. So there, there, there's multiple ways to skin the cat.
[00:16:15] Dave Travers: There are ways to get creative. I love that. Okay, so now you're at HCA for the past several years as the leader of this huge important talent pipeline for so many of the hospitals and care providers in, in health services that HCA provides. Doing that job successfully requires you not just to deal with vendors, not just to manage your own team, but to manage across so many different stakeholders, different leaders at different hospitals, different corporate stakeholders, et cetera. As you rise up through your career or as you mentor now somebody who's rising up through their career, who for the first time isn't just managing their team, isn't just an individual contributor, but has to go out through the rest of the organization, how do I as a talent leader start to develop that skill and get the confidence to go out and talk to other parts of the organization?
[00:17:04] Jason Pistulka: The biggest thing I can tell you from my days when I was directly fa interfacing with clients and I'm trying to drive them to do the right things, probably the number one thing is to have the business acumen to be able to do it. And I felt really blessed coming into HCA. In corporate, in lines of business, all those service line delivery areas, because all the business conversations I was having were really at the higher level within HCA about, you know, we're trying to drive surgical excellence or transfer center excellence and, and here's what the metrics behind that are.
And so I understood the data and the science and everything behind why they're doing the business that they are. When I found myself talking to leaders in the business and they would bring up an issue and I go, well that's interesting. Um, is that related to this effort or that effort? And they go like, you know about that?
So just the fact that you're able to show that you're tapped into the business and you understand the different parts of what's going on, even might be. Completely unrelated to the topic at hand. They're just going like, oh, this guy's pretty informed. He, uh, seems pretty smart. Um, you know, that kind of thing.
And that just, again, it comes back to curiosity and interest. I find it fascinating. The business side of it's fascinating and if you are recruiting for an organization and you aren't fascinated by what that organization does and and dig in deep to it, I think you're missing out. I mean, my, my previous organization was Asurion and we did cell phone insurance and we, we convinced people to quit publicly traded companies with stock to join a private equity held company all day long 'cause we could sell. And it was understanding the business and the complexities and, and everything else and all of that business acumen. And not only in recruiting, but just broader in hr. The more you can show business acumen, the more that you can, uh, influence your business leaders to make good people decisions.
[00:18:55] Dave Travers: What is so smart about that is that both when it comes to data acumen, we talked about earlier in business acumen, you pointed out correctly that curiosity is the gateway to both of those things. Like if, if you find a role or you find a company where it's interesting to you to just keep learning more, that is such a powerful multiplier on the amount of stuff you're gonna be able to bring to your job every single day.
And connect the dots for people, whether it's a, a data issue or a business issue, or whatever the case may be. Okay. Jason, we always finish these podcasts with a rapid fire section. So I want you to imagine the CEO of HCA swings by or is in the elevator with you and says, Hey Jason, you're a data guy. How should I be thinking about what's the measure of success for our talent team, for a talent acquisition at HCA?
[00:19:44] Dave Travers: What's the right answer to that?
[00:19:45] Jason Pistulka: So this is a little unique. HCA, because I don't know how much I can teach Sam Hazen more about talent acquisition data than he already knows. I have never seen a leadership team. Who is so deep into data and, and the big difference between an HCA and like when I worked at Microsoft, for example, you know, labor in healthcare represents 45 to 50% of total revenue.
So you have to. Extremely effectively be maniacal about labor management, labor delivery, all of that kinda stuff. And as a result, we just have a leadership that's so clued in, you know, we drive a lot on our end of what we wanna see in, in our, um, TA data. But I would say the business drives. Every bit as much on their end as what they wanna see in that TA data too.
So I don't know how much I could, uh, tell him something that he doesn't already know, he hasn't already asked. I would enjoy, uh, probably two hours over a drink though, to debate about it. Okay.
[00:20:42] Dave Travers: Same setup, same situation. The CEO walks in and says, you know, as you think about our organization, from your vantage point, what's the number one skill we need to be developing internally and recruiting for over the next several years?
[00:20:57] Jason Pistulka: It's such a different environment. I just go back to, you know, you're in a world that's so regulated. We're obviously as a company, we're doing so much in the data science space, you know, how can we use AI in an ethical manner, um, safe manner, all of that kind of stuff. But, you know, in the broader size of HCA, that's small portion of our overall population.
I even works on those things. And although that's critical to the future of the organization, it's not the heartbeat of everyday conversation. Right. And so. My thing that I would say is, Jason, if you can move the ball on any one thing, and this goes in almost every organization you walk into, you have to have where hiring talent is the number one priority that you have in the organization? When I worked at Asurion, it was very broken when I took over, um, the recruiting organization there, and we had common problems with, you know, people not showing up for interviews and reschedules. I had candidates fly in for interviews and then the hiring manager just not even be there.
And so I, I needed to change the narrative and so I got the leadership there to send out a message, and that message said that if you're scheduled for an interview with a candidate here, the only reasons why you can miss an interview is. A personal family emergency. A customer emergency, that you are literally the only person who's able to solve, which is so rare.
And what that means is if I, the CIO, the CEO, whoever send you an invite for a meeting that conflicts with an interview, I expect you to respond. I can't come. I have an interview. I say that I still get a chill when I say that. It makes my hair stand on end. But it changes the dynamic of everything because we had people canceling interviews because they saw it was just not as important as X and, and you, if we think about this in the space of a hospital.
Most of the interviews are happening, like with nursing directors and stuff, and you know, unless there is a mass casualty event that happens someplace, that's just tragic. Those directors don't need to be involved in day-to-day emergencies. They have. Tons of people in their hospitals that deal with that, right?
That's what they are. And their emergency that they have is staffing shortages. It's, uh, contract labor. It's all those kinds of things that, uh, they can have the most impact on. And so trying to get where you have the culture, the mindset, the philosophy of the organization, that this is the most important thing is, uh, I, I don't care where you're at.
It is such a game changer if you can operate at that point. I've said many times, I don't need more candidates. I need us to get them through the funnel faster and make good decisions quickly. Know what you're looking for and when you find it, hire it. Don't hire by comparison is all of those kinds of things that I would say.
This is what we need to build. We wanna be successful. If you can win the labor game in healthcare, you've won half the battle. And I think it's a winnable thing with excellence.
[00:23:48] Dave Travers: I love it. Jason. Alka, first of all, your curiosity is infectious, and two, when you describe how talent. Is the most important thing for an organization.
Not only can I tell that you feel it, I feel it as you're saying it, so I really appreciate that. It is so clear why you're a talent All star. Thanks so much for being with us today.
[00:24:09] Jason Pistulka: Alright, thank you so much. I enjoyed it.
[00:24:14] Dave Travers: That's Jason Pistulka, a consultant who just finished his tenure year as a VP of Talent Acquisition at HCA Healthcare. You can find him on LinkedIn, and we'll put up link to his profile in the description below. Speaking of LinkedIn, check out ZipRecruiter page. There we post highlights from these episodes in addition to original research, hiring data and more.
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. See you next time.