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Health Care Matters is edited by Karen A. Hart, RN, BSN, and Sandy Haeberle, RN

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e-mail: healthcare@hodes.com

Buried Treasure

By Kate Christmas, RN
Vice President, Health Care Division

You may be surprised to learn that there are buried treasures hidden deep within your recruitment efforts—tools and resources at your disposal that are not being maximized. Utilizing these sources may increase your recruitment efficiency and effectiveness. Below, we’ve outlined a map to lead you to your treasure. Read More >

RecruitingRx

Perhaps you seek relief from exorbitant search or contingency recruiting fees, or simply need to fill certain jobs in a flash. RecruitingRx, a new solution from the Hodes Health Care Division, can solve these issues and many others.
Read More >

 

Buried Treasure (continued)

Person to Person

No matter how sophisticated your recruitment strategies, at the core of those efforts are the relationships that develop between candidates and recruiters. These relationships are cultivated over time by strategic and respectful repetitive contact with potential employees. To succeed, the recruiter needs to demonstrate a sincere desire to help each professional find a great career fit.

Nowadays, health care is largely a buyer’s market, and it will likely remain that way for the next two decades; maybe even beyond. Therefore, recruiters and managers have the primary responsibility to both begin, and nurture, candidate relationships.

When reaching out to prospective candidates, a personalized approach works best. Candidates like to feel special, to be recognized as individuals and not feel they are one among hundreds of names on a recruiter’s list.

Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing entails using proactive strategies to target candidates in a personalized way. This strategy is ever more critical; given the current dearth of health care professionals, the candidates who most interest you are likely currently employed. Thus, they must be wooed away. Doing so requires careful planning and time and effort to build professional relationships.

The smart recruiter determines the talented individuals that they wish to pursue. To facilitate this, a recruiter might meet with managers of the designated hiring areas to find out who the stars are locally, regionally and nationally. It is also beneficial to check out national conference speakers to identify the primary thought leaders for the various disciplines.

Then begins the outreach process: a phone call, snail mail/e-mail, and, if possible, face-to-face contact with coveted candidates, to convince them of their fit within your organization. Attend local specialty association meetings to rub elbows with them. Introduce them to your leadership team, and make them aware of what is new and exciting in your organization. If they are local, meet for lunch, extend special invitations to events at your organization, and send birthday and holiday cards. 

Be ethical in your approach: do not contact candidates at work. Avoid anything that could distract them from focusing on patients, or be viewed as predatory behavior. If you are truly building relationships, such over-the-top efforts are unnecessary.

E-mail permission marketing is one of the best ways to reach professionals at home because it is minimally intrusive and allows the recipient to reply at his/her own convenience. A similar approach can be applied to enhance college recruitment, or to build your organization’s relationship with particular schools. By developing efforts to individualize outreach to top talent and/or colleges, you set in motion a strategy that eliminates the need to hire “strangers”.

True relationship marketing demonstrates a win/win attitude. Each candidate feels respected, and maybe even a bit flattered by the personal attention. Recruiters and hiring managers widen their professional networks, and in this way, often make some outstanding hires. 

Candidate Care

This term relates to how candidates are treated while they are under consideration for employment. How an organization interacts with a candidate during this period can make or break recruitment success. If your organization does not respond quickly to applications, FAILS to keep candidates informed during the initial selection period or gives applicants the “black hole” treatment, it a sure bet that you are losing valuable potential employees.

To make your organization stand out in a positive way, provide candidates with large doses of respect and appreciation. Be open and in frequent contact with them. As mentioned above, take a personal approach to communication rather than sending bulk form letters.

Applicant Management Systems

Many health care organizations use their applicant management systems primarily to monitor and measure applicant flow. These systems, however, have much more capability. Most allow for the creation of a searchable candidate database. Depending on the system, candidates can be sorted alphabetically, by specialty, or by location. Many offer customized reports by position title or service line. Yet, few organizations tap into these databases, and in failing to do so, overlook a trove of candidates, right at their fingertips.

There are some oft-heard reasons why organizations fail to leverage their systems: “Our system is not user friendly.”  “My recruiters do not understand the system well enough to feel comfortable using it.” “Our recruiters simply cannot find the time to do database mining.” In truth, organizations rarely search their database first when a new position opens. If relationships with those existing candidates have not been established and nurtured, those once-hot leads grow stone cold.

In this age of e-mail and HTML, card templates are simple to use when reaching out to candidates in your database. Use your database lists to ask for a referral, impart news about the candidate’s area of interest or just to touch base. Today’s candidates can quickly become tomorrow’s hires with a bit of planning and effort.

Alumni

It is also important to develop a strategy to keep in touch with those in good standing who have left your organization. Even if they are moving out of your area, those who continue to work in the health care industry may refer others to consider becoming your employees.

To facilitate continued contact with alumni, many organizations now send alumni newsletters or provide a password-protected page on their website to allow them access to information about the organization, make referrals, or keep in touch with colleagues.

National Conferences

When you exhibit at national conferences, you gain the advantage of being among some of the most qualified professionals in their specialties. Take advantage of your proximity to them, chatting about what they enjoy in their current work environments. Have managers or unit staffers in the booth to discuss your equipment, environment and distinctiveness as an organization.

Hold a contest drawing or use another registration method to obtain e-mail addresses from these professionals. Discuss permission marketing with them, particularly if they show interest. Entice them by promising information about your specialized equipment, services, research and/or renowned professionals that may be leading initiatives within your system.

Most important, follow up on the e-mail addresses you collect when you return, perhaps sending out an e-card blast to create a new pipeline of qualified candidates. If you are doing relationship marketing, be sure to single out the candidates with whom you are most interested and make a personal appeal to each.

Not Rocket Science

None of the strategies above are costly or complicated. However, they may require a reorganization of work priorities, and a deeper collaboration between recruitment teams and hiring managers. In light of deepening shortages across many health care disciplines, they are well worth the effort.

For assistance with your recruitment and retention issues, please contact your Bernard Hodes Group representative or contact the Health Care Division at healthcare@hodes.com.

RecruitingRx

RecruitingRx places an experienced health care recruiter in your staffing department. That professional can then tackle numerous recruiting tasks for you, from sourcing, screening and interviewing, through conducting background checks and extending offers. With the RecruitingRx solution, we can also: assess your recruiting process and make recommended improvements; affect change implementation; lend technologies support, and conduct metrics benchmarking. 

For more information, please contact Steve Mitchell, vice president, Hodes Health Care Division, at 978.263.6695 or via e-mail at sgmitchell@hodes.com.