In today's competitive healthcare talent marketplace, it's important to develop an effective and efficient recruitment process. Candidates need to be screened, interviewed, hired, and on-boarded quickly to fill high-need positions. However, focusing on speed at the expense of quality can lead to costly bad hires and future vacancies.
By following some basic hiring protocols, you can find great candidates, even when facing severe time constraints. Here are five key strategies for filling allied healthcare positions on an accelerated timeline.
1. Evaluate for cultural fit.
Organizations where employees believe in the mission and values tend to have better retention, which can save them thousands to millions of dollars each year. Unfortunately, cultural fit is also one of the hardest traits to quantify.
A good way to test the waters of cultural fit is to implement 15-minute phone screens in which the hiring manager delves into the job-seeker’s goals, main drivers and reason for being attracted to the company. You can also have other members of the team speak briefly with the candidate to gather input from multiple sources.
A candidate who is attracted to the company’s overall goals and values—for example, caring for patients in an ethical environment—is more likely to be a good culture fit. Other important culture considerations are working styles and the ability to collaborate with different types of teams.
If you eliminate poor culture fits quickly, you can save time and prevent costly hiring mistakes down the road.
2. Make sure your infrastructure supports the compressed schedule.
If you speed up your hiring process, you need to make sure your recruiting and hiring practices can handle the timeline. Interview timelines are getting longer in general, likely due to hiring and HR practices. It’s important to streamline so that interviews, approvals, communications, and offer letters can happen quickly. Slow hiring pipelines risk losing the best qualified candidates to other, more agile healthcare organizations.
You can also bring in outside resources such as agencies and specialty schools to help with the screening and training of candidates. That way your hiring arm is free to focus on more impactful tasks like interviewing and paving the way for smooth hiring and onboarding. An outside resource can also help ensure that only qualified candidates end up in front of your interviewing team, saving valuable time and money during the interview process.
3. Inform candidates of your accelerated timeline.
If you’re hiring on a quick schedule, it’s important to let candidates know upfront. Inform them that they are interviewing for a high-need position, and that you’ll be requiring them to respond quickly and start the job immediately if chosen for the opportunity. It doesn’t benefit an organization to rush a candidate through the pipeline if that candidate can’t start for another few weeks or months after being hired.
Keeping your candidates informed of your hiring process will help them react appropriately and keep up their side of the recruitment process.
4. Craft job descriptions to inform and inspire.
To pull in the right applicants, consider tailoring your job posting to your ideal candidate’s specific needs, education, and interests. While this may reduce the number of applicants, it will likely improve the number of qualified candidates who apply for your position.
When crafting a job posting, consider the tone, the use of specific words and jargon, and the style. Does your job posting make qualified candidates want to apply?
Take a holistic approach to your company, as well—make sure the candidate knows the mission and values of your facility, the benefits they would receive as an employee, the workplace culture, and what makes your company a unique and valuable place to work.
You also want to make sure your job posting is straight-forward and informative, so that applicants know exactly what the role requires. The clearer you are, the better the candidate will understand your requirements and overall workplace.
Avoiding a one-size-fits-all job posting can help you attract the right candidate while preemptively eliminating unqualified ones—saving your organization time and resources.
5. Work with a reputable educational institution.
To maximize your hiring outcomes, consider partnering with a respected career training institution. Widening skills gaps in healthcare make career and vocational training increasingly valuable, especially when institutions partner with industry leaders to teach current industry needs.
The result of partnering with an educational institution may provide you with a funnel of job-ready graduates with up-to-date skillsets and knowledge of current industry technology. Partnering with an educational institution can also limit the amount of time spent sourcing and screening candidates, and ultimately reduce the number of unqualified candidates funneling into the hiring pipeline.
By implementing these strategies, you should be able to hire the right candidates for your organization despite a quick hiring schedule. It’s important to move fast while recruiting suitable healthcare candidates—but not at the cost of making a bad hiring decision. Once you have an efficient recruiting process, you’ll be better able to fill positions quickly while still finding the right candidate for your organization.