As demand grows for physicians and nurses, hospital and healthcare HR reps and recruiters need to ensure they're doing all they can to attract the best candidates. It's crucial that healthcare recruitment practitioners evolve their tactics to keep pace with the transformation in sourcing trends. One way hospitals can accomplish this task is by optimizing the recruiting functionality of their staffing and HR departments.
Implementing a cohesive strategy that combines incentives, dedicated recruitment teams, contingent workforces and vendor management software (VMS) allows hospitals to boost their recruiting functionality and generate more value in the long term.
1. Recruitment marketing teams
Creating in-house sourcing and recruitment marketing teams lets hospitals directly manage their own efforts to find the candidates that meet their particular needs. It also expedites the hiring process through the recruitment pipeline, increasing engagement and retention.
In addition, dedicated sourcing and recruitment marketing teams have more time and focus to utilize internal performance analytics as well as external industry benchmarks. Effective use of big data will allow recruiters to compare their performance against these key performance metrics (KPIs). This helps hospitals and healthcare organizations in their candidate searches, since the earlier recruiters find the right candidate, the shorter and easier their recruitment efforts. This reduces the resources needed to continue a candidate search if the original person doesn't work out.
2. Utilize a VMS
A dedicated VMS specifically designed for the healthcare industry helps organizations locate the highest-quality candidate for the job and speeds up the process. Large hospital systems can use a robust VMS to take advantage of pre-packaged credential templates to find specific candidates, which streamlines recruiting workflows.
"Hospitals can use a VMS to take advantage of pre-packaged credential templates."
A customizable VMS lets recruiters tailor their processes, such as time and attendance or payroll and invoicing. This reduces time, paperwork and money spent during recruitment, allowing for more operational flexibility and greater budget optimization. A dedicated VMS will connect the hospital's existing website to an applicant tracking system (ATS), ensuring highly qualified leads don't go somewhere else. This ATS also includes a full-length application that eliminates the need for double data entry.
3. Leverage contingent workers
The shifting nature of hospital staffing means recruiters are constantly juggling schedules and filling caregiver vacancies. With access to a vast database of contingent workers and locum tenens physicians, recruiters can use the VMS portal login to quickly fill caregiver vacancies.
4. Introduce incentives
The additional value generated by the techniques above should help recruiting specialists optimize their budgetary allocations, allowing for more flexibility to introduce better incentive programs. There are a variety of ways to incentivize candidates, including:
- Sign-on bonuses.
- Flexible scheduling.
- More vacation time.
- Generous benefits packages.
Hospital and healthcare organization recruiters and HR departments seeking a way to optimize their functionality can rely on these techniques. By creating a dedicated recruitment team that has access to a robust medical VMS, they can leverage contingent workers and utilize incentives to ensure all positions are adequately filled and the organization's workload is manageable.
Click here to learn more about BlueSky Medical Staffing software, a dedicated healthcare VMS.
