Recruiting for Healthcare: An Unconventional Approach

• Author: Amitai Givertz
• Posted: May 15, 2007
• Category: Recruiting, Sourcing Strategies
• Tags: Media, Print Media, USA TODAY
• Comments:

Following up on my post from last week about the mind-numbing nature of recruiting in healthcare — in the month of May mostly but any time really — something practical to think about and do.
 
For anyone who has been recruiting nurses and what-have-you for longer than a month or two knows the systemic shortage of qualified personnel — not to be confused with the shortage of available candidates, availability having more to do with economics than it has to do with sourcing — knows they have a problem, quite a few problems actually.
 
One such problem is how in the face of upside-down supply and demand and pinched budgets do we balance the long term strategies of diversity recruiting, employment branding and retention for example with the immediate need to alleviate the pressures created by staffing shortfalls and the attendant heavy workloads, low morale and work-related stress.

It seems this problem is made worse by the failure of traditional recruitment advertising like newsprint and professional journals — themselves heavily subsidized by recruitment ads — to deliver tangible results. The reasons for this are many. They include an outmoded pricing model for recruitment advertising that correlates circulation numbers with price. Despite declining readership and response rates the price does not adjust accordingly. This means the cost in real terms continues to increase.

Another factor is an increasingly disinterested audience who has developed such a heightened sense of situational awareness that it is almost impossible to stimulate them with media they now have little use for. Sign-on bonuses, student loan forgiveness, relocation assistance and other incentives have become so commonplace that such goodies often fail to motivate the few remaining readers who — at best — browse the help-wanted classifieds.

On-site events like job fairs and open houses — often driven by the recruitment advertising that now goes unnoticed or unattended to — are also becoming increasingly difficult to successfully pull off. There are some that can still do it but too few I think.

For many direct recruiting may have compounded the problem. The most accessible candidates are being overworked. State lists and the usual job boards are being bludgeoned to death by well meaning recruiters blissfully unaware of how they are contributing to a process of candidate alienation.

With too little time and money being invested in recruiter training the pile-and-file and smile-and-dial techniques that barely worked a few years ago have all but stopped being effective except for a few lucky ones. A reluctance to try new things means that many recruiters go hungry even though there are good candidates who could be engaged if only…well, you might know how that goes!

Of course, there are no easy solutions. No silver bullets. No panaceas. But there are opportunities if you choose to view them as such.

For the rest of May RCI is rolling out a number of recruitment initiatives that have been developed with some of these challenges in mind. I would like to describe them as “opportunities” but hesitate at the marketing-speak.

Anyway, I encourage you to consider each on its merits and compare our unconventional approach with some of the usual things that you’ve done in the past or may be planning to do in the future. Remember what Florence Nightingale said and better than I could as to our purpose:

So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

Over the next three or four weeks I will also be posting a number of things that will either point you toward some useful resource or something, or update you on those events that RCI is sponsoring. If you have any feedback I would consider it a personal favor if you would share it here in the comments. Otherwise, feel free to email me and I’ll pass it along.

As examples of the kind of stuff I hope to have for you — buoying up this longer-than-usual opening post — I suggest you check out these three items:

• Preparing for a Future Labor Shortage published Pepperdine University. The report simply explains some of the basics about bucking a labor shortage using nursing as a case in point. I thought it was a good read and I am planning to get to work on the list of references hyperlinked at the bottom — one day.

• To the question of “available” candidates, from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research a white paper, Solving the Nursing Shortage through Higher Wages. The download is a PDF so you’ll need to have Adobe Reader installed if you don’t have it already. I haven’t read this paper yet — it is rather long — but I kept seeing it referenced in my research so I think I should, don’t you? If you get to it first let me know what you think.

• Bringing Healthcare Recruiting into the 21st Century an article by Dr. John Sullivan on ERE. He takes a rather dim view of current recruiting practices in healthcare concluding:

You might think that I have been overly harsh in describing the status of most recruiting and retention efforts in healthcare…I find that those that feel that way generally have not taken the time to undergo a recruiting and retention audit in order to identify areas where they are painfully weak.

Hmmm…a “recruiting and retention audit.” That’s a thought.

So, let’s to it! Stay tuned…