How Mercy Transformed Their Career Site into a Scalable Conversion Engine

Company Overview

Like many large healthcare organizations, Mercy faces the industry-wide challenge of meeting high-volume hiring demand coupled with a severe shortage of skilled workers.

With 43,000 employees across eight Midwest states, Mercy manages approximately 6,000 open roles and makes over 19,000 hires annually. The healthcare system is on track to eclipse 20,000 hires in 2025, driving an urgent need for more efficient recruitment processes.

Scaling Hiring with a Flat Budget

Mercy needed to scale hiring to meet aggressive growth goals, but do so without increasing recruitment advertising spend. They analyzed their high-volume sources of applications and found that like most employers, applicants from their career site were hired 3X more often than those from job boards. While their career site delivered great quality, there wasn't enough applicant volume to reach their hiring goals.

Despite strong employer brand traffic, the majority of Mercy's monthly career site visitors left without applying. At the same time, recruiters — each juggling 70 to 80 reqs — were buried in low-quality applications from major job boards that rarely led to hires.

Mercy didn't have lack of interest from great candidates. But they did have very low conversion of interested career site visitors.

Automated Conversion of High-Intent Leads

Mercy turned to Dalia to increase connection and engagement with interested career site visitors, resulting in dramatically higher conversion to qualified job applications.

But more than just a tool, Dalia brought strategic expertise that helped Mercy reimagine how they approach talent conversion. From refining messaging to optimizing timing, Dalia served as an extension of Mercy's team — delivering insights that shaped smarter hiring strategies across all departments.

Capture — Dynamically configured lead forms capture high-intent visitors to Mercy's career site who previously left as unidentified traffic.

Connect — Relevant and personalized campaigns connect with the high-intent leads across text and email to complete applications when their interest is highest.

Convert — Efficient conversion of high-intent leads into applicants allows recruiters to focus on candidates most likely to be hired.

The key to success is Dalia's focus exclusively on converting ready-to-apply, high-intent leads once they were familiar with Mercy's employer brand, boosting the impact and performance of their pre-existing CRM campaigns.

As Kinsey explains, "Every month we've gotten better as far as the number of visitors filling out applications, and more hires coming from career site traffic. We're continuing to perfect and hone in on what's most effective with Dalia's insights."

Although the experience is completely hands-off for Mercy, Dalia's team of optimization experts worked to continuously improve performance, ensuring that high-intent leads were captured immediately upon visiting the career site and completed applications when their interest was highest.

"When you have such a high volume of reqs, recruiters need to spend their time with the right people. Dalia helps us do that by capturing more candidates who are genuinely interested in Mercy and are most likely to be hired. It's a better experience for the candidate and better results for the business. Beyond tech, the team at Dalia brought a level of strategic insight that made our CRM and employer brand investments work harder — without adding any internal lift." — Paul Kinsey, Executive Director of TA Innovation @ Mercy

Significant Gains in Conversion and Hiring Efficiency

In just a few months, Dalia helped Mercy increase career site lead capture by 15x. Those leads generated 7.6x more completed applications than their existing job alert system, and went on to make up nearly 1 in 5 of all hires — proving that converting high-intent traffic wasn't just smart — it was scalable.

"Within the first month, we doubled our investment because we saw how well it was working," explains Kinsey. "Every month since then, we've seen improvements in both cost-per-application and hire rates."

For Mercy, this didn't just mean more hires. It meant smarter resource allocation, a faster hiring funnel, and greater ROI on every brand dollar they'd already invested — the kind of operational efficiency every talent leader is under pressure to deliver.

Growing Efficiently with Record Hiring from Career Site Traffic

Mercy is transforming how they convert career site visitors into engaged candidates and hires, making the most of their employer branding efforts and allowing recruiters to efficiently prioritize high-intent candidates coming to their career site.

As Mercy continues to evolve, Dalia remains a key partner in their hiring strategy — helping them test, iterate, and scale the most efficient pathways to hire.