Our staff at McLeod Health is composed of more than 4,700 employees spread throughout our medical center, health agency, fitness facility and 35 medical practices. That many employees alone can make HR challenging, but spread them over multiple facilities and toss in the varying degrees of jobs that need to be filled and some days it can make healthcare HR seem like an insurmountable task.
At McLeod, we have nearly 1,000 requisitions a year. About 2 years ago, we did some calculating, and found it was taking us nearly 268 minutes to “touch” a new hire. We needed to find a way to cut down the time it took to find and hire candidates.
On average, it costs around $97,000 for the organization to replace a nurse, and around $143,000 to replace a critical care nurse – making speedy onboarding and high rates of retention key to our success.
We turned to technology to help us streamline our HR department. The top priorities were gaining the ability to quickly post jobs, shortening our time-to-hire and creating a smooth onboarding process for new hires.
Streamline Processes
Somewhat unique to our industry, we make many changes to job codes and titles. We add departments and job codes frequently to our system and found ourselves in a situation where if we need to make changes it could take two days to implement - an unacceptable delay.
Since implementing a recruiting management system that allows us to post jobs in minutes and update as frequently as needed, we have been able to reduce the time it takes to “touch” a candidate from 268 minutes to just 30 minutes. The costs savings from the reduction amounts to the equivalent of two full time employees’ salaries.
As an added bonus, we have increased our accuracy in tracking jobs across several categories including active jobs, equal employment opportunity, applicants by source, applicants by location, time to fill, time to fill by locations, and time to fill by title making it easier to stay on top of open positions.
Another challenge specific to healthcare is the numerous governing bodies to answer to – we need ironclad processes in place to make sure we’re meeting all compliancy standards. With the amount of detail involved in staying compliant, we needed a system with date and time stamping that allowed easy tracking.
Once we find the right candidates we want to ensure new employees are transitioned in to our organization as smoothly as possible – this meant adjusting our Monday new hire orientations and not bogging down new hires with paperwork.
On the first day our old process had new hires signing their name 33 times!
After automating our efforts we immediately noticed a time-savings when it came to Monday orientations. The orientations were no longer saturated with items such as “how to operate a fire extinguisher,” because new hires were viewing that information before they arrived. Instead, time was spent on important high-level items such as customer service, quality care and operational effectiveness.
Our new process allowed us to cut orientation sessions down by an hour, which allowed our team to get to the heart of what our organization is about and gave them back 20 percent of the training time.
We were able to cut back on time spent for new hire paperwork and we now forward paperwork to departments before candidates start. Our new efficiency also allowed us to cut the times new hires sign their name from 33 times to zero.
Reaping the Benefits
Outside of our HR department, our new onboarding process has saved other departments both time and money as well. It has allowed simplified processes for the security, training, occupational health, and payroll departments.
Payroll staffers no longer have to attend orientation every Monday to pass out direct deposit forms and collect voided checks. The HR department now handles this with an electronic form for direct deposits that the new hires fill our when they fill out I-9s online.
Our Occupational Health Department now provides an electronic form for new hires to complete as well. The form is forwarded to the department days before our new hires arrive for pre-employment physicals. This makes appointments smoother and faster, and ensures the department has all the needed resources on hand for the appointment.
Streamlining our processes has not just saved time and money but has also allowed us to provide new hires a better experience. As anyone in HR knows, the better the experience for your employees, the more likely you are to retain them in the future.
McLeod Health uses Life Suite talent management tools from WInston-Salem, N.C.-based SilkRoad technology Inc.