Healthcare Recruitment Benchmarks 2012: Taking a Look to the Past and to the Future

The beginning of a new year can be an exciting time. A time to reflect a little on the past and chart a new, improved course for the future. As healthcare recruiters, you are well aware of the worker shortage and the challenges the situation presents. Over the past decade, healthcare recruiters have been faced with seemingly insurmountable odds to attain fully staffed healthcare facilities. The workforce shortage is systemic and there is little an individual recruiter can do to solve the problem in its totality. But you can measure your organization’s recruiter effectiveness by establishing quality-focused metrics and benchmarks that deal with today’s reality.

A Look to the Past

In order to chart a new course, we must first look to the past to gain perspective. Healthcare recruitment specialists face many of the same challenges as they did in 2001. The healthcare worker shortage is an ongoing concern, competition for available talent is high, and recruiters must use their creativity in order to attract and hire quality personnel. With these challenges, recruiters must look to new ways of measuring their progress.

The workforce shortage has led to some recruiters in the industry filling positions with little to no regard to the quality of the hire. An unsuitable hire leads to employee turnover further compounding the problem. In order to break this cycle, recruiters can adapt to current challenges by concentrating not just on the cost aspects of hiring but on the quality of the new hire.

An article in HR Management titled “Recruiting Metrics – The Rules Have Changed” best describes the changes taking place in regards to recruiting metrics then and now. The author states “Ten years ago recruiting was often seen as a stepping-stone to an HR Generalist role. Recruiters were trained to “screen out” applicants, thus making their roles transaction-focused.” It is in a transaction-focused environment that metrics such as Cost-per-Hire and Time-to-Fill became the cornerstone to recruitment measurement.

While these metrics are still valuable in today’s healthcare environment of cost containment, recruiters can improve their effectiveness by adding additional metrics that focus on quality. Before we get to that, however, let’s take a moment to see what high-performance healthcare organizations are focusing on and how it affects recruitment management.

A Look to the Future

In a 2011 American Society for Healthcare Human Resource Administration survey, it was reported that in order to increase patient satisfaction the majority of healthcare providers are focusing on:

• Improving Employee Satisfaction/Employee Engagement 75%
• Creating a Culture of Employee Accountability 75%
• Creating a Service-Oriented Culture 72%
• Aligning the Workforce with the Organization’s Core Values 64%

Further, The Institute for Corporate Productivity reports, “high-performing organizations excel because they have well integrated talent management processes and policies and practices that support talent management.” High-performance organizations tend to:

• Create a meaningful definition of talent management that supports their corporate strategy and ensure that all stakeholders understand it.

• Integrate all components of talent management such as retention, recruiting, onboarding, performance management, and succession planning into their processes and technology.

• Assign accountability for talent management throughout the organization.

• Choose metrics that measure the success of their talent management strategies as well as the ownership of those metrics.

• Create organizational incentives and issue rewards for those behaviors that contribute to talent management objectives.

As a result of its analysis, the institute offers this gem for recruiters “hire for attitude and train for skills.” It appears that hiring employees for their passion, work ethic, and optimistic attitude contributes more to your talent management goals than aptitude. The institute offers recruiters the following strategies:

• Create a positive relationship between the recruiter and hiring manager
• Manage and market the employer reputation/brand
• Focus efforts on high ROI candidate sources
• Manage the entire applicant experience
• Screen for vocational skills and knowledge, interview for behaviour

Measuring Healthcare Recruiter Effectiveness 2012

As a healthcare recruiter, it is important to measure your organization’s performance through the design of relevant metrics and benchmarks. In an era of retention and recruitment of healthcare workers, the following will help you measure the quality of your hire:

• Quality-of-Hire – This can be a difficult metric to measure due to its subjective nature. However, standardized performance appraisals conducted over a 12-month period can be compared against co-worker appraisals as well as organizational or departmental averages. A survey by Staffing.org titled “Recruitment Metrics and Performance Benchmarks” reported that regular performance monitoring of new hires contributed to more satisfied hiring managers.

• Source-of-Hire – this measurement allows recruiters to focus their efforts on those sources that provide the highest return-on-investment.

• Employee Referral Rates – similar to the source-of-hire metric, this measure tracks new hires recruited through employee referral.

• Hiring Manager Satisfaction – This metric can be tied to a standardized request-for-hire report that details the hiring manager’s needs and preferences for the position before the actual recruiting begins. The hiring manager can prepare a feedback survey at regular intervals rating the recruiter’s ability to provide those preferences in the form of a new hire.

• New-Hire-Satisfaction – information obtained from new hires in regards to their satisfaction can be used to assess both the retention and recruitment processes. The new hire’s job satisfaction can provide essential data towards the retention process while candidate surveys about the hiring process – from first contact to hire - can provide valuable insights into your recruitment process.  

At least for the near term, healthcare recruiters will face a workforce shortage that offers many challenges. The greatest challenge, however, is recruiting quality employees that will contribute towards a high-performance healthcare organization. To accomplish this goal, healthcare recruiters will need to re-evaluate their performance metrics and ensure that they measure the quality of the new hire in addition to containing costs.

Sources:

http://www.bristolassoc.com/news/health-wsj.htm

www.14cp.com

http://www.hrmreport.com/article/Recruiting-Metrics--the-Rules-Have-Changed/