The Top 3 Healthcare Recruiting Mistakes to Avoid

Running a successful healthcare organization depends on your ability to recruit and hire good employees. This is especially true at the executive level, where each individual hire can have a big impact on the rest of the company. In any industry, you want to avoid the candidates that have bad attitudes, inadequate skillsets, or questionable ethics. Within healthcare, the same rules apply. One bad hire can cost your organization nearly $10,000 in replacement costs, but perhaps more importantly, can put both your organization and your patients at risk. When delivering top quality care is your goal, you can’t afford the risk of a bad hire.

Beyond the obvious mistakes to avoid, here are three other common mistakes to avoid if you want to reduce your chances of making a poor hiring decision:

Mistake #1: Not Tracking Metrics

The Challenge:
You must set metrics for success, track sources and find ways to report your results. This will help you gain a better understanding of why you’re having success with certain types of candidates or why you’re not having success.

Here are the five Key Metrics of Recruiting Success, according to a JobVite eBook:

  • Time-to-Fill: The time it takes to fill an open position
  • Quality-of-Hire: looking into the combination of an employee’s productivity, tenure, scale and impact
  • Cost-per-hire: this metric links recruiting effort to cost savings for your organization
  • Sourcing Channel: Shows your most productive sources of candidates
  • Retention: turnover rate for a position and costs of replacing the employee

Eliminate excessive turnover at your Healthcare organization with these tips.

The Solution:
Here’s what you can do to ensure you have the right information accessible for quick decision making:

  1. First, report on sourcing success so that you can make a strong case for investing in areas that deliver the best talent
  2. Embrace analytics and metrics to gain visibility into your recruiting from many different angles.
  3. Prove the impact of initiatives by tracking your savings and benefits. When you track analytics, you can discover if efforts such as social recruiting or employee referral programs are working or not working. You may discover that social recruiting has saved your organization $100k in annual recruiting fees, which is an indication that it’s a tool worth investing more time and money into. When you have hard numbers, it’s much easier to make your case and feel confident about your efforts.

 

Mistake #2: Not Sourcing Proactively

The Challenge:
In many healthcare industry roles, such as registered nurses, physicians and healthcare executives, demand outstrips supply. Between turnover and increased hiring needs, it may be difficult to find time to source proactively. However, because healthcare is among the most competitive industries when it comes to recruiting, it’s critical that you think proactively and creatively about finding candidates well before you think you need them.

The Solution:
Here are some ways you can source more proactively:

  1. Social Recruiting: An increasing amount of healthcare companies and hospital systems are looking to social media to access and engage with candidates. Ensure you have a strong digital presence established on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can gain a following by creating content that establishes your organization as an industry thought leader. This will improve your reputation, raise awareness and help to attract top talent.
  2. Employee Referral programs: Employee referral programs are among the most effective methods for sourcing quality candidates. And according to JobVite, “research has shown that successful employee referral programs can speed up time-to-hire by 55% over career sites.” You can gather referrals to create a talent pool of top candidates that are ready for work. When you empower your employees with the right tools, they can aid in the recruiting process. Start by establishing an easy and rewarding referral process.
  3. Recruiting Firms: Sometimes it makes sense to pull in outside help for healthcare recruiting. Recruiting at local community hospitals and smaller organizations can be particularly challenging. It’s also likely that many of your prospective candidates already have many options for their next position, so it’s critical that candidates have a positive perception of your brand if you hope to attract and hire the best talent. Recruiters can help you build a candidate-centric recruiting plan that is designed to deliver the best results possible.

 

Mistake #3: Thinking Your Job is Done After Hiring the Perfect Candidate

The Challenge:
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is thinking your job is done after hiring what seems like the perfect employee. While finding and hiring candidates is a key piece to the puzzle, the next critical step is to find ways to retain those employees when they come on board. According to JobVite, one of the most effective tools you have to address this is your onboarding process.

The Solution:
“A well designed onboarding program plays a key role in turning a new hire into a dedicated employee,” wrote JobVite. 40 percent of new hires quit within the first 45 days, but having a strong onboarding process can help avoid losing employees early on. Start your onboarding process while recruiting and emphasize the employer brand that you utilized to attract the candidate in the first place. When employees understand details about your organization’s goals and culture, it engages them more with your organization and makes them much more likely to become successful long-term employees. A disappointing first day can lead to churn, so make sure you make a good first impression on new hires.

As mentioned previously, healthcare recruiting is both complex and competitive, but if you avoid these common mistakes, you should be able to streamline the process and avoid unnecessary challenges. With the rise of the internet and the digital ecosystem, traditional methods for recruiting aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be. To compete in today’s market, you need to replace outdated approaches, tools and processes with new and modern habits. If your organization is in need of a new hire, or needs help building a recruiting program, get in touch with the healthcare recruiting experts at Healthcare Recruiters International today.

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Sources:

http://education.healthcaresource.com/healthcare-hiring-mistakes-you-can-easily-avoid/
https://www.jobsintheus.com/news/4-Common-Healthcare-Recruiting-Mistakes-To-Avoid/169.html