For many recruiters, recruiting and hiring in the healthcare industry has become a hot topic. Recruiters and HR managers all around the world are battling to find highly qualified healthcare workers on a regular basis. Many healthcare organizations have most likely recognized the significance of this issue. In order to increase hiring in the healthcare industry, they have begun to use some novel methods.
You may simply point out the obstacles of healthcare recruiting if you’re a medical recruiter or hiring manager. High turnover rates, a lack of readily available or qualified talent, and a long time-to-fill are undoubtedly at the top of your list. The healthcare sector is becoming increasingly competitive as the demand for trained professionals grows. It’s a good idea to brush up on your medical recruitment methods if you’re boosting up your hiring efforts.
Invest in a recruiting application
A strong applicant tracking system can help you deal with issues like high cost per hire or time-to-hire, as well as limited access to a varied pool of prospects. You can build up a recommendation system using Workable, for example, to include your present employees in your hiring efforts or to more efficiently search passive applicants. Workable keeps track of these and other processes for you, providing you with insightful statistics and insights. Read about how Workable helped Houston Behavioral Healthcare Hospital find competent clinicians while also improving its recruiting processes.
Increasing the Number of Candidates in Your Candidate Pool
Building an applicant pool is the first step in any successful recruitment process. Of course, there are a variety of approaches, but in the healthcare industry, recruiting frequently begins early. To begin, keep in mind that on-the-job training is an important aspect of healthcare worker training and certification. Students in the healthcare field must obtain practical experience through shadowing preceptors and spending time in the trenches. Of course, this is a great experience, but it also allows the student to gain exposure to the culture of the facility in which they are working. This means that certain healthcare personnel will acquire a strong attachment to certain institutions while others would develop an aversion to others. Because of their experience or because of their reputation, many qualified candidates will prefer to avoid particular hospital networks, for example.
You must know where to look
Where should an organization look once it has figured out who it wants? Traditional provider organizations often post job openings on their clunky employment websites or on other job-hunting websites. The issue with this method is that it can perpetuate systematic class-based biases by erecting hurdles to entry for those with low digital access or knowledge, limiting candidate pools. Targeting efforts to the attributes a business is looking for is an alternative to “one size fits all” recruitment. When Enterprise, the world’s largest car rental firm, recognized it needed to acquire team players, it went out and recruited newly graduated student-athletes from genuine teams.
Recognize the skills gap
The so-called “hiring hangup” has emerged as a result of a harmful disparity between industry-standard pay rates and job searchers’ impressions of the prizes on offer. Candidates are seen by employers as being uneducated and failing to keep up with medical and technological advancements. Job seekers are discouraged from applying for positions above the entry-level due to tight job requirements.
Post your job openings on specialized employment boards
It’s time for more targeted outreach after putting your job advertising on popular job boards like Indeed.com and Careerjet.com. Use healthcare employment boards like Health eCareers, CareerVitals, Healthcare Source, or Healthcare Jobsite to find applicants this will allow you to contact healthcare professionals directly and locate suitable candidates more rapidly.
Boost your company’s image
Due to the increasing demand for healthcare employment, it’s critical to stand out in order to attract prospects to your clinic’s door. Reconsider your employer brand and how you’ll communicate your vision and values to potential employees. You can, for example, add images of regular work life to your careers page or post videos of current employees expressing their experiences.
Maintaining Multiple Pools
You want to make sure you’re keeping multiple pools of candidates as a staffing company, whether it’s internal or external to a healthcare facility. There should be a pool for each role. This means there should be a pool for senior management, a pool for lower management, a pool for doctors, a pool for surgeons, a pool for nurses, a pool for janitors, a pool for food service workers, and so on. Every main duty division should have its own pool. The benefit of keeping these pools separate is that it makes it much easier to fill certain roles. You don’t have to sift through a big, disjointed pool; instead, you may sift through a pool where you know every candidate is qualified. Filtering for the best workers for a certain role can be done based on experience, certification, and position.
Creating a Design Map
The procedure exemplifies a fundamental principle: identify the challenges you’re seeking to solve and recruit workers who can solve them without regard for personal or industry biases. Patty McCord wrote in HBR on how she used this principle to help Netflix expand as Chief Talent Officer. Human-centered design paradigms are being used by healthcare leaders such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Academy Health to alter the field of healthcare research, including a reinvention of the workforce.
Provide clever perks
When it comes to hiring in a competitive market, what do you need? Competitive advantages are the answer. Create an appealing benefits package that will not only attract prospects but also encourage them to stay with you. Flexible working hours should be given, particularly for occupations that require lengthy shifts on occasion. It’s also necessary to have access to wellness and health initiatives.
Examine the candidate’s soft talents
Health practitioners must take a people-centered approach to their work and place a high emphasis on assisting others to truly shine. Effective communication and listening abilities, as well as the capacity to operate under pressure, are essential. Prepare relevant interview questions ahead of time to ensure that candidates possess these characteristics. Before inviting a candidate for an in-person interview, you could also employ psychometric evaluation tools.
Make use of the appropriate assessment tools
Credentials such as resumes, diplomas, and training certificates are widely used by health care organizations to evaluate candidates. These do represent an applicant’s training and clinical skills, but they don’t reveal much about their personality or opinions. Providers should explore multimodal tests that assess personality traits or aptitudes that predict work performance after excluding applicants who lack the legally required credentials, keeping in mind the legal, ethical, and financial consequences of psychometric testing in recruiting.
Multimodal examinations are becoming more common in the healthcare hiring process. For example, when hiring clinic receptionists, for example, innovators like Iora Health make a clear distinction between assessing traits versus skills.
Consider human resources to be a management function
Former Netflix Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord chastises executives who regard human resource management as an afterthought. We also feel that the most effective hiring occurs when leaders are deeply involved in all stages of the process since they have a unique understanding of the organization’s needs and desired culture. As healthcare moves away from clinician-dominated, medical-competency work and toward a team-based approach that addresses the needs of entire patients and communities, hiring tactics must adapt. Similarly, by rethinking hiring techniques, healthcare executives can hire high-performing employees who might otherwise be overlooked by traditional recruitment and evaluation methods. Disrupting hiring procedures and human resource regulations is challenging work, but it will pay off for healthcare organizations and patients in the long term.
Employee Retention should be emphasized
With such a high turnover rate, the facility that can demonstrate that it can treat its employees well will never have personnel issues. Many factors beyond the facility’s control, such as insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and the government, contribute to healthcare turnover. That simply implies that the facility should be able to control what it can.
- Employee perks should be improved. A job in healthcare is extremely demanding. This is partly due to the nature of dealing with people who are hurting and at their most vulnerable. However, part of it is due to CEOs’ ineffective desire to squeeze every penny out of their jobs.
- Ascertain adequate staffing levels. A facility that is understaffed is one of the most stressful situations for healthcare professionals. Not only does it increase the stress level of individual healthcare workers, but it also lowers the quality of care provided to patients, making healthcare employees who are generally in the field because of their compassion feel less able to make a difference at their facility. It puts them on the verge of burnout and raises turnover.
- Make an investment in your facilities. While not directly related to the recruiting process, healthcare institutions must guarantee that not only their workers but also their tools are maintained up to date. For example, using modern software is vital since fresh grads will have been trained on it, and it can better manage modern patient care. Modern equipment helps to eliminate stressors such as alarm desensitization, which can have an impact on patient care. More than the workers are involved in healthcare.
Author – Sunny Chawla is a Managing Director at Alliance Recruitment Agency. He specializes in helping clients with international recruiting, staffing, HR services, and Careers advice service for overseas and international businesses.
