Innovation in 2008
December 31st, 2008 by tpierce
Our last post focused on inspiration. We asked you to share with us your proudest moments. This week, we want to share with you one of our unique projects that yielded great results.
A prominent academic medical center approached Bernard Hodes Group to develop a program that would critique the way employees answered the telephone. This project was retention-focused. The golden rule, to “treat others as you would want them to treat you” was to be tested, as new telephone standards had been put in place to guarantee strong customer service, both internally between staff, and externally, with patients and their families.
We developed an online survey utilizing all of the telephone standards employees should meet when on the telephone, including specifics on how the telephone was answered, what happened if the call was put on hold, what occurred if the caller requested a transfer, and what type of follow up occurred if a voice mail was left. Mystery shoppers were utilized from various parts of the country, and calls were made at various times throughout the day in order to hit all shifts.
Over a five-month period, the results were reported to the medical center on a monthly basis. Each director was given his results in order to better focus his employees on improved telephone etiquette.
By tracking compliance on a monthly basis, directors were able to go back to their employees, communicate the results, and delineate future expectations. Measures were taken instantly, and by the second month’s report, compliance rates increased by 13%. By the end of the five-month period, the organization, as a whole, went from utilizing the correct telephone standards only 69% of the time to a near perfect 92% compliance, an increase of 23%.
YOUR Innovation in 2008
December 23rd, 2008 by tpierce
2008 is winding down, and as President-Elect Obama said, this has been the year of change. This year, all of America has lived through tremendous transformation. 2008 is the year that the United States will be remembered for accruing the largest deficit in history - $425 billion. It is also the year of historic losses and gains on the stock market. October of 2008 was the worst month in 21 years for the Standards & Poor’s index of 500 stocks; and, the last week of October was the best week for the market in 34 years.
Because of these turbulent times, successful organizations are thinking differently in order to reach their goals. Next week, we will showcase a unique project that we partnered on, and were able to assist a client in fulfilling their objectives.
However, this week, it is your time to shine. We want to hear from you!
Share with us your proudest moments. Did you have a successful job fair? Tell us what you did to increase attendance! Did you change your overall advertising, which then reaped new hires? Did you switch gears and focus internally on your staff, emphasizing retention and referrals?
Share with us and let us join you in being proud of your accomplishments!
Happy Holidays
December 22nd, 2008 by khartWe wish you and yours the happiest of holiday seasons. We have been closely following economic predictors for the health care industry and know many of you, our readers and partners, are strategizing on how to survive and thrive in this economic environment. We are here for you. In a week filled with inclement weather, economic woes and uncertainty about the future, take a deep breath and remember the spirit of the season. We will get through this. Wishing you a holiday season filled with peace, joy and love.
Nursing’s Millennials-Fair Treatment?
December 16th, 2008 by khartWe’re always glad to have feedback on the articles and white papers we write, especially when it provides us with the opportunity to further examine a topic. A reader, Annette Lynch, sent us her comments on a recent white paper by Kate Christmas of Hodes Health Care as follows:
Karen - Thank you. I am a mentor for new nurses at our facility, and I am impressed by the quality of this white paper. So many articles that have been written on the topic in nursing journals have portrayed the millennial nurse as a self-centered parasite. I have found them to be quite the opposite. This boomer nurse appreciates them for their zest, their joie de vivre, and I fear that if many of the existing nurse pool clamps down too heavily, we may lose the war of attracting and retaining the best and the brightest.
- Annette Lynch
How about you? Do you think that nursing’s Millennials get fair treatment in the press?
Recruitment department structure, roles and responsibilities
December 12th, 2008 by khartOne of the areas we always look at when doing process consulting is the structure in the recruitment department. What we often find is organizational growth has impacted the effectiveness of the current structure and that roles and responsibilities have grown over the years. At the same time, assignment of new roles and responsibilities hasn’t been well planned and thought out. Workflow may have increased for the department overall and for certain positions in particular.
If you are a multi-hospital system, is your recruitment structure centralized or decentralized? There is no ‘right or wrong’ structure; but the structure should make sense from an economies of scale point of view, your customers (candidates and internal hiring managers) should be well served, and processes should make sense for either scenario.
Perhaps now would be a good time to take a look at the structure in your department, the roles and responsibilities of your staff, workflow and how all of this impacts your recruitment success. Have you analyzed job descriptions and concluded that they still make sense? (Often as ‘other duties as assigned’ pile up, we find these additional duties are tacked on to existing jobs with little analysis or strategic planning.) New responsibilities often go to the person deemed the least busy and are not necessarily aligned to business objectives. This may lead to everyone on the team doing a little of everything, with overlap, duplication and confusion as to who is responsible for what in the final analysis.
Another scenario is the model where responsibilities are strictly assigned, and there is no deviation or overlap, making communication essential and coverage for absences crucial.
Many organizations went to the ‘generalist’ model years ago before reverting back to having recruiters, employee relations specialists, and even retensivists when recruitment became a major issue again and retention began to get the emphasis it deserves. Some organizations now employ ‘sourcers’, who may actually be screening large volumes of resumes as well as mining Internet databases in search of viable candidates, making calls, etc.
This post is appearing near the end of the calendar year. Perhaps now would be a good time to take a closer look at how you have structured your department, analyze roles and responsibilities and make necessary adjustments to move your recruitment and retention programs to the next level. We wish you much success and welcome your comments.
Communication with hiring managers
December 5th, 2008 by khartKey to recruitment process and one of the core tools for success in recruitment is excellent communication with your key internal customers, the hiring managers. These individuals can provide you with an unsurpassed worldview of what changes are in the works (rumored resignations, retirements, transfers in and out, expanded or contracted services in their areas, etc.) as well as vital information on what the unit culture is all about and what types of individuals integrate seamlessly into those units.
Recruitment process success involves an efficient requisition and posting process, understanding of position control, rapid and considered response back to candidates, and clear communication as to where the candidate is in the process. All of these items involve communication with hiring managers.
Recruiter/hiring manager partnerships involve frequent meetings to discuss requisitions and postings, position control, openings, candidates and interview results. These meetings can also pinpoint the managers’ views on the quality of hires you are making.
You need a process around who is conducting the interviews, whether or not recruitment screens resumes and conducts a preliminary interview, when (and which partner) conducts background checking and reference checking, who makes the job offer and when the paperwork is begun. Other process issues include who handles transfer requests and who makes the offers to internal candidates. Other shared responsibilities include responding back to candidates who have been eliminated from consideration and communication to candidates in general.
A good partnership and communication with your hiring managers can make the difference between success and failure in recruitment.
Next week we will discuss roles and responsibilities, structure in recruitment and reporting.
Communication
December 1st, 2008 by khartDo you know what your automated message back to candidates looks like? Is it an auto message that your ATS provider developed or have you actually looked at it recently? Are you comfortable with the tone of this message and confident that it is an extension of your corporate culture? We have been routinely taken aback when we see what these messages look like. They often are ‘from’ DO NOT REPLY and very often do not give the candidate a warm and fuzzy feeling.
And how about this-do you even have such a message, or is the candidate worrying about whether or not the process actually worked or was complete after submitting a resume or online application?
Another question is, how long does it take you to get back to candidates after that automated response? And how do you respond to the candidate? Does recruitment screen the resume/application, then send the viable candidates’ resumes along to a hiring manager and alert the candidates as to what has taken place, what to expect next and time frames going forward? Or does the candidate wait and wait for some type of response, while applying to competitors? We have found in many cases no one ever responds back to candidates who are not a good fit.
We would advise that you develop a ‘form’ e-mail response that in warm but professional language lets candidates know where they are in the process, what to expect next and time frames. Similarly, craft nice responses to those who don’t make the initial cut and for those who aren’t hired after interview. Your reputation in the health care community is at stake when you ignore candidates.
Of course these recommendations assume you have excellent communications with hiring managers, which we will discuss on next week’s post.
Technology in Recruitment
November 21st, 2008 by khartThe good news is there is technology to help recruiters in their every day lives. The bad news is that in many cases this very technology seems to be crippling recruiters’ ability to recruit. This seeming contradiction in terms often results from inadequate recruiter education on how to use the technology (in many cases we have heard of recruiters being given very little to no help in using either their HRIS system OR their ATS). Very often recruiters have no idea what either of these systems can do nor how to use them effectively.
I chatted with a training manager of a large ATS who described the training session for recruiters and noted that after a period of time, she felt there was true information overload. And that recruiters didn’t retain enough from just one session.
So education and re-education is one issue. What are some others?
One, often these technologies do not interface with each other, forcing recruiters to ‘make do’ and ‘work around the systems’. Information must be re-entered from system to system, adding unnecessary work.
Sharing information with hiring managers can be an issue; some systems don’t allow managers to visualize everything that can be seen by the recruiter related to a candidate. This type of situation can compromise communication. Also, looking at the entry in the ATS does not always easily show exactly where the candidate is in the process. Sometimes notes are not made by all concerned so that the hiring manager and recruiter can tell at a glance where the candidate is in the process.
Secondly, when a successful marketing campaign generates hundreds of resumes, the system (and the recruiters) can be totally overloaded with resume after resume. And depending on how the organization’s policies and procedures work, volume can increase exponentially. For example, if candidates are required to apply to a job number, not for a specific classification of position, they must submit multiple resumes for the same job family. This leads to duplication and confusion for everyone.
Similarly, if there are no ‘knock out’ questions, anyone can apply for any position. So that theoretically, someone with a high school education and no work experience could apply to be a department head.
And then there is the issue of how internal transfers are handled. Many organizations require internal folks to follow the same procedure as external candidates. Thus you have internal candidates using the same application procedure, adding more and more resumes to the mix.
What all of this leads to is a resume database that just keeps growing like Topsy and in most cases, never gets ‘mined’. There may be a stellar candidate already ‘sitting’ in your database, but the sheer volume of constant new resumes means no one ever gets to ‘mine’ that database to see which resumes represent viable candidates. And when posting a position, this valuable source is never consulted before the entire search process begins again.
These are a few of the areas to look at when you are trying to get a handle on your technology tools.
Next week we will look at communications to candidates.
Website and its Influence on Process
November 14th, 2008 by khartOne of the most important areas to look at in the process continuum is your website and the impact it has on how a candidate applies online. You would be surprised at the difficulties awaiting the job seeker when he attempts to submit a resume or application online to many organizations.
From the placement of the ‘careers’ or ‘jobs’ button on your main page to the process of hitting the ‘send’ button when submitting a resume, there are countless ways to ‘lose’ a good candidate.
It is always good to remember that not all candidates are comfortable with technology and creating barriers to submitting a resume online may result in the non-tech savvy candidates simply giving up. We had a forty-something, highly experienced RN tell us on one consulting project that she attempted multiple times to submit a resume online to a prestigious academic medical center and became so frustrated, she turned the computer off, grabbed a paper resume, drove to the facility and dropped off the paper resume. She got the job, but in many organizations, dropping off a paper resume is simply not an option anymore. Therefore, it behooves us to create a process that is easily understood and makes submitting online a pleasure, not a chore.
A good idea is to shop your site as though you were an actual candidate attempting to apply online. Because it is difficult to view your site with fresh eyes when you are used to seeing it every day, another option is to engage an outside firm to conduct a Mystery Shop of your site and resume submission process (Hodes Health Care Division has done over 150 of these candidate experience Mystery Shops).
Some things to consider when you are looking at this piece of the process include but are not limited to:
• Does your facility’s site URL appear when your facility or system is “Googled”? If it does, how far down the list is it?
• Is the careers or jobs button clearly and instantly visible on your home page?
• How many clicks does it take to get to the careers or jobs page?
• Are you able to easily (and efficiently) search for a specific position by location, department, professional classification?
• Can candidates attach a resume to your application or can they cut and paste elements of their resume to your application?
• How long is your application? (We have seen the gamut- from a few questions to several pages in our projects).
• What kinds of sensitive information (social security number, professional and driver’s license) do you require?
• How long does the application process take? Our experience has ranged from 15 minutes to over an hour and we are quite experienced at submitting resumes.
• Are there any potential technical glitches (error messages, being timed out) that crop up during resume submission?
This kind of diagnostic can enable you to correct flaws in the online application process, create a better website experience for interested candidates and create a better online candidate flow. Ultimately, the online application process can be a help rather than a hindrance.
For further reading, click here to read my Nursing Economics article, “Evaluating Recruitment Process through ‘Mystery Shops.’”
Next week we will look at your ATS, technology and mining your own database.