Don't let this be you.

We all know that Healthcare recruiting is difficult to manage. Never mind the fact that you have to find the most qualified person for a position (as do most other industry professionals) you also have a ton of different hire types to manage and a slew of regulatory issues to comply with. It’s plain old difficult...so you should pat yourselves on the back for bringing in the talent you have thus far. But what if managing your recruitment program could be easier. Well, it can be with recruitment technology. With these solutions you can direct all of your candidates to an online application process, allowing you to store all data electronically (improving your compliance and facilitating your recruitment management).

If you clicked on this blog, you have probably already considered leveraging technology to facilitate the process. But since there are so many options out there, the idea of choosing just one is quite daunting. Well, Healthcare HR professionals - I’ve just the webinar for you! iCIMS is hosting a free webinar regarding what questions to ask when choosing a recruitment technology. Here are the details:

Healthcare Webinar: How to Choose a Recruitment Technology
When: Friday, November 18th at 1:00pm EST
Cost: FREE
Register: Click here to register for free.

Learn from iCIMS' Chief Strategic Officer Susan Vitale and Baptist Memorial Healthcare’s Director of Talent Acquisitions Lisa Mack to gain the knowledge you need to choose the right HR solution. Or, I’d be happy to register you - so just shoot me a quick email at karen.bucks@icims.com and I will gladly send you the webinar information. This is a webinar not to miss!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the healthcare industry is in for an extraordinary boom in this decade. “Wage and salary employment is expected to increase by 22 percent as compared to an expected 11 percent increase for all other industries combined.” I must say, that’s great if you are job hunting in that industry. The BLS further states, “Healthcare will generate 3.2 million new wage and salary jobs between 2008 and 2018, more than any other industry, largely in response to rapid growth in the elderly population. Ten of the twenty fastest growing occupations are related to healthcare. Many job openings should arise in all healthcare employment settings as a result of employment growth and the need to replace workers who retire or leave their jobs for other reasons.”

In a scaled back assessment, Monster.com reported that the expected growth might not be as much as originally expected, though still positive. Preparing for growth is something that HR professionals can face head on. The first step is to re-evaluate current processes for inefficiencies. Removing inefficiencies like source ineffectiveness or extensive paper usage can save money and time that can be spent on areas like recruitment SEO (job posting optimization) or new training programs.

To start, it would be good to re-evaluate your candidate management processes including:

• Sourcing
• Recruiting
• Onboarding

Within each of these groups, try eliminating at least one old process. Here are few basic suggestions:

Improve your source effectiveness through source tracking. Source effectiveness tracking can help you understand where most of your talent is coming from. Not only do you need to analyze whether you are getting candidates from each specific source, but you should also evaluate whether or not those candidates are converting into quality new hires. Check out Mike Bohanek's post on this topic! Tracking this will allow you to eliminate ineffective sources (that may be expensive) and draw only from the sources that deliver top talent.

Improve the candidate experience. Draw more top talent with an easy-to-complete application process. My advice, as scary as it sounds, go completely online. Create an online application process and install a kiosk that allows walk-ins to apply online too. While you may have to spend a little to leverage a web-based application process, the overall return-on-investment is probably worth it. The amount of money saved from the reduction in paper usage and the amount of time saved from less manual entry leads to better, more efficient processes.

Improve the employee experience. Do your new hires feel confident after their onboarding training? The only way to know is to send out an onboarding survey. Get their feedback. See what they like and don't like and use that advice to create a better program.

Evaluate your program. If you evaluate and find that you have a largely inefficient candidate management process, try fixing it now. This way, when healthcare employment does speed up, you will be prepared.

Lately I’ve been speaking with a lot of industry experts, partners and clients regarding integrated recruitment and performance management; specifically on which data points are most beneficial to bring together to get the most value out of the combined areas of talent management.

Because of these recent conversations, I was interested to read Jayson Saba from Aberdeen’s latest research: Talent Management in Healthcare. While talent management means many different things to different people, much of this report touched upon bringing together recruitment, onboarding, succession, performance and competency management.

Aberdeen highlighted how top performing organizations execute talent management strategies to improve employee engagement. The criteria Aberdeen used to determine best in class vs industry average vs laggard organizations include:

·          Hiring the top choice candidate – as a result of engaging talent during sourcing & clearly communicating the brand of the organization

·          Time to fill: linking hiring manager satisfaction and recruitment efficiency

·          Employee performance: how well the organization links individual performance to organizational objectives

I was interested to see how much emphasis was placed on recruitment in this study. I think part of this is due to setting appropriate expectations during the recruiting process, as well as the tools an integrated talent management platform offers to bring a lot of these metrics together. Outside of the technology there are of course other ways that organizations can consistently engage candidates, new hires and employees about their expected results and how those contributions roll up to higher level organizational objectives. One of our clients has even suggested using a performance evaluation as the primary guide during the selection process; essentially providing a crystal clear look at what an employee will be measured upon as opposed to simply reading a job description and a few bullet points.

I won’t spoil the results for you, but do encourage you to take a look at the research and share your thoughts on this blog. You can access a complimentary copy of the report here.