January 31st, 2023 | Sterling

Recruitment and Hiring Strategies for 2023: A Recap of LEAP TA Healthcare

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the healthcare workforce and has brought a slew of challenges and obstacles for TA teams. Sterling recently attended and spoke at the 2022 LEAP TA Healthcare event in San Diego, where TA leaders gathered to share new recruitment and hiring solutions.

Here are some key takeaways from our team at the event:

1. Adjusting to a Candidate Market to Get Talent Fast

Talent shortages in the healthcare industry have resulted in a candidate-driven market. Candidates now have more of a say about who they decide to work with as there are more open positions available than healthcare professionals to fill them. Employers are required to be creative in how they attract and secure top talent quickly so they don’t lose them to someone else.

A Director of TA from a nonprofit healthcare system provided an interesting recruitment strategy that embraces this candidate-driven market. Just like most organizations, this health system used to bring in multiple candidates who would apply for a single job, and one would be given an offer. Now they only bring one candidate in to meet a panel of hiring managers from different teams and departments who share available roles and why the candidate should choose them. The candidate then gets to decide what role they’d like to move forward with. This approach has enabled this health system to get offers out faster and improve their acceptance rate overall.

Ryan Garman, Sterling’s Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences division, commented, “Essentially, they have ‘flipped the script.’ By having multiple managers share why they are the best choice for the candidate vs the other way around, not only are they recruiting talent faster, but they are creating an awesome feeling for these candidates, which positively reflects on the company’s brand.” This approach ties back to Sterling’s belief that every hire is a celebration for both the organization and the individual, and that the candidate experience is highly valuable.

2. Leveraging Technology and Automation to Reduce Administrative Burden

It was no surprise that a common theme from the event’s sessions centered around speed and efficiency in hiring. With healthcare organizations attempting to hire and onboard dozens and sometimes hundreds of candidates per week, the manual administrative work required to maintain HR and compliance paperwork for a large number of candidates calls for a need to streamline this process.

At LEAP TA Healthcare, Ryan Garman led a session about onboarding automation and ways that TA leaders could begin automating parts of the onboarding process that speak to their pain points. Based on examples and findings that we’ve learned from partnering with over 3,000 healthcare organizations, Ryan shared three ways TA teams could leverage information from background checks to help automate other parts of the onboarding process:

  1. Consolidating the onboarding checklist so everyone involved in the onboarding process can have real-time insight into both candidate-specific details and aggregated data of the entire onboarding process.
  2. Integrating multiple vendors into an applicant tracking system (ATS) can enable more automated processes that can kick off subsequent steps in the onboarding process. Sterling’s integration partners help simplify recruiting, tracking and monitoring.
  3. Updating processes and policies to further speed up the onboarding process, such as conducting a progressive screening where you can screen candidates for criminal, abuse, and sanctions at the national level first while having remaining searches completed in the following days.

Not only can these steps help reduce time to hire, but there are a variety of other benefits that can be seen when automating the onboarding process:

  • Decrease candidate dropout rate
  • Increase employee retention
  • More employee referrals
  • Larger talent pool

There were numerous talks and ideas shared around other ways TA teams could leverage automation and technology to improve efficiencies in the recruiting process. Zoom, GoToWebinar, and other similar platforms have enabled recruiters to host and launch their own virtual hiring fair at any time. Implementing automated chatbots have also allowed recruiters to not only schedule interviews and send reminders, but one organization has taken it to another level by having the actual interview be driven by text messaging and automated chatbots.

Conclusion

It will continue to be a challenging time for TA teams as we move into 2023, but also equally exciting given the new and creative ways TA leaders have already improved, or are looking to improve, their recruitment strategies. Want to see how Sterling can help automate your onboarding processes? Request an onboarding workshop with our healthcare experts.

Sterling is not a law firm. This publication is for informational purposes only and nothing contained in it should be construed as legal advice. We expressly disclaim any warranty or responsibility for damages arising out this information. We encourage you to consult with legal counsel regarding your specific needs. We do not undertake any duty to update previously posted materials.