iCIMS Hire Expectations™

For as long as I can remember, industry experts claimed that the healthcare industry was basically guaranteed to remain a consistent and strong job market forever. The thought was there will always be patients and patients will always need healthcare providers.  Now, I see that rationale is not quite as sound as we all once believed. 

The Federal Sequestration, automatic budget cuts implemented on March 1, 2013, included a 2% reduction in Medicare payments to healthcare providers. If you don’t think 2% is all that significant, you are sadly mistaken.  For many hospitals, for example, Medicare is the largest single payer, at times accounting for more than half the facility’s total revenue. In those terms, 2% is a monstrous reduction. 

A joint study by the American Medical Association, The American Hospital Association, and the American Nurses Association predicted that the Federal Sequester would undoubtedly result in a decline in healthcare job growth. The impact will not only affect hospitals and physician’s offices, but will have a trickle-down effect including other healthcare vendors, such as suppliers and IT providers. 

Unfortunately, we are already seeing the predicted downturn. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare made a “relatively weak” contribution to the job market in both March and April 2013. Further, the American Hospital Association thinks it may get worse, estimating that these budget cuts could lead to 766,000 fewer healthcare jobs by 2021.

All this at a time when healthcare reform hurtles forward and an estimated 32 million new patients will have access to healthcare in 2014. In short, more providers, supplies, and ancillary staff will be required to address this massive influx of patients at a time when Medicare reimbursement will be significantly decreased. CFOs in healthcare are worried, and with all this in mind it is no surprise. This means, every department, in every healthcare organization, will be required to cut costs.  Human resources and recruiting departments will be no exception. 

Today more than ever, healthcare recruiters need to take serious action to reduce the costs to fill job vacancies. For any newbies reading this post, I am referring to a standard metric, or measurement, called cost-to-fill. The costs-to-fill are the cumulative total of costs associated with recruiting, such as time dedicated to sourcing, sifting through resumes, and interviewing as well as direct costs associated with travel, relocation, costs of employment advertising, and onboarding. In addition to this, one must consider the cost of the vacancy itself. When a job is vacant, either someone needs to pick up that slack in the form of more expensive overtime or the vacancy simply results in additional losses in revenue. In short, vacancies are expensive. 

No matter how you slice it, the key to bringing down costs-to-fill is automation. If healthcare providers want to survive, even thrive, they must eliminate the inefficiencies associated with humans performing processes that can be easily automated such as sifting through hundreds, even thousands of resumes to identify the a particular skill set. Unfortunately, healthcare has always been notoriously slow in terms of adopting information technology. The growing acceptance of electronic medical records, however, does seem to indicate that healthcare is beginning to warm up to technology. Still, automating processes in order to create efficiency does not end in the exam room. 

Automation through recruitment technology is the key to reducing recruitment’s cost-to-fill. For example, automated candidate screening reduces the number of unqualified candidates that a recruiter reviews in order to find those that meet the organization’s needs. Other features include social recruitment and automated job board posting to healthcare specific job boards that broaden and target the recruiter’s reach. At the same time, recruitment technology facilitates and streamlines the communication between recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers.  The combination of broad, yet targeted reach through employment advertising and improved communications ultimately reduces time-to-fill, which subsequently impacts cost-to-fill. 

Gone are the days when email folders and filing cabinets could be considered as viable systems for searching and screening candidates. Operational efficiency is among the best ways to improve an organization’s bottom line and remain competitive. Manual recruitment techniques, filled with high resume volumes and no effective way to accept, review, and manage those resumes is a dangerous inefficiency. Without recruitment technology in place, a healthcare organization cannot maximize human capital efficiency.

If you would like to dive deeper into this topic to learn about the costs associated with manual processes and the return on investment associated with automation, download our Free Whitepaper titled: Healthcare Recruitment: Facing the Sequester.

Over the holiday weekend, I offered to open a bottle of wine at my friend's BBQ. As I was shuffling through the drawer to get the cork screw, I noticed a fancy looking electronic toy sitting on the counter. I asked my friend when she had gotten the new gadget and what its purpose was: I found out it was a corkscrew. SWEET! A neat new gadget. Cylindrical in shape and attached to a charger, it was supposed to simplify the wine-opening process more so than electronic corkscrews of the past. With excitement bubbling over, I, of course, opted to use (the rather unnecessary) gadget. I placed the electronic corkscrew over the top of the bottle and pressed the start button. After about fifteen seconds the "hum" of the motor stopped and I pulled up to see my newly-opened bottle of wine. Except, all I saw was a quarter-of-a-cork. Fantastic! So I tried again. I placed it over the bottle of wine once more, only to come back with more bits of cork. Frustrated at the idea of getting any cork inside the bottle, I pulled open her drawer, got the good old fashioned metal corkscrew and had an opened bottle of wine in about 10 seconds.

Now the failure of the wine-opening operation could have been caused from a couple of different things: unqualified operator, flimsy gadget or just plain old coincidence. Who knows... But what I did conclude was that in this case: the easy-to-use technology got the job done, where the more advanced one did not.

People are frequently inundated with new occupational tasks as every year passes, and technology has come to our rescue for this. But how do you find the right solution? Whether it is a corkscrew, a phone, a computer model, or the latest software, finding the best one is always a challenge. Let’s take the HR department. HR professionals have become more and more overwhelmed with exceedingly draining tasks. Compliance, for example, is reliant on a company’s resolve to stay aware of the latest laws and acts and remain cognizant of past applicable legislature. Sounds like a job in and of itself. And, as you may know, there is technology to handle compliance; thus, leaving more time for one-on-one real interaction with your top talent candidate or recently-hired employee.

However, as technology advances so does the complex inter-workings of each tool. Finding the right solution becomes a greater challenge with every bell and whistle that is added. Soon, HR professionals are spending more time "simplifying their department" with overcomplicated technology.

Some software tends to overindulge by adding unnecessary technology when the software itself hasn’t been able to master the basics. Finding a happy-medium is the answer. As a user, I believe it is better to go with the reliable solution with the unwavering functionality you need, rather than the one with hundreds of bells and whistles that don’t even work that well.

Just my thoughts.

Companies have a plethora of options to choose from when it comes to recruiting avenues. You can choose the expensive big boards, cheaper options, and free options like social media tools, but how do you tell what is REALLY working for you? How do you truly measure the success of your financial investment and more importantly, the TIME invested? Did you know with a little tweaking you might be able get some real numbers that could help you concentrate your budget and time to resources that are truly working for you. Here are a couple of suggestions to help.

• Talk to your talent management system provider because most TMS or ATS providers have the ability to track the site a candidate came from by either collecting the referring site or through a tag attached to the apply URL. You will want to automate this process because if you leave it up to the candidate to populate the “How did you hear from us?” field the candidate is either going to choose the option that they think makes them a better candidate for the position, viewing this as a pre-screener question, or just pick any option to get past this mandatory field so they can continue on with the application. By taking this option out of the candidate’s hands and by automating the process you can ensure that you accurately run your source report to see who is providing you with candidates.

• Are these quality candidates? So, three major boards sent you over 1000 candidates. Success right? Not so fast. It’s great if you got a boatload of candidates from your job posting as it means that the posting was seen by a lot of candidates and many of those applied. That is success by marketing standards but what about by HR standards. Were these quality candidates? There are several ways to tell if a source really is as successful as they claim. A high number of applicants from a source is great, but it is important to take a look at the number of candidates that made it to the Phone Interview.  If a recruiter took the time to pick up the phone and call the candidate then that candidate fit the requirements of the job.
  
  I know some of you may say what about just looking at hires. And my answer would be, hires may be a misleading stat simply for the fact that it does not tell you the whole story. Candidates get cold feet and back out or sometimes there are personality conflicts with the hiring manager or the hiring manager went with the first quality person they were able to get on the phone. If a source is supplying you with quality candidates they are definitely worth the time and money.

• Social media is all the rage these days and many companies are hiring specialists to help them recruit on social media. But is social media the right avenue for the HR department or for the Marketing department? By accurately tracking the number of candidates that come to your career section from a social media site and then looking at the number of quality candidates that came from that traffic, you will be able to tell if this is something you want to invest time and manpower in or if it is better left to your Marketing department to increase your brand awareness.

So, take a look at your metrics. How well is your online recruitment program? And, how well is each channel performing?

On the eve of Queen Elizabeth II's post-Independence Day visit to New York, Buckingham Palace made the announcement that the Queen was imposing a hiring freeze for The Royal Household in order to help do her part to trim expenses in the face of a British budget crisis.  And while the hiring freeze accounts for just one portion of the Monarch’s efforts to cut expenses by $4.5 million over the previous year, along with reductions in Royal Travel and expenditures for the upkeep of the Royal Residences, the half-million pound (or approximately US$760,000) cut in The Household’s property services budget is making news in the US where recent employment figures are showing a slower rate of recovery than hoped. 

As an iCIMS employee, I think I can confidently say that a hiring freeze is not the only way for The Household to save on expenses related to its 1,200 person staff.  In fact, a quick visit to the Royal, (oops, I meant ROI) Calculator reveals that The Household could save as much as US$2 million by implementing a candidate management system, with no reduction in its headcount of Fendersmiths or Flagmen. I worked out the problem myself, and came up with the following results.

For a mid-market employer like The Royal Household, the current UK average number of job vacancies per year is 245, and with new graduates finding that they are competing with nearly 70 other applicants for open vacancies this year, that adds up to a lot of Recruiter and Hiring Manager FTEs to track and review all of those resumes/CVs.  In fact, if we assume that the average recruiter earning approximately US$45,000 spends 4 hours receiving, tracking, reviewing and screening all those candidates, then The Household could save almost US$700,000 due to increased recruiter efficiency by using an applicant tracking system.

And for our analysis, we assumed that just one hour would be necessary to submit data for a background check per requisition, but that may be an underestimate considering employment for the Royal Family may entail a considerably more detailed background check. At the estimated one hour figure, however, The Household could save around US$4000 using a candidate management solution to automatically initiate a background check with a third party provider.  Furthermore, in the UK where employers tend to favor using Agencies to fill some hard to find professions (again, Fendersmiths and Flagmen come to mind), The Household could potentially save nearly US$400,000 by deploying a Vendor Portal to automate this process. 

Finally, candidate management systems usually offer benefits that cannot be measured by any ROI calculator, such as contributions to The Royal Household’s green initiatives, which include recycling green waste and computers, installing a wind turbine at Balmoral, and installing LED low-energy light bulbs wherever possible.  By automating its candidate management processes like requisition management and onboarding, The Household could expect to reduce its carbon footprint and paper consumption while attracting, hiring and retaining top talent efficiently.

Any other advice for The Household? Well, in the meantime, let's sit back and see how they will cut their expenses.