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.

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.

 

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.

 

How 2010 changed the scope of Recruiting

Recruiting space is becoming aggressive day by day. The changes are so dynamic that what was good yesterday may not be so today. Recruiters say that technological boom is the biggest contributor for this trend. Technology in recruiting has shaped up in different mediums like Social media recruiting, Online job search, Blogging, HR and even e- mail recruiting.

ATS (Applicant tracking system), is one such software which has streamlined the recruiting process even further. Mergers, Acquisitions and takeover segment in recruiting segment also saw some up new tidings and trends like

• Monster Buying Out Yahoo Jobs
• Kenexa Acquiring Salary.com
• ATS being the new frontrunner for staffing solutions

Recruiting related domains although have changed hands, but when you add in the major job seeker, HR, and salary transactions, you can see that something’s are still the same. This seems to be a trend beyond coincidence as we have precise insight into the causes.

But the real reasons why the Internet Recruiting has changed so much is that is

1. The jobs and economy experienced dramatic shifts prior to 2010. This along with increasing usage of Internet changed the monetization equations and metrics around job search and online recruiting.
2. Easy, immediate distribution of content in the online segment leveled the playing field. When every individual is a publisher, the brand becomes more important which makes it easy to establish a big brand.
3. Professional networking, job referrals had been an important source of job placement, However Social media drove that process online, thereby creating new opportunities and expectations for the future of online job search.
4. Mobiles and consumer devices furthered the penetration of the Internet as the primary vehicle for job search thereby making online job search even more important and thereby changing the scope of recruiting and made Internet Recruiting a reality.

 

Why performance of HR departments should be evaluated

It seems that no one can deny the importance of effective HR management.  Sure, there are some business managers who still think and work on the assumption that the supreme value for their company is money, investments, equipment and production facilities etc.

However the recent economic downturn has proved that companies which possessed the best human resources managed to survive, and even managed to conquer new potential markets in the form of attracting new customers, thus making us re-think on the fact that “Business is run by people, no matter how efficient and smart the IT solutions are”.

For this tactical reason, it is important for every organization to measure performance of its human resource department.  The problem is that HR or the personnel department does not earn money unlike other departments, and to the contrary it spends financial resources in order to hire, educate and retain the best of professionals in a strategic business area.

Human Resource departments believe in human resource investment, which has time and again proved to be one of the most effective long-term investment tools.

However not many HR departments can be effective in this and can be more of a bane than a boon for many companies. The reason being they misuse the company money for cheap and unproductive training programme.

Hence it makes us consider many factors to take into account when working with personnel. Thereby using a balanced scorecard system, it is possible for the management to evaluate the human resource performance and thereby align the HR goals with the strategic goals of the company, its mission and values.

Evaluation of HR performance is a must for any companies as it in turn contributes to improvement in effective “two- way communication” and proper feedback system, the system of education, training and coaching.

Proper HR policy even improves the organizational climate and employee satisfaction. Use of a balanced scorecard for HR performance is recommended for heads of human resource departments and top managers of big companies who want to optimize work of their enterprises and firms.

 

5 simple steps to create an Effective Online Resume

A resume is a very important tool highlighting your achievements, strengths and core areas of work in a detailed format. However not many people are so confident when it comes to creation of an Online resume, and are left fumbling for details.

Hence, we created a small write-up on how to effectively create an online resume databank. This will not only help in gaining maximum visibility, but also gets a higher stance of getting noticed by recruiters in job portals and professional networking sites.

Few Steps to effectively create an online resume to gain maximum visibility are

1. Selection of the platform: – Personal branding on the Web is about the Pull factor. The challenge lies when you pull them into your network, which you’ve built through forum participation, feedbacks and social networking. Platforms range from forums, blogs, websites, and social networking sites to the simple e-mail.
2. Create a positioning statement: – After selecting your platforms, try creating a positioning statement in your online resume. This not only helps in showcasing your unique personality to potential employers. It helps in engaging the recruiter as it is a unique way of branding yourself, which is what recruiters would prefer.
3. Enhance your resume with Goodies: – Multimedia goodies, this is the one of the advantages of an online resume creation. This increases the ability to enhance your online presence with recruiters, and allows your potential employers to see you in a more complete manner. Thereby allowing recruiters to connect to your resume, thereby making your profile more appealing. Video or audio testimonials from previous clients and coworkers are a very innovative idea that can be included, which can be linked to your YouTube channel or a Flickr page which support you activities when representing yourself to recruiters.
4. Integrate your resume with Leading Social Networks: – Now that your resume has started to take shape try linking your resume with your favorite social network profiles. Make sure you keep the resume fresh, professional and constantly updated.
5. Start Promoting Your New Resume: – Now that you’re online resume is created, start aggressively promoting it in multiple channels and modes like adding it to your paper resume, business cards, email signatures, social networks etc. The possibilities are endless. It’s about how smartly you brand yourself.

 

 

 

How Performance and Implemetation of HR policies can impact the entire Company’s Growth

There is no universal success recipe for business anymore, what may be succesful at one point of time will not even work out in today’s context. But there are few intangible factors which contribute to the success of the company in a long-term perspective.HR management is one such vital factor as any company is associated with the people who are working there.

Even companies who have the best talent can fail to achieve success because they cannot work together in an efficient and productive manner.Hence many companies are investing in efficient HR departmental policies, thereby ensuring the productivity of the employees, which in turn helps the companies to expand more.

HR is about learning and a growth perspective which deals with improvement of personnel, professional skills, knowledge, organizational  climate, employee satisfaction etc.This in turn helps to implement a balanced scorecard on a departmental level. Something that is good for human resource department is good for the company in general, as it’s about simultaneously ensuring employee and organizational productivity.

This is where Strategic HR can help as they show cause and effect ties between indicators of different categories/perspectives, For example if company decides to focus on employee hire turnover rate, strategic HR along with the help of applicant tracking system will connect these indicators with other measures and goals in a balanced scorecard metric.

When implementing a sound HR Framework it is really important to keep in mind that you are dealing with people and is really difficult to measure certain human resource management things along with numbers.

HR at the end of the day is about ensuring employee productivity and retention, alongside with meeting of the organizational goals.

 

 

 

 

 

How to create and promote your Online resume in Twitter

Social media recruiting is growing at an increasing pace day by day. Recruiters are active more on social and professional networking sites than job portal sites looking out for new talents. One social networking site that is growing in leaps and bounds is Twitter, which is being used by many of the companies. Organizations say that Twitter is more like a PR tool for them. This has made active job seekers, consultants etc to actively follow companies on twitter.

But what many people are not much aware of the fact is that Twitter can be used to create an online resume of yours in less than 140 characters which can be circulated amongst friends or companies.

Here is how you can create an online resume in twitter in less than 140 characters.

1. Job Title Creation: – Create the title or the position you are seeking for.
2. Location Inclusion: – Include your location by adding the #tag or Hashtag of the location where do you want to work or relocate to.
3. Use Hash tags frequently: – Hash tags are a way for Twitter users to classify tweets and group them together. Recruiters use hashtags as a way to search for talents on Twitter. Some good examples of hash tags could be included in your Twitter resume tweets are #needajob etc.
4. TweetMyResume: – Post your twitter resume on tweetmyresume.com, for added exposure, wherein it gets a higher visibility stance of being noticed by recruitment consultants.
5. ReTweets: – Ask your friends and followers in Twitter to re- tweet your Twitter resume which thereby makes it viral and helps it get noticed by many people at ease.

End of the day Social media recruiting is all about making online recruitment go viral.

 

 

Small Changes in your Recruiting System can go a long way in succesful Candidate Engagement

Candidate engagement is increasing day by day. Staffing companies and organizations are ever increasingly creating a conducive stance wherein candidates can directly submit their resumes and even know the status of their resumes. The recruiters are going a step ahead wherein they get back to the candidate personally after they fill in their application or after giving the interview.

These sessions helps in solving a problem from scratch and brainstorm how an organization should look and act to a candidate. This stance helps to create the organization the leader in candidate engagement.

Candidate engagement however has a few obligations, which must be seen or taken care of by the organization, If it is to be succesful in it. They are

Setting expectations early :- Organizations after receiving a resume upload should begin turning on the auto-reply feature within the ATS. There is no reason why you shouldn’t turn this on today if you have this feature. I was surprised by how many people in the audience were not using it or were not aware of it.

Organization should set their expectations, and set a higher productive stance wherein every candidate submission is replied back via their ATS. The key however is to concentrate on the messaging of this auto-reply and how long the process will take.

Should all candidates be treated equally? – First off, I think an auto-reply should be sent to all candidates that submit an application. But after that should you feel compelled to treat everyone the same? In a perfect world, sure but our world is far from perfect. If you have limited labor resources, I’d recommend putting candidates in tiers. Candidates that don’t fit the job description should be sent a generic rejection email, which is quite easy to do in your ATS.

Candidates that you interview should always receive a personal call that they didn’t receive the job. And finalists should receive a conversation from a recruiter to gauge their interest in future positions in the company as they would still be good fits for the company in the near future.

Candidate engagement is not that difficult. There are a number of small things that you can do in order to improve the experience of the candidates that are coming through your recruitment marketing system every day. The key is doing it in a channelized manner than just doing it for the sake of it .