It’s no secret that recruitment and retention of skilled employees are the biggest challenges facing the healthcare industry today. With the Great Resignation facilitating an exodus of healthcare workers leaving the industry for other sectors, many healthcare employers are having difficulty finding talented employees to fill open positions. As such, developing strategic staffing for the healthcare industry continues to be a top priority among healthcare companies.
You may wonder how to properly vet talent for the position. We’ll answer that question with these healthcare recruiting tips. We’ll also consider three ways to cultivate your talent base to more effectively and efficiently reach your company goals.
3 Ways To Vet Top Talent
Now more than ever, healthcare companies are focusing on finding skilled workers instead of just filling open job positions. Here are three healthcare recruiting tips to help you to vet candidates to ensure you hire the right person for the job.
1. Determine What Problems You Need to Solve
A fundamental aspect of finding the right talent is outlining the needs of your healthcare company. So before you even start to search for talent, determine what problems you need to solve.
This ensures you can pre-filter candidates who don’t fulfill those needs. The goal is to find employees who can fulfill identified priorities and have the potential for growth in the future.
Consider creating a list of attributes and skills of an ideal employee to guide you through the hiring process.
2. Adopt a Skill-Based Recruiting and Hiring Approach
There are two mistakes hiring managers make in today’s red-hot labor market:
- Hiring based solely on job descriptions
- Not exploring candidate abilities beyond the existing work history
By focusing only on the immediate needs of the role, hiring managers often miss other valuable potential talents. This blind spot leads to missed opportunities – in hiring, in rewarding deserving staff members, and in realizing a more efficient and empowering workplace. It can also lead to a misalignment of expectations between employees and management, which tends to drive employee turnover rates higher.
As an alternative, consider adopting a skill-based hiring strategy. Evaluating potential employees based on performance and skill sets can help you look at candidates in a new way or unearth existing talent you didn’t even know you had. Skills are often transferable, and many potential candidates only need the right training to hone their abilities for the healthcare workforce.
For example, a potential hire who worked in retail or food service may already possess good communication, time management and problem-solving skills, and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced or high-pressure environment. They may also have received basic training on what to do in emergency medical situations that may arise while on the job.
Such a candidate satisfies many of the requirements healthcare agencies seek in a well-qualified hire. With proper onboarding and training, candidates with work experience in other industries and sectors can just as easily become top performers for your company.
3. Develop a Thorough Interviewing Process
Another way to uncover great talent is by developing a detailed interview process. Don’t just focus on the details of your job posting. Try to get a more comprehensive understanding of your potential hires by asking about their:
- Soft skills
- Hard skills
- Passions
- Career aspirations
This will ensure that you hire employees with the right skills for the position and the potential to grow with your company.
3 Ways To Cultivate Existing Talent
Staffing responsibilities don’t just end with hiring talent. Once you’ve successfully recruited skilled caregivers and added them to your workforce, you’ll want to implement your talent development plan to help build upon existing skills. The goal is to identify additional opportunities to add skills that further your company’s mission.
Talent development is essential to the growth and success of healthcare companies, and there are several ways to address this need.
1. Create a Structured Onboarding Program
Strategic employee onboarding is key to retaining your talent. Companies with poor onboarding processes tend to lose the confidence of their employees. New hires who have exceptional onboarding experiences are 2.6 times as likely to be extremely satisfied with their workplace. This means a structured onboarding can dramatically improve your organization’s retention rates (up to 82%).
So consider developing a robust 90-day onboarding program with managerial, video, and hands-on training. When you invest in your employees’ onboarding experience, you ensure they are fully equipped to fulfill their role and feel confident in performing all necessary functions. Your workforce will also appreciate your willingness to invest in their success and will be more likely to take advantage of future growth and advancement opportunities.
2. Invest in Employee Growth and Development
Growth in performance doesn’t just happen all on its own. Cultivating and developing your workplace talent pool requires a commitment from both the management team and your employees.
Targeted trainings provides employees with structured opportunities to improve existing skills or develop new ones in preparation for their job roles. For example, an existing employee onboarding into a managerial role may need to complete a conflict resolution training course.
Such learning opportunities help employees better understand how to apply their skills to various situations that may arise on the job. And they allow your team to practice what they learn, so they can excel in all the critical functions of their roles. Investing in employee training and learning also allows you to promote internally, which tends to have a positive effect on employee retention rates.
3. Check in Regularly with Your Employees
The most successful managers make an effort to know and understand their employees as people. This is best accomplished through regular conversations and contact, not just through a structured review process.
Performance evaluations are an excellent opportunity to:
- Keep track of employee progress
- Identify areas they can improve in
- Get to know their career goals
- Learn how you can improve their work experience
However, these meetings also serve an important opportunity to identify rising stars and encourage further professional growth.
Don’t use the evaluations solely to address performance — ask employees to identify their areas of strength, some current challenges of their positions, and any additional skills they’d like to develop. Try to make the conversation feel as comfortable and equitable as possible. Listen carefully and actively, then formulate a concrete training and development plan to help them grow.
And don’t rely just on the annual review to establish and maintain a great working relationship with your team of care providers. Be sure to check in with your staff regularly – quarterly, or monthly. More regular contact and a great working relationship with management can help your employees excel at their jobs even more, and help you increase workplace productivity in the process.
Make Employee Recruitment and Cultivation Easy Through Automation
Hiring and retaining skilled talent in today’s tight labor market is difficult. A more intentional approach to recruiting, onboarding and workforce development can help you stay ahead of the pack.
Investing in an automated solution, like Empeon, is another way to enhance your hiring and HCM processes. Our comprehensive HR + payroll software automates every part of the employee journey, from recruitment to retirement. Book a demo today to begin your journey to streamlined company processes.
