Does your healthcare organization utilize a healthcare staffing agency? If not, you are missing out on the many benefits of what an agency can do to make a more effective recruitment strategy. With ongoing challenges in the medical field such as talent shortages, high turnover, and employee burnout, it’s in every healthcare organization’s best interests to have a staffing agency on-call at all times.
These specialized agencies can help you identify top talent, streamline the recruitment process, and find the best candidates with the right technical and soft skills for an enhanced cultural fit. Today, we will explore 6 strategies to refine your recruitment strategies and optimize collaboration with a staffing agency.
1. Establish Clear Hiring Criteria
Before reaching out to a healthcare staffing agency, it’s best to establish clear hiring criteria. This is one of the most important recruitment strategies. How will the staffing agency know which temporary staff to send your way if you do not have the specific hiring criteria down pat?
Write and refine the job descriptions for each of your organization’s open requisitions. Ensure there are keywords for every position included in those descriptions to increase searchability on Google and job boards. If you are unsure if your job descriptions are up to standard, ask the staffing agency for assistance in editing them.
Outline the responsibilities, qualifications, and skill sets for clinical personnel, administrative staff, and maintenance positions. The sections for your job descriptions should be as follows:
- Introduction: Draw in the candidate with a rhetorical question and a brief overview of company culture, mission, and vision.
- Position Description: Overview of the position’s importance to the healthcare company.
- Responsibilities and Tasks: Outline what the person in this position will perform daily.
- Qualifications: How many years of experience does the candidate need for specific skills?
- Education: Does the candidate need a high school diploma, Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s, or doctorate? Note any specific certifications required for the position.
- Call to Action: Encourage the candidate reading the post to apply.
2. Use Data-Driven Approaches
Data-driven approaches are an objective avenue for ensuring the best recruitment efforts when working with a healthcare staffing agency. Speak with the agency about the current medical job market trends. What are the best skills medical personnel should have based on their job titles? How is the demand for specific healthcare roles changing in the field? Notate this data to refine your recruitment approach accordingly.
Use the Bureau of Labor Statistics to evaluate salary benchmarks at industry averages to compare with the current salaries you give to your employees. If not as many people are applying to your open requisition as you thought and the pay rate is lower than the industry average, increase the salary and watch what happens.
Evaluate candidate ability within your organization. Use this information to communicate to the healthcare staffing agency when you would need temporary medical personnel to come cover your organization the most. You should also evaluate current patient demand and upcoming employee vacations and family leave requests to relay to the agency other potential time frames you’d need increased coverage.
3. Collaborate With the Medical Staffing Agency
Undergoing healthcare hiring with an agency should involve consistent collaboration to communicate expectations throughout the process. One collaborative strategy is to institute check-ins to ensure recruitment strategies are as streamlined and effective as possible. What is going well with the hiring process thus far? What bottlenecks are preventing certain achievements from occurring? Take this data into consideration to refine the company’s recruitment strategy accordingly for more successful future hiring campaigns.
4. Refine Employer Brand
Healthcare staffing solutions should also involve refining the employer brand. Essentially, you are presenting to candidates a unique value proposition about what makes your healthcare organization different and more rewarding to work for than the experience with competitor businesses.
Outline your company’s organizational culture which involves presenting a thorough and genuine mission and vision statement. Of course, one of the most common missions of a healthcare organization is to deliver patient-centric care. Because of the care you provide to a diverse patient population, what values has your organization generated over time since you started your business? Make your language genuine and you will start attracting quality talent.
5. Implement a Cohesive Screening Process
The screening process should be cohesive and thorough. While it’s imperative to hasten time-to-hire, you can’t just hire a candidate with just any random qualities. Do they have the proper certifications and years of experience in their desired position? Have they obtained the proper educational background and completed any internships or residencies to enhance their knowledge? Besides ensuring candidates have all the necessary technical skills, the screening process involves so much more.
Ensure your company’s ATS software has the proper partnerships with companies that conduct background checks. For example, Sterling is one of Cadient’s partners who handles background checks. They ensure that the candidates truly are who they say they are and reveal their criminal history, if applicable. For example, records from years ago such as petty theft would not disqualify a medical professional from being onboarded. However, medical dishonesty of any kind could disqualify a candidate no matter when it happens because it may happen again for this healthcare company.
6. Shift the Focus To Passive Candidates
While it’s great to refine your recruitment strategy to onboard active candidates, don’t forget to shift your focus to passive candidates, too. Passive candidates are individuals who are in the market for looking around at new opportunities but are not actively seeking to transfer jobs. Networking with passive candidates on social media and personally reaching out to them can keep your healthcare organization’s name on their minds in case they do change from being passive candidates to active candidates one day.
