Tag Archives: employees

4 Tips for Finding and Hiring Top Healthcare Talent

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Finding and hiring top healthcare talent is your main priority — and your biggest challenge. Here are four tips to help you overcome healthcare recruiting hurdles and fill every opening at your facility with the right candidates.

Work on Your Job Descriptions

Job descriptions aren’t just a place to list the must-have qualifications you want to see in applicants. If you truly want to appeal to top talent, start looking at these descriptions as an opportunity to make your healthcare facility stand out. On top of detailing the experience, skills, and education a candidate must possess, explain some of the perks they’ll access when working for your medical center, such as:

  • Insurance benefits
  • Flexible scheduling
  • Paid time off
  • Retirement planning

Find the Right Place to Post Jobs

Pay careful attention to the job boards you use, because the places you post your job openings matter just as much as the effort you put into writing the descriptions for them. Along with the popular job search engines that any company can access, consider posting on websites exclusive to the healthcare industry. This will guarantee that your listings appear in front of even more clinical and non-clinical healthcare professionals.

Nurture Your Company Culture

If your facility struggles with employee attrition, you’ll have a hard time not only finding top talent but also retaining it. To make your medical center stand out to well-qualified applicants, establish and nurture a company culture that they’d want to be a part of. You can start by surveying your current staff, getting an idea of where your facility excels and where it could improve, and implementing actionable changes as soon as possible.

Partner With a Healthcare Recruiter

Finding top healthcare talent is a multi-layer process. Without the time and resources available to put in extra effort every step of the way, your healthcare facility will have a much harder time attracting the best candidates. That’s why more and more medical centers are partnering with healthcare recruiters that know where to find the perfect fit — every time.

At HealthCare Support, we specialize in placing healthcare professionals in both clinical and non-clinical roles across all 50 states. From administrative openings to executive-level positions, our healthcare recruiters quickly and effectively find, screen, and recommend top talent. And once we find the perfect match to fill your position, we continue to monitor their progress and offer continual support. To learn more about our search process, contact HealthCare Support today at 407-478-0332.

Soft Skills to Look for When Hiring at Your Healthcare Facility

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Out of the many qualities that make a great healthcare candidate — quality education, relevant experience, and strong letters of recommendation — soft skills are perhaps the most overlooked. While these can’t be measured, graded, or certified like other skills, soft skills are essential indicators of how well a candidate will fit in your facility and excel in their position.

Whether you have some current open positions to fill or are looking for ways to improve the operations of your facility in the future, these are the soft skills to look for in potential employees.

What Are Soft Skills?

Hard skills are the trained techniques and knowledge that candidates accumulate over the course of their schooling, internships, and entry-level jobs. Soft skills, however, are the personal characteristics that candidates can also apply to their job, including professionalism, critical thinking, and creativity. While hard skills are specific to the individual duties of each professional, soft skills are useful to employees in any position, and they help to determine the way that an applicant will interact with members, patients, and associates of your facility.

Which Soft Skills to Look for in Applicants

You need to know that the next person you hire can perform, but you also need to know that they can successfully collaborate with your other employees, adapt to the ever-changing needs of your patients, and manage their time accordingly. Therefore, the top soft skills to look for when screening candidates include:

  • Communication — Whether it’s with a patient, third-party provider, or member of the same department, your employees must always clearly and professionally communicate.
  • Adaptability — Every patient, treatment plan, and medical claim are different from the last, which is why healthcare professionals must be able to adapt as needed.
  • Patience — Hiccups and holdups happen all the time in healthcare, which is why your future employees must be patient enough to provide excellent service at all times.
  • Time management — In the healthcare industry, workloads change on a daily basis. Therefore, it’s imperative that your staff can prioritize their daily and weekly tasks accordingly.
  • Teamwork — Being able to effectively collaborate within and outside of their own department is critical to the success of any healthcare employee.

Where to Find the Right Candidates for the Job

If you want to find candidates with not only the right soft skills, but also the right experience, education, and technical expertise for the job, partner with HealthCare Support. Our team of healthcare recruiters will find top talent for your open positions based on a range of factors. We’ll also use personalized skills assessment testing, screen each candidate with a multi-level system, and measure their performance with quality assurance calls. When you’re ready track down the best talent, call us today at 407-478-0332.

Job Openings Outnumber Unemployed: What Should Companies Do?

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The number of job openings has exceeded the number of the unemployed for the second month now, setting it at 7.45 million open jobs to 5.82 million unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is the largest margin on record – leaving a gap at 1.63 million – which is why so many employers are having a tough time finding good, quality candidates. While the number of openings in April decreased by 25,000, the number of hires increased by 240,000 and the unemployed fell by 387,000. Employers are eager to fill roles as the week’s pass, so what should they be doing in order to fill their jobs?

One of the most obvious things employers can do is raise wages. Quality candidates know their worth when they come in for interviews, so if you offer them something lower than what they expected, then it probably will not work out.  Raising wages in your company improves the productivity, motivation, and overall morale in your company. In the end, don’t you want employees who want to come in and work hard to make a positive impact on the company?

Another way companies can help with the job openings to unemployment ratio is to be quick when making a hiring decision. Did you know it takes one to three weeks to hear back from a company after you’ve applied? And the job hiring process as a whole? That can take up to twelve weeks; maybe, even more, depending on how many applicants the company receives. Twelve weeks is a long time to wait for one job and, most of the time, candidates are going through more than one interview process. Some ways you can speed up hiring is letting your internal team know what positions are open and see if any of them want to make the switch to a new department. By letting your employees know, they can also dig up some quality candidates of their own through their network. To speed up the hiring process, companies can also be more selective about the candidates they bring in for an interview and reach out to those not chosen so they can move on in their job search. One last thing that will help speed up the hiring process is using a staffing company, like HealthCare Support. Hiring recruiting and staffing firms for your hiring needs may cost money but will save you tons of time because while they are busy finding and screening quality candidates, you and your employees will be doing your own work with the thought that your company is in good hands. If speeding up the hiring process seems like a tough thing to do because of the size of your company, then focus on staying in touch with your candidates every step of the hiring process so they won’t lose interest.

The last thing companies can do is improve their company culture. With millennials becoming the main group in today’s workforce, they are drawn to companies that have an awesome company culture with great perks and benefits. Some of the most common questions millennials ask during an interview are, “what’s the company culture  like” and “do you like working here?” This allows them to get a feel if your employees are happy working for your company. Some of the perks and benefits that candidates are most drawn to are flexible hours, company incentive trips and prizes, unlimited PTO, gym membership discounts, healthcare coverage, working remotely, and food catering. A company’s culture makes a huge impact on one’s decision to work for a company, so in order to fill jobs, have a company culture that stands out from other companies.

With job openings exceeding the unemployed by about one million, now is as good a time as any to start thinking about what changes you can make to reel these unemployed in. Increasing wages, speeding up the hiring process, and improving your company culture are a great place to start.  Partnering with a staffing firm like HealthCare Support who can guide you through the process and provide insight to industry supply and demand, salary averages and speed up new employee onboarding could be just what your company needs.

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How Companies Win the Talent Tug-Of-War

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It’s a job seeker market now! There are now more job openings in the United States than unemployed workers to fill them. This is the first time this has happened since the government started tracking jobs in 2000. So, our question is, how do we get the unemployed to pick your company over the others? Let’s get to know the three different kinds of candidates.

  1. Future Champs:

    They have the devotion and love for the job and the company, but don’t have the right experience and knowledge. More times than others, companies don’t have the time nor the effort to put into teaching these new hires.

  2. Indifferent Einstein’s:

    The brilliant ones that have the right experience, but lack passion and dedication to the company and their position. These employees usually leave soon after they’ve been hired.

  3. All-Stars:

    Candidates who have the right experience along with the right passion and enthusiasm for the role. Best of both worlds! These are the people you absolutely want to hire, which makes them extremely difficult to find.

Now that we know the different types of candidates, how do you win over the All-stars?

  • Be Flexible and Move Quick

    If you found an All-Star for the position, stop wasting time choosing and extend an offer. All-Stars will probably have many other options to consider. Act accordingly so they don’t have time to consider these other options. Keep the second interviews and deliberation to a minimum.

  • Referral Incentive

    Almost everyone talks about working with their friends, yet no one does anything about it. Come up with a referral incentive so your employees will want to recruit their friends. Most employees are conscious that this reflects themselves and will not offer just anyone. Also, your employees will be excited to get to work with their friends and you will have workers that want to be at work. It’s a win-win.

  • Employee Benefits

    The best thing to hear at an interview are all the unique benefits of working there. Some ideas are costume contests, Jean Fridays, annual team-bonding trips, having a pet-friendly office, or having company event tickets. Get creative and make them irresistible.

  • Open hours

    Everyone enjoys their free time. Be open to workers creating their own work schedules. Whether its 7:30-4:30, 8-5, 9-6, they are all working the same amount of time and getting their work done. Work from home days never hurt anybody either!

  • Talent Costs

    If you want to hire the All-Stars, they’re going to assume they are worth more than others. Make sure your salaries are competitive to skip out on losing them to a position paying a dollar more. When it comes down to it, it’s not that much of a difference.

  • Fans Always Welcome

    If your company is more consumer based, hire people that are already fans. That way, you hire someone who is passionate about the company and their job from the start.

  • Networking!

    Networking is great for candidates, but it’s also great for hiring managers. It allows you to build relationships with candidates before they even considering working for your company. It’s also a great way to meet applicants you wouldn’t have originally gone for. You never know, someone might surprise you!