The success of any healthcare organization depends on its workers. The equipment and structure a hospital or healthcare facility have means nothing if it does not have good workers. This is why most hospitals pay a great deal of attention to their recruiting process.
However, the pandemic has made the shortage of healthcare workers even more obvious. There are fewer and fewer practicing healthcare workers. Many have had their spirits broken and have had to stop the practice. Some others died and even the newly graduated ones may be unwilling to practice.
So, how do you optimize your recruitment amidst such a shortage? Well, that is the purpose of this article.
5 Sure Tips to Optimize your Healthcare Recruitment Process
1. Work towards Increasing the Candidate Pool
Building a bigger candidate pool should be your first step to ensuring your recruitment process is the best when you are staffing for healthcare and indeed any industry for that matter. There are a lot of methods through which you can achieve this. But before we discuss that, we need to remind you that working as a healthcare practitioner requires a lot of learning on the job. So you need to be on board with the idea of employing fresh graduates as well as prepping healthcare students.
With that being said, you can increase the candidate pool with the following methods:
- Campus recruiting – you can talk to healthcare students that are yet to graduate and keep in contact with those you think will be perfect working in your organization.
- Contact recruiting channels – most sites that offer recruitment services provide services across almost all industries. So do not think you cannot get healthcare candidates off these sites.
- If regular recruitment channels do not sit well with you then you can look for channels that focus solely on healthcare jobs.
2. Have a Verification Process
A very important part of the recruitment process is being able to verify if the candidate has been truly certified. For doctors, this is board certification. There are sites and tools with which you can check the board certification of any doctor. All states also have a database of all doctors that have been certified.
You have to ensure that your verification process is as thorough as possible. This is the only way you can avoid hiring an impostor.
3. Keep Multiple Pools
Why rely on one candidate pool when you can have multiple? Hospitals or health centers have positions for different roles, so, you can have multiple pools for these roles. Doctors could have a pool, so also, surgeons, nurses, upper management, and janitorial workers.
This way, you will not spend time to filter through one large pool for a particular job, but would just access a pool you are certain of every candidate being qualified. This makes your job of filling these separate roles much easier.
4. Emphasize Employees Benefit
Remember, the turnover rate is high, so you would have to sell your organization to potential candidates. Tell them of all the employees’ benefits they stand to get if they come to work for your facility.
And do not let them be mere words, ensure your facilities provides these benefits. Healthcare workers go through the rigorous duty of seeing people suffer. This is a very demanding job both physically and mentally, therefore, they deserve as much benefit as the facility can afford to give them.
Some benefits that potential candidates will appreciate include:
- Leaves. Any potential candidate will appreciate a facility that can give them adequate leaves. Let your candidates know that leaves will be offered to them when necessary: medical leave, maternity, paternity, and even leaves for vacations.
- Relocation Assistance. Increasing your candidate pool also means making the pool big enough to get candidates in far locations. When you get a potential candidate in a far place, you could sweeten the deal by offering to cover the relocation cost of the candidate.
- Access to Certain Amenities in the Facility. If your facility has a gym, you could offer your candidates unlimited access to it. You can also give discounted or free foods to them. Remember, the idea is to make them realize that they will be treated well working for you.
5. Ensure you have a Proper Outreach
Don’t just sit back after you increase your candidate pool. Now, you have to do the job of keeping in contact with those who you have sighted out as potential candidates. Reach out through emails, phone messages, and other channels. Read this article to find out how to write an outreach email. A perfect outreach message will ensure that your potential candidate keeps you at the back of their minds.
Conclusion
This article gives the best tips to help anyone looking to increase their healthcare facility staff’s strength. We hope you use them to build a better workforce for your organization.
