How RosmanSearch Used an Employee Engagement Survey to Guide the Organization through Growth
RosmanSearch is a healthcare recruiting firm that helps organizations identify and hire specialized physicians.
Snapshot
RosmanSearch had changed quickly. The organization had grown from roughly 20–25 employees to about 75 in just a few years, shifted from a primarily in-person workforce to a more hybrid and remote workforce, and experienced a leadership transition along the way.
With more employees working outside Northeast Ohio and fewer people together day to day, it became harder for leadership to know how connected, supported, and engaged employees really felt.
RosmanSearch partnered with ERC to run an employee engagement survey to get a clearer picture of how employees were feeling and where leadership may need to pay closer attention.
We helped them get a pulse on how employees felt about their work, their managers, and the company overall. We analyzed the results across key employee groups, walked the leadership team through what stood out, shared benchmarks, and helped them identify where follow-up conversations and action steps were needed.
Rosman gained not just feedback, but a better understanding of where to focus, what conversations to have next, and a survey process they can repeat to measure progress over time.
“We just said, ‘Let’s figure out where we stand now, and then hopefully it’s good. But if it isn’t, that’s good to know. And then what do we have to work on?’”
Adam Stern
President and Chief Executive Officer, RosmanSearch
“It’s not as simple as it sounds, ‘Are you happy? One to 10.’ I do think there’s some real expertise in nuance in how you ask questions.”
Adam Stern
President and Chief Executive Officer, RosmanSearch
Background
The leadership team at RosmanSearch knew the company had changed quickly. With significant growth, more remote employees, and less day-to-day visibility into how people were feeling, they wanted a better sense of the employee experience across the organization.
What the organization was navigating
- Rapid growth: RosmanSearch had grown from about 20–25 employees to roughly 75 over several years, changing the scale and complexity of the organization.
- A more distributed workforce: The company had moved from a mostly in-office environment to a hybrid model, with many newer hires working remotely outside Northeast Ohio.
- Less visibility into employee experience: With people no longer in the office every day, leadership had less day-to-day clarity into whether employees felt engaged, supported, and satisfied.
- Leadership transition and organizational change: RosmanSearch had added senior leaders and gone through a few leadership transitions, making it an ideal time to establish a fresh baseline.
- A need for something more rigorous than a simple internal survey: After using SurveyMonkey for feedback at a company event, leadership recognized that true engagement questions required more nuanced, stronger question design, and better interpretation.
Our Approach
We used a proven survey approach and worked with RosmanSearch to decide what they wanted to learn and how the survey should be structured. We then handled the survey process and helped the leadership team understand the results so they could decide what to do next.
What we did
- Started with planning and alignment: We worked with RosmanSearch to clarify what leadership wanted to understand and walked the team through the areas organizations often explore in engagement work.
- Used a validated engagement survey tool: Rather than relying on an internal do-it-yourself questionnaire, Rosman used our established survey framework to gather more meaningful and reliable feedback.
- Included custom qualitative input: Rosman was able to add open-ended questions so the survey could capture context specific to its organization.
- Managed the survey process end-to-end: We handled survey creation, distribution, follow-up, and analysis.
- Segmented the data in useful ways: Results were broken down by in-office vs. remote employees, newer vs. longer-tenured employees, and by department, giving leadership a more actionable view than overall scores alone.
- Walked the team through the results: After collecting responses, we brought the findings back to RosmanSearch, walked the leadership team through what stood out, shared benchmark context, and helped them understand what the results meant and where to focus next.
“It was really great that they handled it… your people have spoken, and here’s what they said, and here’s how you should interpret it. So it was very user-friendly for someone like us who doesn’t have a big HR or analysis function.”
Adam Stern
President and Chief Executive Officer, RosmanSearch
“We had the meeting with the ERC folks and our exec team, so we could all digest it together. We then felt equipped to go to our management group and think about action items.”
Adam Stern
President and Chief Executive Officer, RosmanSearch
The Results
The employee engagement survey helped RosmanSearch see where employees felt positive, where more attention was needed, and what conversations and follow-up steps leadership should take next.
Rosman also came away with confidence that this should become a recurring best practice, not a one-time exercise.
What changed for the organization
- A clear baseline: Leadership gained a stronger understanding of employee engagement, support, and satisfaction at a moment of organizational change.
- Better-than-expected overall results: The data showed RosmanSearch was doing many things well, which gave leadership confidence while still highlighting opportunities to improve.
- Sharper visibility into where action was needed: Department-level and demographic breakouts revealed some opportunities in a specific group, helping leadership focus attention where it mattered most.
- Actionable next steps: Rosman used the findings to guide follow-up conversations where opportunities for improvement existed, with the goal of understanding what was driving the differences in engagement.
- Broader organizational improvements: Across the company, the survey showed that employees wanted to feel more informed and more involved in strategy and decision-making, which led leadership to emphasize more cross-departmental teams and broader participation in solving problems.
- A repeatable process for the future: Rosman now sees engagement surveys as something to repeat regularly to track whether improvements are happening over time, and in what areas.
