Continuous recruitment: an antidote to extended job vacancies

In the past decade, private-sector healthcare has been one of the United States’ few reliable job engines. As of May, the healthcare industry has experienced 130 straight months of positive job growth. Few industries even come close to such a tally. 
A steady need for new labor is unquestionably a positive economic sign. But for employers, rising demand coincides with a slew of staffing challenges. Finding and attracting the right talent, and in the right quantity, is a paramount issue for executives. It’s not about to go away.   
According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, 46 percent of healthcare hiring and human resources managers (at facilities with 100 or more employees) currently have open positions for which they cannot find qualified candidates.
These positions end up staying open for two months or longer at a staggering 73 percent of organizations.
The costs of extended vacancies are real, and threaten organizations’ dedication to high-quality patient care. Six in ten survey respondents claimed openings resulted in productivity loss. Three in ten said they hurt morale and negatively affect the quality of work.
Beyond looking to the education system for answers, solutions run the gamut from overhauling internal development and retention programs to raising compensation for the toughest to find healthcare roles. These are important, but often difficult propositions for organizations constrained by cost reduction initiatives.
A new approach
A different solution is to simply turn the recruitment process on its head. Successful staffing is becoming less about reacting to vacancies and more about developing pipelines of prospective talent for when those vacancies actually arise. Intuitive as this idea may seem, only 44 percent of large healthcare organizations continuously recruit. A majority (53 percent) of those who do, however, shorten their average time to hire and dampen the consequences of extended vacancies.
However, the biggest benefit may be the quality of the prospective talent. I recently spoke with Dale Caldwell, a talent manager for Columbus, Ga.-based St. Francis Hospital, about this issue.
“We realized that talent pipelining was absolutely necessary in order to continue to give the level of service we wish to provide our patients,” he said. “The process strengthens the pool of candidates from which we choose.”
St. Francis, a 376-bed facility employing about 2,800 healthcare associates, is expanding with new clinics, and as with many healthcare organizations, is constantly in need of experienced nurses. To attract a broader range of specialized skill sets to their mid-sized market, Caldwell said a continuous recruitment strategy is a natural fit for attracting talent from outside the region.
But what’s the best platform for sourcing and engaging with these prospective candidates?
A common (and generally ineffective) mechanism for building a talent pipeline is to advertise positions that aren’t actually open in the hope of collecting resumes en masse. There are two primary reasons this isn’t a viable tactic. First, this approach won’t attract professionals who are already working full-time and may only be exploring other career opportunities passively. In other words, healthcare practitioners on their feet 50-hours a week won’t often take the time to fill out a long job application. Secondly, the approach is likely to frustrate and even alienate job seekers who thought they were applying to actual openings.    
The simplest continuous recruitment tactic, it turns out, is to allow talent to get on the organization’s radar on their own terms. Think of it as an easy way to exchange business cards. Career sites should invite visitors to submit their resume or contact info online regardless if there’s an immediate opening. Ideally, candidates should be able to do this on their mobile phone without having to fill out forms that take a half hour or more to complete. For healthcare organizations, such an approach allows for ready access to a pool of interested candidates before a new listing even goes up.
Branding
Caldwell points out that one of the easiest ways to establish a continuous recruitment mentality is to develop an employer brand that prospective job candidates recognize as a desirable place to work.
“Find a way to differentiate your recruitment marketing from the organization itself,” he said. “We actually created a recruitment specific marketing campaign, with our own branding, that presented St. Francis as an employer as opposed to St. Francis as a healthcare provider.”    
The branding process can involve touting any number of competitive advantages such as above-average compensation, flexible scheduling or organizational prestige. Combined with proactive, year-round recruitment, a successfully deployed campaign can give healthcare recruiters a huge step up over their regional competition.
Fueled by increased access and an aging population, healthcare industry employment is projected to grow quickly over the next decade. Forward-thinking workforce planning is as essential as ever. In certain markets, skill shortages will almost certainly be a reality. Proactive healthcare organizations with access to a pipeline of vetted candidates, however, will avoid many of the most prevalent recruiting headaches.