Artificial intelligence in healthcare staffing what to expect

A recent report by Staffing Industry Analysts on AI and robotics indicated that 47% of the total US employment was at high risk of computerization within next 10-20 years. Most of the industries are not ready to embrace Artificial Intelligence, yet they have no option but to prepare for its arrival.

Fortunately for the healthcare staffing industry, the average probability of computerization is 0.242. Jobs that bear the highest risk of being automated are the ones that are highly technical with little patient interaction. Lab technicians, Pharmacy Aides and Equipment Preparers are some of the positions that are at risk. On the other hand, jobs that need a high level of manual dexterity or creativity are marked safe, like those of Physicians.

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics are not all negative and should not be looked as a threat. The subsets of AI like Virtual Assistants, Augmented Reality and Machine Learning have numerous applications within the healthcare and healthcare staffing space. Staffing firms will include automated work solutions in their portfolio when these technologies are further developed. Let’s look at how AI and its related technologies can impact Healthcare Staffing, in a positive way.

Better hiring decisions

One of the most important tasks in staffing is to help hiring managers find the best candidate to fill job openings. With the need for credential verification, the task is even more arduous in healthcare staffing. AI can ease this task with top notch accuracy through Machine Learning (ML). ML can also be coupled with adaptive online assessments and it can even predict how well a person is likely to perform at his job if hired. This way, smarter hiring decisions can be made quickly, leading to a decreased time to fill vacancies and a reduction in cost.

Efficient management of contingent workforce

Virtual Assistants (AI enabled embedded intelligence) can help users by guiding them through all the tasks of Contingent Workforce Management hiring – making workflows easier, simpler and efficient. Virtual assistants can even make relevant suggestions, if they are fed the proper business processes, preferences and policies.

Predicting staffing needs

Artificial Intelligence risk monitoring and treatment algorithms can analyze electronic health records of all patients in the hospital and predict the staffing requirements based on the risk posed in the near future. In such a situation, hospitals can be well prepared to meet these requirements with contingent workforce hiring.

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These are just a few of the benefits AI can provide within the healthcare and healthcare staffing space. Increased used of AI with existing technologies for healthcare hiring will enable faster decision making and improve productivity in the future. AI can provide valuable insights to the healthcare business and can enhance patient care. Coupled with human expertise, AI will help drive cost savings and improve talent quality.

2018 healthcare staffing trends

Last month, we wrote a blog on “Trends that will shape the Staffing Industry in 2018” talking about the paradigm shift that the industry is going through. In this blog, we will be talking extensively about trends within Healthcare Staffing, which is one of the promising High Growth Sectors of the Staffing Industry.

The US and its aging population is one of the reasons behind increasing healthcare jobs and rising demand for healthcare services, resources, and staff. Also, affordable insurance plans like Obamacare has created millions insured people seeking medical assistance, eventually contributing to the growing demand for physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals.

So, how’s the Outlook 2018 for healthcare staffing? Let’s take a look.

Rise in contingent workforce

The healthcare unemployment rate is extremely low and this may lead to higher churn of resources. With the increasing demand for healthcare professionals, the talent pool has become more or less stagnant. This may tighten the labor supply and could increase the need to resort to contingent labor. As a result, more and more organizations in the healthcare sector will be hiring temporary and temp-to-hire workers.

Increased use of social media

Social media platforms like LinkedIn are becoming a trustworthy source of information about candidates for recruiters. Organizations as well as staffing companies have started using social media more and more – in fact, the usage has grown 73% in the last four years. Check out our infographic on Growing Importance of Social Media for Staffing Companies..

Crowd-sourcing and referrals are here to stay

Referrals have always been a preferred source for recruiters as many studies show that referred employees work better and are less likely to quit. In addition, crowdsourcing is emerging as another preferred practice for healthcare companies. With crowdsourcing, employers use a community of independent recruiters to source candidates for a job opening. Crowdsourcing is inexpensive as compared to traditional recruitment processes.

Higher revenues for Staffing Companies

As mentioned previously, the tight labor supply will mean higher salaries for workers, a higher bill rate for staffing companies, and most importantly, higher revenue. Every increase in the number of job orders for staffing companies will lead to an increase in revenue. Having said that, staffing companies will still need to keep rethinking their models to stay competitive amidst changing practices in the industry.

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The healthcare staffing sector shows signs of promising growth this year. While the geopolitical uncertainty in 2018 could detrimentally impact both healthcare organizations and staffing firms, the future looks extremely bright.  As a staffing company, you need to constantly monitor any changes to regulations and other industry trends..By staying ahead of the curve, healthcare staffing agencies will be able to see great returns and increased client satisfaction.

2018 High Growth Sectors in Staffing

2017 was melange of varied events that have the potential to change the game of many sectors. Unexpected Brexit , new policies by Donald Trump, GDPR compliance regulation were some of the events that impacted businesses globally. Staffing industry is not barred from all this, but yet there are sectors which stand as stealth and are expected to show promising growth this year.

Here are the top sectors in staffing for this year

Healthcare

By 2025, 1/4th of the US workforces will be older than 55 and that share will double in 30 years. This means, there will be increased demand of Healthcare professionals. Secondly, US spends billions of dollars each year  on Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare benefits. This support systems makes health-care employment an invincible during the downturns as well.

Some of the top jobs within healthcare include Physician Assistant, Nurse Practitioner, Orthodontist, Statistician, Pediatrician, Obstetrician and Gynecologist.

IT and Technology

It is estimated that the global IT temporary staffing market at $59 billion in 2018 and US will be the largest market for IT staffing. For years together, we have been evolving with greatest inventions on this planet and thanks to technology. Private institutions like spaceX have been planning to commute all the way to a different planet,devices are getting intelligent day by day so the need of skilled resources in technology would grow in the years to come

Recruitment agencies predict that the top ten areas where professionals may be hired for 2018 are AR Development skills, Data Scientists, Cyber Security Experts, Mobile App Developers, SaaS in the Cloud Professionals, Applied Machine Learning, Multi-faceted Programming languages (Python, JavaScript), Data Analytics, Digital Transformation and AI Experts.

Engineering

Engineering sector will eventually boom because it supplements the growth of technology. A lot of projects in engineering will come up that will give rise to the growth in recruitment of skilled and unskilled human resources. The demand is expected to remain strong for engineering talent in industries like manufacturing, automotive etc. Top jobs in the engineering space are Aerospace engineer, Engineering manager, Materials engineer, Petroleum drilling engineer, Chemical engineer, Nuclear engineer.

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There are other sectors like manufacturing, retail which always show strong growth when it comes to staffing and talent needs. Whether your staffing business is US based or has global operations, you will need a carefully planned strategy to make the most of these emerging jobs and create a talent pipeline based on market needs. You need to keep a close eye on emerging trends in staffing.

Read our blog on Trends that will shape the staffing industry in 2018

Check out our Infographic on Growing importance of Social Media for Staffing Companies

Trends that will shape the Staffing Industry in 2018

Staffing Market size of US is expected to reach a total revenue of $145.1 Bn, according to a research by Staffing Industry Analysts. The industry has been steadily growing with a rise of 3% each year. As per SIA, the forecast is a little dim due to the maturity of this expansion cycle and a sluggish GDP growth. However, some of the reforms are expected to give the industry the push it needs.

The numbers may not sound impressive, but the there is a paradigm shift that the industry is going through, which is going to bear great results in a few years.

Increasing demand

The industry has fought back the stigma associated with inhouse hiring and many organizations- big or small are realizing the benefits of engaging a staffing partner. This has given the industry a constant support. Some of the highest demand jobs will be in the healthcare sector , as predicted by the Atlantic. Other promising jobs will engineers, biomedical professionals, and analysts. Hence, staffing agencies should start developing the candidate pool for these jobs.

 

Candidate Experience will matter

As per Kelly Global Index, positive candidate experience leads to 95% of unsuccessful candidates reapplying, 97% referring others to the organization, 88% increasing their purchases with the company and 50% of them tell social networks about it. With a lack of talent pool, staffing agencies will have to start focusing on how to engage candidates happily and  productively. Candidates will join the organization based on how well they were treated in all of the interactions they had.

 

Some perks will be nice to have

Millennial workforce is all about a little more and like the above point, they also need the offering to be more attractive. The workplace experience, benefits, office culture, perks will decide whether a right candidate will take up the job or not, and not just a higher pay. So, staffing agencies, do nudge your clients to showcase their workplace, sprinkle some attractive things in the package offered to the candidates and your clients will appreciate the returns.

Some organizations even boast about mindfulness initiatives at their organizations to mitigate work stress and strike work-life harmony.

Regulations may take a hit

With the new Trump government in place, there will be many more changes expected in the coming years. Staffing agencies were taken by surprise by Bill 148, Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, 2017 of Ontario.

Staffing agencies should focus on strengthening their back office operations so that they are prepared to cater to any strong changes in regulations.

Big data and Socials impact

This is something that is affecting every industry and is nothing new for staffing. Digital marketing, growing importance of websites like LinkedIn will change the way hiring and business happen in future. Rise in big data analytics and data driven decision making will compel recruiters to take recruitment decisions in light of data and solidify majority of their processes.

Last but not the least, Diversity is the talk of the town

With Sheryl Sandberg, Oprah Winfrey and many top notch women talking about how women are underrepresented at all levels in workplaces, there is an increasing focus on hiring women as well as moms in organizations. Most of the organizations like Salesforce have diversity goals in place and some even have a Chief Diversity Officer recruited for the same.

So, all the staffing agencies should start stacking resumes of talent women and moms. They can even partner with initiatives like Mom Relaunch to get access to the talent pool.

Recruiting Strategy:-

Recruiters today recruit with multiple intentions. The first one is to fill positions with any available candidates and thereby close their targets. However the real challenge comes for them when it comes to source, recruit and hire Achievers. They are the tough kind and have a lot of expectations which have to be catered to before joining a company’s talent bar.

Hiring achievers is a challenge for any recruiter as they are very hard to find. They Have more counteroffers and have a higher expectational demand before joining. However to break the Achiever recruiting pattern, there are a few strategies which are to be borne in mind by the recruiter himself, if he is to placate him in a new position.

The first step that goes is to understand the Classic Achiever Pattern and differentiate his skill set pattern, and how he reacts to situations which are suddenly given before him to comprehend.

Based upon the circumstances, the achiever can either go the extra mile or get it resolved or either makes excuses and backs out.

As a result of the above, the Achiever tends to get promoted more quickly, gets formal recognition, and typically earns more in comparison to the 75 percent not in the top cadre.

Interestingly, in the first 5-10 years of their careers, Achievers tend to have less practical experience in work than their peers, due to their rapid promotions. So if a company screens on years of experience, they’ll tend to eliminate many of the high-potential candidates from consideration before they even have a chance to evaluate them.

From an assessment standpoint, it’s pretty easy to recognize the Achiever pattern, if you don’t first get impressed by the candidate’s first impression and presentational skills. I suggest that during the first phase of the interview. Try to spend at least 20-30 minutes on the work-history review as you go through the person’s resume, look for evidence of his Achiever pattern which consists of things like

• Rapid promotions or assigned to bigger projects at quality organizations.
• Higher compensation, including extra bonuses and bigger raises.
• Assigned leadership positions for a variety of projects consisting of multi-functional groups.
• Formal recognition for exceptional performance, including awards, honors, and letters of re-commendation.
• Technical recognition including patents, white papers, presentations, and industry acknowledgments.
• Strong academic background, academic awards, and strong institutions.
• Mentoring skills.
• Subject matter expert in his area.
• Displays a pattern of self-development, especially during gaps in his employment.

Identifying Achievers is actually far easier than finding and recruiting them. The key idea to remember here is that Achievers don’t look for new jobs or accept one the same way as everyone else. Keeping this objective in Mind, make sure that the next recruitment you plan to do is a combinational mix of an achiever and a non achiever for an organization to achieve.

 

 

Recruiting Top Talent to your Organization – Make sure that you have a Sourcing Checklist ready:-

Recruiting as people say is an art than a job. Many recruiters still underperform due to improper ineptitude errors. This not only causes improbable mistakes in the recruiting process, but also maximizes the Organizations hiring metric capability.

Hence to succeed in Recruiting, Any organization should make sure that they have a Sourcing Checklist ready. This not only helps them source top talent easily, but also handle complex recruiting procedures.

Using a checklist in recruitment search, results in great success. The reason being the recruiter works upon the competency skill map ratio as per the checklist, which can help the organization to get top-notch successful placement ratio.

Top Strategies to be included in a Successful recruiting Checklist:-

1. Use Key metric tools to stay on top of all recruiting assignments and make sure that you keep the ATS (Applicant tracking system) up-to-date.
2. Define top performance indicators, by asking the hiring team to define their Work Success quotient, the person needs to handle.
3. Create an Employee Value proposition statement as to why would an employee want this job.
4. Prepare a channelized sourcing channel plan, which covers all channels of recruiting from social media, Blog sites, Career sites, groups, and even references. This helps in getting the best talent from multiple sources.
5. From this build your recruiting pipeline of prospects for the future as well as for the current projects.
6. Track the Objective metric of the Candidate as to the Hiring Objective of the department, and only when they match go ahead with the hiring process.
7. If you feel the candidate is potential enough recruit, negotiate, and close the offer.

 

Employee Referral Programme- The pros and the cons

Talent retention and acquisition is increasingly becoming popular in organizations. Companies to ensure that the best talent acquisition happens insist on using employee referral programme to poach the best talent available. However many internal employees are of just one perception, does it always really work.

However the trend happening in companies is that employee referrals are preferred for only experienced roles and hire on an average ten top potential referrals for every hundred interviewed for multiple reasons. So we can infer that referral hiring is an average medium to bring in top quality talent, as compared to job board search and social recruiting via the ATS (Applicant tracking), which continue to be the hot pick.

We have a perception that external hiring always holds good, as they produce good results in terms of hiring, but recruitment analysts opine that social media hires or job board recruiting is better when it comes to an efficient external hiring policy. It all comes down to not just hiring through a referral programme, but making sure that the “Referral programme” becomes a “Best Practice” and should focus on making the referral program more visible among remote positions.

Employee referral in certain situations breeds ego – slates between present employees and the new employees, as they presume that project-management roles will be taken over by the new hires. Hence Organizations are a bit apprehensive when it comes to Employee- referral programme.

Lastly but not the least, If you want a successful employee referral program, accept responsibility for managing the performance of the program. Never try to act in influencing factors and do what works best as the organizational climate varies from company to company. It has also been proved that a well-managed employee referral program can accomplish higher employee productivity and greater organizational profits. It’s all about implementing it and accomplishing it successfully.

 

 

 

Is Mobile recruiting going to be the Future in Recruiting Space?

Recruiting is growing at a tremendous pace. What job board and referral search activity was before is now being aggressively replaced by Social Media Recruitment. Industry Experts predict that the next vertical to be aggressively placated in recruiting in the coming days is Mobile Recruiting.

Recruitment experts say that The Mobile is becoming an important tool in recruitment with each passing day. With users becoming tech-savvy at an increasing pace, Recruiting Organizations are trying to segment and leverage the usage of mobile space as a niche recruitment channel. However a mobile recruitment strategy should outline the following objectives if it’s to outlive its predecessors.

1. Use Promotional messages as a Premium Recruiting Channel: – SMS or short messaging service, WAP, Server messages should be used as a recruiting channel by recruiters to attract talent. The reason being Users are more accessible in their mobile than online networks.
2. Use Mobile as a Candidate Sourcing Channel: – With GPRS, Internet as an open source tools on the Mobile. Recruiters can now provide real-time job updates and thereby source qualified candidates into their CRM. This helps them to grow their recruitment database and thereby close more candidates as compared to other channels. Phone applications enabled in 3-G phones are the best tool for a successful mobile recruitment strategy.
3. Enable RSS updates in your Mobile for Live Job updates: – Recruiters can go a step ahead to enable RSS (Syndication updates of New Job openings) to attract top quality candidates via mobile. The reason being Phones are becoming more impressive in the browsers to view web pages and receive spontaneous updates.

Mobile Recruiting is a must to include in your recruiting strategy as the future of recruiting is going mobile. With Social media supporting Mobile, We can say that the future of recruiting is going to witness a dramatic change in terms of recruiting efforts.

 

LinkedIn rolls out two new killer applications for their users called as “Referral Engine” and “Jobs for you”.

LinkedIn recently announced the new launch of their new product offerings to the LinkedIn brand. Called as “Jobs for You” and “Referral Engine” by LinkedIn, the products were a super success right from its first day of implementations.

Being targeted exclusively for recruiters and employees, the products pre-populate the persons work experience and only displays relevant contextual jobs in his profile as a page called as “Jobs you may be interested in” offering jobs specifically targeted to end users.

The perception after customizing this page was tremendous. LinkedIn revealed the fact that after the application was installed, they saw lots of success with passive candidate’s clickthroughs applying as active job seekers. The success behind it was simple. They placed this offering in the home page of the employee’s profile.

LinkedIn’s “Jobs for You” directly helps companies, recruiters, individuals to directly share job openings. The advantage is that it uses the information directly from their LinkedIn profiles to target users with relevant job opportunities.

While LinkedIn’s concept of finding and delivering relevant job opportunities is not new. LinkedIn has taken professional networking to a new level. Their intention is to target active job seekers, who run specific job searches in their database.

They plan to capture the audience by a strategic method called as “Geotargetting”. Here individuals are targeted within a specific location.  With the data gathered by LinkedIn from individual profiles, the Jobs for you console will deliver the most relevant opportunities based on your LinkedIn profile information.

LinkedIn users will be able to opt out from these options if they don’t want to participate in it. But who wouldn’t want an occasional interesting career opportunity to be displayed to them. However from a recruiting perspective it takes targeting passive candidates into active ones to a whole new dimension.

Referral Engine

LinkedIn went a step ahead in terms of their new product and brand development by launching “Referral Engine”, slated to be in beta mode until 2011. But the buzz is that it’s going to be the killer app specifically for “employee referrals”.

The intention behind this is to assists companies in hiring top talent from their employee’s referrals by involving more employees in making potential referrals, and thereby helping them make more quality referral closures.

With Referral Engine, any company posting a new job through LinkedIn will now make automatic job suggestions to potential employees who can be a good fit for that job. This thereby helps employees to “pre-screen talent” in their own network to make quality referral suggestions.

To promote this service, LinkedIn has planned to launch “Referral Engine”, as a free service to its “Recruiter” customers. They opine that, the more jobs posted by the company, the better this service will work in a viral mode.

More Information about LinkedIn’s new product Lines can be read on its Talent Advantage website.

 

 

Job Descriptions are not necessary for finding the right talent:-

Job descriptions are becoming more and more out-of-date nowadays. Companies insist that they use job description, mainly for people starting out in their careers, whereas for people with experience, job description is a kind of negative norm, which keeps them restricted to a particular process, which in turn hampers their productive output.

Recruiters tell us why job descriptions are becoming less important nowadays in many organizations.

1. Job Descriptions just tells us of the responsibilities, they don’t brief us about the people involved and the nature of the job involved at all.
2. They’re not trusted and sometimes illegal because if a few people who can do the work required without having all of the skills, experience, industry, and academic background are listed on the job description, then what is the use of challenges in an organization.
3. Internal promotions, appraisals do not consider the job description into consideration. Rather they consider the leadership, potential, team skills, and a track record of delivering results on time of the candidate.
4. Highly Skilled and lateral thinking employees leave out a job which has too many job descriptions given just in writing. They know from experience that a job never gives too much description about itself. It’s what they do that adds description and value to the job.
5. Specific Job descriptions makes us become less “Out-of-the box” approachers towards a job as we are always bounded by the description of a job.
6. Job descriptions make an employer and his workplace for an employee to be a non challenging workplace, as it is a regular work schedule for an employee with no experimentations or learning path graphs in his work.
7. They decrease employee satisfaction and increase employee turnover. If you don’t tell people what they’ll be doing before they start on a new job, the likelihood the person will find the actual work involved exciting, appropriate, and satisfying is problematic. Clarifying expectations up front has been shown to be the primary driver of on-the-job performance and employee satisfaction.
8. Of course, we all need some basic level of skills and experiences to handle the actual job requirements, but in most cases managers use the job descriptions as an alternative shortcuts to get the requisition approved, which has time and again proved disadvantageous as discussed above.