The healthcare industry is one of the fastest growing industries in America. Not only is it one of the fastest growing, but it is increasingly becoming more dynamic by the hour. In order to keep up with the changing environment, traditional healthcare recruiters and staffing agents need to evolve with some of the changes. With more changes that seem to occur daily, and a growing desire to fill vacant positions that continue to grow, modern healthcare staffers can no longer rely on using old methods to fill vacant positions. Demand for qualified healthcare workers has been rising steadily over the last decade. As the economy helps spur new expansions, investments, and revenue growth, new positions need to be filled – in addition to the aging workforce that only complicates the problem. The following are just some of the reasons as to why modern healthcare staffing needs to change.
Changes in Healthcare Standards Are Accelerating
At an alarming rate, new healthcare standards are being implemented or existing ones are being changed. This means that healthcare staffers need to become increasingly more aware of the changes as they take effect. With different regulation being pushed forward or pulled off the table each year with varying administration goals and stances, healthcare staffers need to be aware of different regulation priorities as they directly affect a hospital’s incentives or penalties incurred. Some of the new regulations revolve around the quality of patient care, implemented safety measures, and cost of care reduction. Hospitals and healthcare systems are changing their plans moving forward to ensure that they follow future regulation standards and healthcare staffers need to be on the same track in filling vacant positions that align with their goals. As the healthcare industry becomes more complicated, healthcare and hospital system executives have less time to worry about staffing measures and increasingly rely on the expertise of healthcare staffers to help fill the ever-growing list of vacant positions.
Quality of Care Is Key For The Healthcare Industry Moving Forward
During the course of the great recession, hospitals decided to relieve staff members in an effort to cut costs. As a result of hospitals cutting employees to save on expenses, more healthcare workers were forced to take on additional patients and the level of care provided for each patient began to suffer. As the healthcare industry continues to recover from the great recession, the rate at which candidates are being hired to replace those who were let go in addition to meeting new demands has been slow. Part of the slow recovery process is due to the fact that hospitals are better preparing themselves for future pullbacks if they ever occur. The problem with this preparation is that the quality of care in the industry is steadily falling. The quality of care that patients are currently receiving has been declining as more patients are needing care than available healthcare workers. That is why moving forward, healthcare staffing is so important to reverse the trend that quality of care is currently on. Modern healthcare staffing experts need to eliminate the staffing shortage issues by utilizing some of the new techniques available to them.
The Quality of Hires Needs To Improve
One of the largest pairing of expenses a company faces when bringing on new staff members is training and orientation. The problem is that many healthcare executives want to cut down on two things in regards to training and orientation. First they’d like to cut down on the amount of time it takes to acclimate a new hire through orientation, and second they want to cut down on the expense of lost production from a new hire getting acclimated. Because healthcare executives are looking to decrease training and orientation costs, the quality of hire needs to improve. This means that the quality of candidates that healthcare staffers consider needs to rise as well. One way that healthcare staffers can consider more qualified candidates is by changing the way they go about seeking new candidates for open positions. Traditionally, modern healthcare staffers have been using individual hospital or healthcare system applicant tracking systems, or large one-stop shop job posting websites. Each of these methods offers their own set of problems that a healthcare staffer needs to navigate around when attempting to find qualified candidates. Some of the largest job posting websites like Indeed or Monster enable users to submit resumes or applications without viewing the job posting or reading the details of the position. This means that a lot of healthcare staffers are getting inundated with spam applications from candidates who aren’t qualified or whose skills don’t align with the job posting itself. In contrast, if a healthcare staffer only utilizes the applicant tracking system for the hospital or healthcare system position they are looking to fill, the amount of potential candidates is restricted to only those who view the website to go to the applicant tracking system itself. These solutions simply aren’t enough to use in the modern healthcare staffing realm and healthcare staffers need to evolve to using some of the more effective methods available today. One of the more effective healthcare staffing methods that healthcare recruiters are turning to is niche job board sites. These niche job boards get the best of both worlds in terms of gathering qualified candidates and driving them to fill out applications. One such niche healthcare and hospital jobs site is HospitalCareers.com, where there are over 25,000 active job postings for qualified healthcare job seekers. These niche sites enable modern healthcare staffers to upload new job postings and drive quality candidates to fill out applications without having to worry about spending extra time sifting through spam applications that healthcare staffers might receive from some of the larger job posting sites. Because the quality level of each candidate is higher through some of these niche job board sites, healthcare staffers can place more qualified employees into vacant positions. This means that overall training and orientation costs go down, something healthcare executives are striving for. Healthcare and hospital systems have been searching for ways to reduce their expense budget and one of the items on the chopping block lately has been the hiring budgets for human resource managers and healthcare staffers.
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Changing Workforce Backgrounds and Career Development Paths
One way that the modern way of healthcare staffing needs to change is the way in which healthcare staffers select and evaluate candidates. More so now than ever before, candidates are receiving an education and gaining professional experience in new ways which creates a more diverse network of workforce backgrounds. With the advent of additional eLearning opportunities and specialized learning opportunities, job seekers are gaining a valuable education in new ways. More candidates are electing to obtain specialized education from smaller schools or training opportunities instead of going to larger colleges or universities. In addition, more individuals are gaining professional experience and training in healthcare positions from non-traditional career development paths. Some of these non-traditional career development paths come from entry-level hospital or healthcare positions that evolve into additional duties due to staffing shortages in different positions. Even though candidates are finding new ways to develop their skills or happen to be on a different career development path, their consideration for a position shouldn’t be any less than those who have followed a more traditional path. Plenty of companies see value in non-traditional career development paths or education paths, and modern healthcare staffers need to change the way they screen candidates to reflect changing views. With the changing workforce background and unique career development paths, modern healthcare staffing needs to change to better match potential candidates to positions they could be a good fit for. The evolving job marketplace requires modern healthcare staffing to fill an increasing number of vacant positions.