How healthcare employment challenges can make or break your organization
By: Mike Ingelido, GHS Recruiting
While rising costs in healthcare seem to grab most of the headlines lately, this is not the only challenge the healthcare industry is facing in today’s hyper-competitive market. While on the surface, runaway costs seem to be the biggest issue these organizations are facing, the principal threat to the healthcare industry’s long-term growth and ability to serve the American public will be the shortage of qualified and skilled employees, such as nurses, mid-level practitioners, physicians, lab techs, and aides. It turns out that your healthcare employment activities are just as important to the long term success of your organization as is keeping costs down.
Currently, there are more qualified employees ready to retire than there are new graduates, causing a significant shortage in workforce. To further exacerbate the issue, schools are unable to accept additional students due to a lack of educators and rising tuition costs. Hospitals are becoming so desperate for these types of employees, they are offering large sign-on bonuses, flexible scheduling, in-house daycare, and more to entice potential employees. Forecasts predict an increase in over 200,000 new openings in the next year, with less than 100,000 individuals to fill those vacancies. It is likely that your organization, like the multitude of other hospitals and healthcare entities in the country, is already feeling the effects of these extremely challenging healthcare employement situations.
To stay competitive in this in this vast and competitive landscape, must do two things immediately:
- Find a way to differentiate your organization and your available job opportunities from the endless stream of choices that healthcare professionals have these days. This requires a top-down approach of creating an environment that is attractive and enticing to potential employees. What makes your organization unique and special? What can you do better?
- Get it right the first time. There are no mulligans in hiring. Every hire needs to be the right hire. In this healthcare employment environment, you cannot afford miss-hires. It costs you too much time and money to have a “do-over”. Furthermore, it strains current staff and wreaks havoc on morale. Too many bad hires and you will begin to lose tenured staff who will begin to question the leadership, begin to feel overworked and undervalued, and eventually decide to move onto greener pastures. Your recruitment process needs to be in-depth, concise, and swift!
Here are some questions for you and your HR team to seriously consider:
- What have you or your organization done to address these healthcare employment issues in order to put yourself in a better position than your competition?
- What changes have you made to improve your recruitment process so that you get the right person for the job the first time?
- How do you measure your retention rate and how does your rate compare to similar healthcare organizations?
- How do you plan to increase employee satisfaction to keep more team members on board and happy with their job and their place of work?
While GHS Recruiting cannot change the actual number of viable candidates available to fill the positions you have open, our new, state of the art recruitment platform, IRIS (Intuitive Recruiting Information System), can assure the hires you do make are the best overall fit for your organization and are most likely to become long-term employees. With IRIS we assist by measuring and qualifying the candidates through:
- behavioral assessments and forecasts
- innovative video introductions
- in-depth questionnaires
Too often, organizations hire on experience and fire on behaviors. IRIS helps eliminate those miss-hires. The results speak for themselves, as our clients have experienced a 96% retention rate after one year.
To find out how GHS Recruiting can help integrate IRIS into you pre-existing recruitment process and help you realize similar results, please contact your GHS representative or contact us online here to set up a quick demo.
Mike Ingelido is the Operations and Training Manager at GHS Recruiting, a nationally recognized retained and contingency search firm specializing in the recruiting and retention of healthcare professionals. Mike can be reached at 800-808-7297, extension 2 or via email at mike@ghsrecruiting.com
