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

800.582.4668
e-mail: healthcare@hodes.com

Building Lasting Relationships with Customers

As health care recruiters, you take direction from a multitude of customers. You may, for example, report to the director of workforce development. However, if you recruit for the director of respiratory therapy, he or she will also be interested in your work. 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 >

 

Building Lasting Relationships with Customers
(continued)

If you are responsible for nurse recruitment, not just nursing managers but also the chief nursing officer will be invested in your strategies and success. Some of these customer relationships will be enjoyable, and others will prove to be hard work. In either scenario, they all comprise your customer base, and you must work effectively with each of them to succeed.

It is important to remember that each customer must be treated with respect. Despite the many needs within a health care setting, each customer believes they are your one and only client. None want to hear that you did not accomplish something they requested because you were busy with someone else’s work. It is virtual professional suicide to use this as a defense.

Your credibility can either be built or torn down based on how well you communicate with customers. Ensure you are able to meet job demands. If you are up against conflicting priorities with similar deadlines, meet with all the stakeholders involved so they can prioritize your workload. This will keep you neutral and can highlight your need for assistance if you are overburdened.

Be seen and heard

Recruiters should optimize the good communication skills they’ve honed in the field, using them to find out all they can about their customers, i.e. - what influences work in their departments and the personality of those departments. Completing a unit or department profile every six months will keep you current on workflow, new equipment in the area, potential changes in service offerings and where challenges lie.

This information gathering is not just a nicety; it will convince your customers that you are making the effort to understand the details of their services. You will become a more informed recruiter, and thus able to provide superior information on the challenges and opportunities facing each department or unit.

There is simply no substitute for face time, even in our day of e-mail and virtual meetings. Ensure that you physically visit your units and departments of responsibility whenever possible. This allows you to experience firsthand the atmosphere of each area. It also allows staff members to get to know who you are and how to contact you.

Don’t forget that each time a person leaves your system, the burden falls squarely on you, the recruiter.

Visiting units or attending the occasional departmental staff meeting is a great way to keep in touch with recent hires to see how they are progressing. Many a smart recruiter has salvaged a good hire who was floundering in her original area because she did not “fit in” or was not provided proper support during orientation. Don’t forget that each time a person leaves your system, the burden falls squarely on you, the recruiter.

In working with candidates, being seen and heard means timely, meaningful communication to keep them aware of their progress through the process. And, if you are recruiting someone out of town, out of state or even internationally, it is imperative to keep the communication flowing even after you have closed the deal. Many organizations create Intranet pages for new hires who will not begin work immediately. This facilitates easy sustained contact between those employees and their managers, co-workers and/or recruiters. Other companies send facility newsletters, local newspapers, personal notes, and/or schedule phone or e-mail communication with the candidate every two weeks until they arrive. With today’s competition for talent, you cannot be sure of any hire until they begin working with you.

Process and reporting

All stakeholders will want to remain informed of the status of your efforts. To facilitate this, schedule face-to-face meetings with each leader at least bi-monthly, and provide a simple weekly report for those with open positions. Applicant tracking systems can aid the recruiter in creating these reports by revealing, through a few keystrokes, the open position, where it has been advertised, and how many candidates have been sourced. The report does not have to be comprehensive; a snapshot of efforts that is easily read will suffice. Your monthly report, however, should be more detailed.

It is also essential to check in often with stakeholders to ensure you have requisitions for all of their open positions. Make sure that your system has checks and balances so that you are notified when a manager requests recruitment efforts and the manager is notified when you have received and/or posted the requisition. Precious time is lost when a manager asks about an open position and the person tasked with recruitment of that position is unfamiliar with its status.

Carrots, not sticks

In the work sphere, applying positive motivators can be more productive than using conflict or public embarrassment to get a point across. After all, it is rare a person comes to work each morning with the goal of doing a terrible job. Conversely, we also acknowledge that not everyone is in a job for which they are best suited.

So, if you are struggling with uncooperative managers to get positions filled, instead of focusing on them, provide a prize or reward to one or two outstanding managers who meet you halfway. Doing this in a public forum—such as an administrative meeting—can have a halo effect that can encompass many of your problem areas.

Likewise, with candidates, it is important to remember that health care shortages have created a buyers’ market. You as the recruiter should assess fit and create a winning, forthcoming approach to attract and keep the best candidates for your organization. Careful listening when a person applies for a position is essential; it will yield details that will help you close the deal later on.

It is rare a person comes to work each morning with the goal of doing a terrible job. Conversely, we also acknowledge that not everyone is in a job for which they are best suited.

Using extenders

A smart recruiter will take advantage of busy times to leverage the assistance of key stakeholders. For example, if you are attending several college or national events, involve managers or their staff to assist in booths. Just make sure to provide some guidelines on booth etiquette and approaching potential candidates.

Back at the office, if you have scheduled multiple interviews for virtually the same timeframe, ask department directors or staff members to take the potential hire on a hospital tour or to meet informally with staff members on that unit. Having a friendly person or group take a candidate for coffee can be a great boon to your recruitment efforts.

Recruitment and retention committee members can also be helpful here, providing waiting candidates with information about the health system, housing, and area schools. A great project for an R&R committee is to develop a booklet about the area or the system aimed at helping new hires to acclimate more quickly. Informing a new hire with small children of the location for the closest library, or letting a new employee know about the area’s best restaurants, lends a wonderful personalized edge to your recruitment efforts.

We often hear from recruiters who have difficulty finding anyone to meet with walk-in candidates. This can be remedied by approaching division directors or the chief nursing officer to assign daily or weekly “call” for unscheduled candidates that have great potential, and who are in a hard-to-fill specialty such as nursing, physical therapy or respiratory therapy. The surgery director may still have to contact a potential surgical tech, but having a peer meet with that person while they are onsite makes your system look organized and provides a welcoming environment for potential hires.

If you need additional help but cannot hire more hands, enlist your system’s volunteer group. Or, consider a high school or college intern who can help out while learning about employment practices. Either way, remember that these extenders will represent the system and may be the first point of contact for your candidates. Orient wisely and evaluate performance to make sure that your service level and communications remain excellent.

Building bridges

Astute recruiters can uncover areas of friction among departments that influence turnover and patient satisfaction. For example, if the laboratory and emergency department are in conflict about how blood samples are drawn, patient wait times may increase, angry words may be exchanged, and staffers may seek greener pastures.

Recruiters are not responsible for such turnover; yet they are often the first to realize a problem exists. As mentioned previously, when a person vacates a position, it falls to recruitment to fill that position. Bring such conflicts to the attention of department directors or higher, with suggestions for resolution. Staff is often willing to share issues with the recruiter because the recruiter is viewed as an impartial third party. Another strategy in the aforementioned case would be to help form a taskforce of lab and ED staffers to uncover and resolve differences.

Staff is often willing to share issues with the recruiter because the recruiter is viewed as an impartial third party.

Surveys and interviews

If you do not perform post-hire or exit interviews for your system, ensure you have access to that data to help you to uncover potential problem areas. If your organization does not conduct such interviews, this is a missed opportunity to improve working conditions and understand what drives turnover. If you lack time to do such interviews, consider contracting with a third party to gather this crucial information. Compare the data with your employee satisfaction survey results to uncover major issues requiring attention.

Also consider doing an annual survey of your own customers. Invite department managers for whom you recruit to complete a short survey that asks for feedback on the recruitment function. Allow for respondents to answer anonymously. Present stakeholders with a tally of the results, along with an overview of how areas will continue to improve and grow based on their feedback. Having a transparent process will create a more trusting atmosphere and show that you are open to change and all constructive suggestions.

By strategically providing outreach to customers, you can make your day-to-day role easier and elevate your standing among stakeholders. You may also get the exact resources you need to best perform your role! Do everything in your power to get to know each of your customers, and impart the value of that relationship whenever you can. It makes a difference!

For help with any recruitment or retention issues, contact the Bernard Hodes Group Health Care Division at 800.582.4668 or email us 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.