Using internet technology to streamline healthcare recruiting

Healthcare Financial Management, June, 2002 by Tony Marzulli

The staffing shortages currently facing healthcare organizations may become more severe in the future. Using the Internet to facilitate the process of identifying, interviewing and hiring candidates for healthcare positions can result in cost effective, appropriate hiring decisions and reduce the amount of time human resources personnel must spend performing administrative tasks relating to hiring. In addition, this technology contributes to improved satisfaction of current employees by identifying those who are most eligible for promotion.

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Many remedies to stem the shortage of health-care workers in hospitals and health systems have been proposed, including educating students about healthcare professions, increasing healthcare scholarships, and forgiving student loans for healthcare education. Although these strategies may indeed increase the number of healthcare workers in the future, they cannot solve the clinical staff shortages provider organizations face now. The use of Internet technology can have an immediate, positive impact on a provider's recruitment practices by streamlining the identification, interviewing, and hiring processes for candidates for healthcare positions. This technology, known as e-recruitment technology, enables human resources staffs to use their time productively by automating these processes and providing the information necessary for making appropriate hiring decisions.

E-recruitment technology offers the advantage of quick identification and hiring of appropriate candidates, which is particularly important given today's shortages of candidates for some clinical positions, especially nurses and pharmacists. Missing an opportunity to hire a suitable new employee because of a lengthy and cumbersome interviewing process is frustrating and expensive.

Investment in e-recruitment technology also demonstrates to potential and current employees that the organization is modern and progressive. Increasingly, a lack of current technology on the part of the hiring organization is seen as detrimental because it may indicate to employees that the organization is behind the times.

Recruitment Costs

A recent survey commissioned by the American Hospital Association, along with other medical and hospital trade organizations, found that recruitment costs for nurses have risen 50 to 75 percent during the past two to three years. (a) According to the Harvard Business School, the cost of hiring an unsuitable person can be two times the employee's annual compensation, including expenses, training, benefits, wages, commissions, and bonuses. (b) That means, for example, that having to terminate a newly hired $60,000-per-year employee can cost an organization more than $120,000 in both direct and indirect costs.

Direct costs of hiring an unsuitable employee include out-of-pocket costs for recruiting, interviewing, and training a replacement employee. Indirect costs of hiring an unsuitable person include the detrimental influence on morale, absenteeism, and productivity Staff shortages also can contribute to loss of revenue for an organization because emergency-department patients may need to be diverted, surgeries may require delay or cancellation, programs or services may need to be discontinued, or patient loyalty may decline due to dissatisfaction with care.

The cost of e-recruitment technology varies based on the number of the organization's employees, the organization's level of centralization, and the technology components needed by the organization. Cost-effectiveness for e-recruiting and human capital management technology also are determined by the number of employees and organizational locations. The larger and more diverse an organization is, the greater the need for technological relief. To justify an investment in this technology, current data about human resources services and employee recruitment and retention need to be compiled and tracked against such data from past years. The data then should be linked to customer results (eg, clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction) and the organization's. overall financial performance.

Candidate Selection

The process of assembling a short list of suitable job candidates requires a host of time-consuming tasks, including making appointments for telephone and in-person interviews, updating potential employees on the hiring process, tracking each candidate through the interviewing process, and verifying skills, degrees, and background. E-recruitment technology can automate and track each of these tasks, allowing recruiters to focus on the strategic goals of workforce planning and hiring for hard-to-fill positions. E-recruiting systems also allow healthcare organizations with multiple hospitals in one employment market to share candidate applications and information, integrate payroll and other human resources systems, and combine reporting, financial analysis, and planning functions.

E-recruiting allows hiring executives to publicize a job opening widely and almost immediately by typing a job description into the e-recruitment system. The system can post the opening on thousands of Web sites, including general job-search sites, niche sites devoted to specific industries, and professional association sites. Sites may be free to both the hiring organization and the applicant, or may require the hiring organization to pay a fee to post jobs. The technology has the ability to recommend Web sites that draw visitors looking for specific types of jobs.