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A need for speed became all too real as we witnessed hospitals struggling to quickly expand capacity amid the surge of COVID-19 cases. Healthcare organizations should continually assess and amend their recruiting methods to ensure they can build and sustain a robust staff when they need it most.
So, how can healthcare systems apply an adaptable approach to the new world of recruiting?
Here are three best recruitment practices to consider as you retool your systems for a more agile and effective future.
1. Use Digital Methods to Create a Faster Process
Look beyond your traditional methods, embracing digital for a more intuitive approach that accommodates increased hiring needs.
“Industries need to immediately shift to a heavy reliance on digital for all aspects of recruitment, interview, onboarding and even terminations pay,” says Jeanniey Mullen, Chief Innovation Officer at Daily Pay in 15 Tips to Hire Talent Post the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Virtual interviewing and modern onboarding processes must keep pace with a new future, and it is important to advertise that your company is staying current in order to attract forward-thinking candidates.
This includes getting candidates into the onboarding phase before the hiring journey has concluded, according to David Rice’s article, How Healthcare HR Teams Are Raising the Bar During COVID-19
In this way, you can prepare for potential “patient surge scenarios,” encourages Karen Power, Senior VP of Talent at Novant Health, also in Rice’s article. “Optimizing the use of technology, you can engage the new team member much earlier in the process versus the traditional ways of doing orientation, which is a positive.”
“I wouldn’t recommend skipping any critical steps such as background checks, but you really can design to do many steps in a parallel versus traditional linear approach,” suggests Power.
>Pro Tip: Look for technology that integrates well with other tech like background check systems to automate steps for you along the way.
2. Brand Your Healthcare Organization as Innovative and Futuristic
Emphasizing the value of first impressions, Power describes the need to provide both a tailored and agile onboarding (and beyond) approach for new hires that exudes your company’s innovative brand and culture.
As well, Nurse Recruitment Strategies for an Uncertain Future suggests performing an internal brand assessment: Can you articulate what makes your organization “a great place to work, as well as a top choice for patient care?” Doing so ensures your recruitment team members are on the same messaging page.
For example, does your organization’s post-COVID brand include behaving as a customer-centric healthcare partner that delivers “frictionless, customer friendly experiences?” While such services have always been important to patients, post-COVID expectations have propelled expectations to new levels, asserts Lindsay R. Resnick, MHA in Trends Relevant in Healthcare Before COVID-19 Will Remain So After.
Lever healthcare partner Kernel, is another example of how a company can raise the bar to remain innovative. Navigating complexity to improve, evolve and extend human cognition, Kernel needed to recruit highly specialized talent — world-class neuroscientists, physicists and engineers — in record speed to achieve their critical mission of building a non-invasive mind/body/machine interface (MBMI). According to Srbouhi Uzunyan, Talent and HR Leader, “(Kernel’s) ability to scale rests on having a very streamlined tracking process. Lever helps us ensure that no candidate is lost in the process.”
3. Put Candidate Quality and Culture First
A focus on attracting and retaining healthcare staff aligned with the improved normal is imperative to futuristic brands. This includes assessing how candidates’ role-specific competencies align with mission, vision and value. Moreover, effective assessments that extend beyond technical competencies can improve the retention bottom line.
On average, a hospital spends $300,000/year per every percentage point increase in nurse turnover, according to Frederick P. Morgeson, Ph.D., in a HealthCareSource article.
Seeking out “inherent behavioral competencies, such as attitude, compassion and customer service orientation … may be more predictive of retention and crucial to on-the-job success (than technical competencies),” says Morgeson. Behavioral assessments provide objective insights as well as guide interviews to “create alignment between organizational expectations and candidate capabilities,” and ultimately increase HR professionals’ peace of mind.
Another option, though the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses (AMSN), is a free online tool that matches nurses with specific, most-desired competencies by hospitals and organizations, according to an article in Minority Nurse. A time-saver, this self-assessment is an innovative way for employers to ramp-up quality staffing more quickly amid the disruption of crisis or other high-demand upticks.
“By putting candidate quality first and making sure you’re choosing the right candidates for the roles in question, you can maintain a strong company culture …,” reinforces the article, Hiring in the Post-COVID-19 Era.
Final Thoughts: Recruiting and Retaining Healthcare Staff
Not only should you have your finger on the pulse of what candidate qualities your healthcare organization requires, but you should also streamline the process to get to those candidates.
“Once you fully understand what candidate quality means for your organization, you should make it a point to analyze your recruitment channels and see where your best candidates are coming from. Then you can focus your efforts on those channels and on finding qualified candidates for your organization,” says the same article.
Get a demo to see how Lever + Zoom streamline remote interviewing. In light of the COVID-19 outbreak, we’re extending access to the Zoom Integration to all of our customers for free through September 1, 2020.