These days, hiring in almost any industry can be a difficult task. But the healthcare industry, particularly the healthcare service sector can be even more challenging. That’s because employees in this industry directly impact customers’ health and overall well-being. Due to this direct connection to patients’ health, the job performed by healthcare service professionals is critical to the success of the organization. Beyond doctors and nurses, without housekeeping, maintenance, dietary aids, nursing assistants, patient care techs, and administration the quality of patient care can suffer. This makes it extremely important to get the right staff. In addition to patient care needs, HIPPA regulations and other compliance requirements associated with healthcare recruitment can bog down the hiring funnel. There are some recruiting challenges that all healthcare providers face in terms of recruiting non-clinical staff. In this article, we’ll pinpoint what some of these challenges are, and help you to tackle them.
The Challenge – Shortage of Available Talent
A lack of properly qualified employees is one of the largest problems in healthcare service staff recruitment. According to a study done by Mercer, the United States will need to hire 2.3 million new healthcare workers by 2025 to keep up with the population. These stats include doctors, nurses, nursing assistants, phlebotomists, home health aides, nursing home staff, housekeepers, medical assistants, cooks, janitors, and other non-clinical staff.
The Solution – Innovative Sourcing Strategies
The ability to source quality candidates is vital to winning the battle for healthcare service staff talent. Non-clinical workers today have more choices than ever, so it’s important to implement ways to stand out to candidates. Partnering with a service like Work4 can help healthcare organizations develop strategic and innovative approaches to finding the right candidates for unfilled positions. We have experience creating diverse healthcare service staff candidate pipelines and proprietary lead generation sourcing to ensure healthcare organizations have access to the best talent. Because we handle talent programs across a variety of clients and industries, Work4 has visibility in the recruitment marketplace that is hard to achieve with an internal team.
The Challenge – High Employee Turnover
For years, the healthcare industry has endured high turnover rates, a trend that only seems to be accelerating. According to Daily Pay, the average turnover rate in the healthcare industry is second only to the hospitality industry. The paper included statistics on business operations support staff at 9.92%, non-clinical support staff at 15.83%, and front-office support staff at a 20% turnover rate.
The Solution – Recruiting and Retention
To address high turnover rates, healthcare organizations need to invest more in recruiting as mentioned above, and retention. Plenty of today’s healthcare service professionals know their value and won’t settle for less. If you won’t offer them top compensation, the facility down the street may. In the current climate, candidates can afford to be more selective. There’s an old saying that goes something along the lines of “the easiest way to recruit the best staff is to keep the ones you have.” And, the best way to do that is by making yourself more attractive than the other employers. As a healthcare employer, some of the more attractive benefits you can consider offering include:
- More competitive compensation
- Sign-on bonuses
- A choice of insurance plans
- Paid sick leave, bereavement, holidays, and mandatory vacations.
- Improved retirement plans
- Life insurance
- Flexible work schedules
- Clear career growth opportunities
- Always promoting from within
The more your candidates get from working with you, the more likely they are to turn down your competitors. And, employees are more likely to remain loyal if they know there is a chance of promotion in the future.
The Challenge – A Cumbersome Screening Process
It’s not uncommon for candidate screening processes in the non-clinical field to be on the elaborate side, making cumbersome screening processes a big recruitment challenge. Obviously, it is important to screen your candidates properly, but some of the tests can be long and tedious, which can frustrate candidates. While some screenings are fairly standard, such as social security tracing and criminal history information, other background checks involve processes that don’t usually apply in other fields. Below are a few of the additional screenings HR has to administer before filling healthcare service positions.
- Verifications and Credential Screenings: These check previous employment, and verify professional credentials and licensures.
- Fraud and Abuse Control Information System (FACIS) Checks: This involves searching healthcare-specific records for any disciplinary actions or reprimand letters the person has received related to the healthcare field.
- Controlled Substance Screenings: This ensures candidate employment complies with company-wide policies on illicit substances.
In addition to these background-styled checks, a healthcare employer might have you take a tuberculosis test and verify you have received other necessary vaccinations relevant to the job.
The Solution – Transparency
One way to resolve this issue is to be more transparent in your hiring process. Allow candidates to have more insight into exactly where they are in the process at any given point can go a long way toward easing frustrations. Make it easy for them to check their status and find out what they need to do next. In addition, HR recruiting software can offer the ability to pre-populate previously entered candidate data into background screening requests. Automating this process can help to eliminate duplicate data entry. As a result, HR recruiting software reduces errors associated with candidate screening, improves accuracy, and speeds up the entire hiring process.
The Challenge – Inefficient Onboarding Process
Attracting and hiring candidates is only half of the battle. Once you have them, the next step is to integrate them into your organization and team effectively. It’s not uncommon for healthcare providers to have somewhat complex organizational structures. Most facilities will have a Human Resources department that manages or oversees recruitment, but the individual departments take care of their own hiring procedures. This system can lead to discrepancies between HR protocols and those of the individual departments.
The Solution – Simplification With ATS and CRM Systems
To help simplify the onboarding process, an effective onboarding structure should be consistent throughout all departments. This negates confusion and saves time and effort for you as an employer. To assist with this structure, you could use an Applicant Tracking System, (ATS) to organize your candidates. Or a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) system to build and maintain relationships with job candidates. With this software, every department has access to the same records, information, and protocols. It can help you to centralize and streamline your recruitment processes and onboarding practices.
The Challenge – The Length of The Hiring Process
The average time to fill any healthcare position is higher than in other industries. You read that right, according to Health eCareers, it takes an average of 48.3 days to fill any given position. That’s 20.5 days above other industry averages. All of the factors that we’ve covered above contribute to this extended timeline, as well as to candidate frustration.
The Solution – A More Efficient Hiring Funnel
While recruitment and retention challenges in non-clinical healthcare can be nerve-wracking, the good news is working with Work4 can help you minimize healthcare service staff recruiting and hiring difficulties. Our HR technology and team can help you to create visually engaging career pages and streamlined, mobile-friendly job postings. This proprietary system allows recruiters to attract quality applicants at a higher volume with the ability to filter prospects based on experience or accreditation. Ultimately, these efforts result in a more streamlined and comprehensive recruiting process across the healthcare industry.
Connecting You to The Right Candidates Right Now
More people today are employed in health care support, service, and direct care jobs than in all other health care practitioner and technician jobs. That means that more housekeepers, janitors, cooks, maintenance workers, and administrators work in hospitals than physicians, nurses, and surgeons. The size of the healthcare service or non-clinical workforce exceeds the size of most other occupational groups of essential workers. It employs more people than the entire transportation and warehousing industry and more than twice as many people as the grocery industry. A unified talent acquisition model powered by Work4 can provide your healthcare organization with an agile solution that complements your internal recruiting team. Our non-clinical healthcare recruitment marketing solutions bring the experience and technology to create a best-in-class lead generation solution that begins with the candidate and ends with the patient. With Work4 technology, your previous healthcare recruiting challenges can become problems of the past. Contact us today to see how we can help.
