Recruiting talented employees takes a certain amount of skill. The candidate needs a job, and you need to fill a role. It’s a partnership. So, just like you’re looking for specific qualifications in a potential employee, they too have certain expectations of you.

When hiring staff for your healthcare industry, keep these do’s and don’ts in mind:

Do’s:

• Do read the candidates resume so that you can discuss relevant information pertaining to the job position.
• Do introduce yourself with a firm handshake to help the candidate feel more comfortable in an unfamiliar environment.
• Do make an effort to remember the candidate’s name (ex. “Hello Kathy, it’s nice to meet you.”)
• Do be on time to show the candidate that punctuality and attendance matters on both their end and yours.
• Do listen to what your candidate has to say to discover things that may be important to them.
• Do discuss all of the fantastic perks your business can offer them such as competitive compensation, benefits, career advancement opportunities, catered lunches, paid time off, overtime pay, etc.
• Do give candidates something to be excited about by putting some focus on your organization’s culture and values.

Don’ts:

• Don’t surprise the candidate. Instead, be transparent about the hiring process being sure to set proper expectations.
• Don’t forget to write down notes on each candidate’s resume. Throughout the hiring process, you will meet a lot of people, so it’s important to have specific details to refer back to.
• Don’t stick to certain hiring processes especially if you haven’t been getting the results you wanted with previous new hires.
• Don’t let inexperienced staff handle the initial screening and interview process. An employee who doesn’t have the proper hiring background could easily overlook candidates whose talent could be best utilized.
• Don’t forget that everything you say or do during the hiring process could cause the candidate to see the organization, culture, and management in either a negative or positive light.
• Don’t drag the interview out or lead a candidate on if you know they aren’t the right fit. After all, you could be using that time to recruit someone you feel has more potential for your organization.

Hiring top healthcare talent for your organization can be a daunting task; yet, it’s one of the most critical processes. Recruiting the wrong candidates often leads to loss of productivity, customers, brand integrity, and more. Luckily, there are recruitment firms that can help.

HealthCare Support (HSS) places top talent in the dynamic healthcare industry. And, because we’re focused solely on healthcare, we understand the needs of our clients better than anyone else. For general questions or to acquire our services, please call us today at 1-407-478-0332.

When it comes to job satisfaction, individuals want to be valued, appreciated, and feel they are a part of the team. Managers who make an effort to engage their employees, will see that their team members are more productive, enthusiastic, and committed to both their work and workplace.

With 70% of U.S. workers feeling unengaged at work according to Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report, what can you do to help keep your employees happy?

To help engage your employees, you can start by providing these seven things:

• Fair pay

  Compensation must be competitive and fair, or employees will seek work elsewhere. (Read Retaining Employees with Good Pay)

• Shared purpose

  Everyone wants to feel like the work they do is for a purpose. Let employees know how their work makes a positive impact on the business, and they will be more willing to work effectively, cohesively, and as a higher-performing group.

• Flexible work options

  Those who are students, have families, or work additional jobs, need a career that provides flexible work arrangements. Companies that offer flexible schedules allow their employees to thrive both personally and professionally.

• Recognition programs

  Incentive programs are a great way to motivate employees and keep them from wanting to quit. Reward those who reach a particular goal with things such as gift cards, lunches, event tickets, etc.

• Transparent leadership

  To foster a culture of trust between leaders and their employees, senior staff should keep employees updated and informed. Hold bi-weekly meetings where you communicate with your team while getting their feedback or listening to their suggestions.

• Mentorship programs

  Whether it’s focusing on things such as company culture, improving retention rates, and developing leadership skills, you can help retain great employees by giving them the opportunity to receive personalized training.

• Structured career paths

  Employees typically feel more engaged when they believe their employer cares about their growth within the organization. Managers should encourage their staff to enhance their skills and expertise, giving them the opportunity to excel in their current job role, receive promotions or begin a new position with the company.

Job retention is a common issue for companies whether big or small. However, when you engage employees with recognition, praise, training, and fair pay, they are more likely to appreciate their jobs and less likely to leave. You should always remember that investing in your employees only benefits your company in the end.

If you’re looking to obtain top talent for your healthcare organization, HealthCare Support (HSS) can help. Since 2002, we have been the leader in the healthcare recruitment field. Call us today for more information at 1-407-478-0332.

True leaders understand that in order to create a positive culture for their organization, they must lead by example and display the behaviors they want to see exercised by their staff. Employees look to their superiors for guidance, motivation, and inspiration, and are far more likely to follow the leaders they believe practice what they preach.

Building an innovative culture starts by establishing the right environment. This includes looking at yourself as a leader and being willing to grow and develop as an individual. By working hard, obtaining experience over time, gaining necessary skills, being open to learning, and continuously evolving, you can attract and retain talent whose values align with yours.

As a leader, you can influence company culture by doing the following things:

Hold yourself accountable

If you expect your employees to be upfront and open about the mistakes they make, you must also be willing to admit when you are wrong in certain situations. Leaders who hold themselves accountable will see their team do the same, which benefits the company overall. Do your best to keep your word, establish clear goals, and provide employees with the resources they need to do their job well.

Be consistent

Create a stable work environment by being a trustworthy leader, defining expectations, establishing personal rules, and explaining inconsistencies. Deviating away from consistency causes your employees to feel frustrated, often provoking problems which can slow down the speed of the organization.

Define your purpose 

When you know what your goals as a leader are, your work ethic and passion are stronger. Others catch on to that and work together to back your vision, which in turn creates a strong culture of leadership.

Recognize the value of others

The most valuable part of your organization are the people. Without them, you would have no business. So, invest in your staff, help them cultivate their leadership abilities, and assist them in achieving their own success.

Anyone can hold a leadership position. However, to be a true leader who can build and foster a great culture, you must go beyond just managing your staff. Connect with your employees, be engaged, step in when necessary, be supportive, and work alongside your team to help get the job done.

If you’re looking to get top talent into your healthcare organization, we can help. Since 2002, we have placed administrative to executive level professionals in clinical and non-clinical healthcare fields. HealthCare Support (HSS) is focused on providing our partners and candidates with exceptional service while exceeding their expectations. For more information on the recruiting and hiring services we offer, please contact us today by calling 1-407-478-0332.

With living costs continually rising and more jobs than healthcare workers in the marketplace, employees now more than ever are seeking higher pay to keep up with the demands. Rent/mortgage increases along with monthly bills, and personal life changes like a growing family or school tuitions, are all reasons why employees change jobs. Someone  could love the company they work for, but may pursue employment elsewhere solely for pay.

Knowing there is potential to make more money pushes employees to work harder, and can even keep certain team members in a less than ideal work situation for a longer amount of time. Developing new skills and climbing the corporate ladder are less often the reason employees chose to leave a company. The driving force tends to be an increase in pay.

If employees work hard, put in extra effort, but are left feeling undercompensated with no room for growth, they will take their knowledge and training elsewhere. Most people aren’t expecting absurd pay increases or bonuses, but they do want to get paid what they’re worth. Many tools are available to the public to research average pay rates by position and location. Losing employees over offering a small annual increase means the employer is also losing training and onboarding costs and will hve to invest again in a new employee who may not end up being a fit either. Read more on the cost of a bad hire.

By retaining employees with good pay, you will improve morale, entice them to be more productive, and maintain a lower turnover rate.

At HealthCare Support (HSS), we know that hiring and keeping excellent staff members can be challenging. We offer many recruitment services to help you find the top talent to fulfill your open healthcare positions. For more information, or to begin your partnership with us, please call us today at 1-407-478-0332.

In March, employment grew in healthcare with an increase of 22,000 jobs, making the job market more competitive. There are now more open positions than there are qualified applicants to fill them, giving outstanding candidates the chance to choose from multiple job offers. If organizations seeking to hire new talent drag their feet during the hiring process, they will lose out on the opportunity to employ top talent.

Although organizations need to move quickly, it’s important that the organization’s talent acquisition specialists refrain from expediting the hiring process without correctly screening candidates or following proper protocol. Because in the long run, acceleration won’t matter if a company ends up with a bunch of bad hires that cost them time and money.

Here are six ways to speed up the hiring process and avoid the risk of losing out on the best candidates for your healthcare organization.

Start with a Clear Ad and Job Description

To improve your hiring process, you must start at the very beginning. Posting an ad or job description isn’t just to let potential employees know you have an open position. The real purpose is to explain your expectations for the role and attract the best candidates for the job.

Eliminate Unnecessary Steps

One of the biggest reasons individuals withdraw their applications is because the hiring process takes too long. Eliminating unnecessary steps helps you save time and allows you to beat out the competition for the most desirable candidates. Think about what each step accomplishes and evaluate whether or not you could remove or alter any of them. It’s also a good idea to see where candidates typically exit the process so you can determine which stages are helping you to move forward and which ones are hindering you.

Be Selective with Your Interviewees

Though most companies have a meticulous screening process (many beginning with phone interviews), there are still too many unqualified candidates being brought in for interviews. If only three to five resumes impress you, only call those three to five people to come in. Don’t feel the need to bring in more candidates just to increase your hiring chances. Scheduling more interviews doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a hire, and it also wastes more time. Instead, focus on the individuals with excellent skills who would fit in best with your company’s culture.

Keep Open Communication

Make sure each candidate understands the interviewing process and then provide them with an expected timeline. When changes occur, check in with the candidate to let them know. Not only will communicating with them make the entire process a more pleasing one, but it will also encourage the candidate to stick around until the end.

Keep Candidates in a Hiring Pool

A person you interview may not fit the role you’re currently filling, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be perfect for a different position in the future. Maintaining a good relationship with applicants from the start can help you acquire a hiring pool full of talented candidates. This enables you to speed up your recruiting process later on because you’ll already have a bunch of screened, qualified, and interested candidates you can reach out to.

Outsource Parts of the Hiring Process

Whether you have limited recruiting resources or are overwhelmed with juggling all aspects of the business, partnering with a healthcare staffing agency can help with the hiring and onboarding process, ensuring you reach your hiring goals.

Making even the smallest of adjustments can help your company save a significant amount of time and money while gaining the perfect match for your business.

At HealthCare Support (HSS), we move quickly to place administrative to executive level professionals in both clinical and nonclinical areas. Our national niche recruitment firm focuses solely on healthcare so you can rest assured you’re getting quality candidates. For more information, contact us today by calling 407-478-0332 or by filling out our contact us form online.

Hospitals and healthcare facilities are extremely busy during cold and flu season, and those organizations who fail to pre-plan for sick staff members often end up lacking workers to assist patients. As a result, not only are patients inconvenienced due to the shortages in care, but the organization’s reputation and revenue are also put at risk.

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), employees in the United States miss nearly 17 million workdays from having the flu. With an estimated $7 billion being lost as a result of sick days and lost productivity, medical practices are pressured now more than ever to provide quick and efficient treatment.

While cold and flu season gives healthcare facilities extra patients to care for, it also causes staff deficiencies when workers become sick. Organizations can help lighten cold and flu seasonal shortages by cross-training staff to carry out different jobs when needed. Although this helps in certain situations, you need to have a plan set in place to help quickly cover their absence for times when employees become sick unexpectedly.

Teaming up with a medical staffing firm like HealthCare Support (HSS) will ensure that your organization will have access to continuous care when regular staff is unavailable. And, while we have lots of workers who can fill in on short notice, we encourage you to consider creating an existing partnership with us early in the season to establish which candidates can fill specific roles in case an emergency should arise. Also, by incorporating HSS candidates into more of a long-term staffing solution, you can help keep your employees from becoming too overwhelmed, and at the same time prevent staff burnout.

At HSS, we focus solely on healthcare, providing administrative to executive level professionals in both the clinical and non-clinical fields. For more information on how we can help your business avoid staff shortages, call us today at 407-478-0332.

It’s no secret that hiring poorly can cost a business up to hundreds of thousands of dollars or more annually, which is why certain organizations put potential employees through such an extensive hiring process.

But even those companies who take their time hiring, instead of filling positions rapidly, still make the mistake of selecting bad hires each year.

To keep your company from making the same common hiring errors, it’s helpful to know what makes a bad hire and how much it costs a company both short-term and long-term each time a hiring mistake is made.   

Bad Hire

A bad hire is a person who negatively impacts an organization’s productivity and performance, retention rate, and company culture.  Some other features of bad hires include:

• Being less productive
• Having poor retention rates
• Displaying poor performance
• Making a great work culture unpleasant

The Cost of a Bad Hire

Due to numerous variables, it’s hard to estimate precisely how much a bad hire costs an organization.  However, when you factor in lost time and productivity along with the effect they have on other employees, a bad hire can cost a business anywhere from a few hundred dollars to somewhere in the millions.

Some of the things that go into the cost of replacing a bad hire include:

• Recruitment advertising fees
• Staff time
• Replacement hires relocation and training fees
• Delayed company goals
• The loss of customers
• Damaged employer brand
• Lawsuit fees

How to Ensure You Hire the Right Employees

While it’s never a company’s intentions to make a bad hire, it still continues to happen. If your company has made multiple mistakes of hiring people who were not a good fit, then working with an experienced national niche recruitment firm can help.  A firm such as HealthCare Support (HSS), can help you identify, hire, and retain the right healthcare talent for your business.  We put our focus on placing top talent in the dynamic healthcare industry, which includes administrative to executive level professionals in the clinical and non-clinical healthcare field.  For more information on the employment solutions we offer, please call 1-407-478-0332 .

Working in an industry such as healthcare requires staff to provide around-the-clock care for their patients. However, just like in every other industry, healthcare staff need time off as well, whether it be for medical or personal reasons.

Partnering with a medical staffing agency will allow you to fill the role in their absence while continuing the level of care your patients expect and deserve. But because not all medical staffing agencies are the same, how do you know which firm will best suit the needs of your unique facility?

Consider the following factors to ensure you partner with the right medical staffing agency next time you have a “temp to hire” emergency.

Look at their website as a first impression 

The information on a company’s website is an excellent indicator of what the agency is all about. Read through the content on the site to better understand their mission statement and the information regarding their team and culture. You will get a good idea if the agency can provide your business with the best resources and most qualified talent.

Take the screening process seriously

After checking the website, call to set up a phone or in-person meeting to learn more about the agency’s screening and credentialing processes. This step is a significant one and shouldn’t be taken lightly, as your patients will be directly impacted based on who you choose to hire. If the agency you decide to work with doesn’t adequately screen their healthcare professionals, your business could be negatively affected.

Read through reviews and address any concerns

– For an unbiased opinion, check out any reviews that are offered online regarding the agency you’re interested in working with. In addition to reading the information located in the testimonial section of the agency’s website, ask your network of partners if they have any experience with the staffing firm you want to hire.

Choose quality over quantity

Many healthcare facilities make the mistake of working with several staffing agencies at once, keeping multiple options open in the event an emergency should happen. While the strategy seems to make sense, it can cause inconsistency among patient care.

Partnering with a single staffing agency will allow you to establish clear, ongoing communication while building a healthy working relationship to ensure the quality and consistency of patient care. When the staffing agency becomes more familiar with your facility, they can better provide you with healthcare professionals who will best suit your patient’s needs.

Choosing a medical staffing agency may seem like a simple process, but choosing one that best fits your organization takes time, effort, and research. By carefully selecting which firm to hire, you can give the patients of your facility the quality care they deserve.

Recognized as the 11th largest allied healthcare staffing firm in the U.S. by Staffing Industry Analysts 2017, 2016, and 2015, you can trust us to be your employment partner! Call us today at 407-478-0332 for more information on the several flexible placement options we provide to help you reach your hiring goals.

In 2017, health-tech trends focused on finding solutions for patient empowerment through new payment structures, cost pressures, and system integration. Digital transformation is expected to overhaul the healthcare industry in 2018 by using personalized medicine and value-based care.

Precision Medicine

While there are standard practices for treatment plans based on your medical needs, not all patients have the same misspellings and will benefit from treatment in the same way. For example with cancer, misspellings or mutations in important genes force the cells to grow out of control, eventually spreading throughout the body.

As physicians progress through different therapies without knowledge on which will prove effective, valuable time is being lost. Precision medicine will help to deter unnecessary treatment, minimize detrimental drug events, and increase overall safety, ultimately helping the healthcare system to be more efficient.

Real-Time Monitoring

By using non-invasive monitoring, patient data is collected longitudinally across various time points. This is due to different sensors which track patient vital signs 24 hours a day, through wearable devices accomplished by blood and saliva monitoring techniques. Identifying correct treatments and tracking their impact as soon as possible helps open up opportunities to improve healthcare.

Real-Time Personalization

Treatment strategies for patients need to evolve due to the changing of treatment pressures and other reasons. Having the ability to monitor the impact of treatment on a disease creates the opportunity to learn why a treatment is not working and what new course of action should be taken.

Use of Big Data

The growth of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), along with mobile and wearable devices, allows healthcare providers to access a patient’s medical reports from anywhere quickly. The data retrieved can then be used to identify health dangers and provide patients with lifesaving preventative treatment almost immediately.

Mobility and Cloud

Mobility and cloud access has improved the way patients and doctors interact. Most doctors use smartphones and medical apps on a regular basis. However, hospitals, insurance companies, and doctors offices are now storing medical records of the patient into the cloud. Mobile devices can now perform ECGs, DIY blood tests, and serve as a thermometer. Patients are also able to enter their checkup/health results which doctors can quickly access as well as retrieve their test results 24/7.

The rise of digital technology within the healthcare industry and the improvements in overall clinical care for patients are becoming more unified, and with that, are improving the way healthcare facilities function as a whole.

At HealthCare Support (HSS), we understand the continually changing recruiting and hiring challenges healthcare organizations face while trying to keep up with the demands of the always evolving healthcare industry. We’re here to help you by offering several placement options. For more information on the services we provide, call us today at 1-407-478-0332.