5 Healthcare Hiring Mistakes You May Not Know You’re Making

With looming labor shortages, there is increasing pressure in healthcare workforce management circles to get it right the first time. As the talent pool narrows, hospital human resource managers are keenly aware of how costly it can be to make a hiring mistake.

The Society for Human Resource Managers (SHRM) says the cost of hiring a new employee averages a quarter of a million dollars. This is particularly true in healthcare, where clinical “knowledge workers” are an expensive but crucial resource.

Yet 95 percent of all organizations admit to making bad hiring decisions.

How can clinical workforce managers and healthcare recruiting firms avoid bad habits and the frustration of time wasted and money lost?

Avoid These Healthcare Sourcing Mistakes

Conducting due diligence on healthcare candidates can feel monotonous. The comfort of a hiring routine may allow mistakes to slip through the process. Some of the most common mistakes include the following five.

1. Reactive Sourcing

There are simply not enough registered nurses, mid-levels, physicians, and hospital executives to go around. But the pressure of staff turnover or expansion can keep human resource managers reacting and not proactively and strategically hunting for candidates. The truth, in this labor market, is that you should never really stop looking for talent, even if you don’t have immediate hiring needs.

 2. Placing the Wrong Job Ad

Finding the right candidate starts with the ad. Too often, we see poorly written ads that fail to entice candidates with a concise story that differentiates the organization and the role. While the ad should never be complicated, it should be interesting, smart, and careful to define the role properly. It should also have keywords to pull the ad to the top of an online query.

 3. Failing to Hire for Culture Fit

Failing to include department heads in the hiring process is just as bad as forgetting to have interview questions that screen for corporate culture fit. Employee engagement is strongly tied to cultural fit. If you don’t consider culture during the interview process, it could lead to an employee revolving door of employees.

 4. Not Checking Licensure and References

Failing to complete this step during due diligence increases the risk to your healthcare organization. Although it’s often tempting to skip this tedious process, please don’t. Verifying the accuracy of clinical credentials, as well as talking with references about the candidate’s work ethic and attitude, is important.

 5. Failing to Set Measurable Outcomes

Healthcare is all about outcomes, and your recruiting and hiring efforts should be no different. It is the only way, really, to verify the success of your efforts. Understanding metrics like the time it takes to fill an open position, the cost-per-hire, as well as tracking the best channels for ad placement, are critical for quality improvement.

Hire Top Healthcare Talent Today!

Continually improving your hiring process requires avoiding these common mistakes. Healthcare organizations often partner with an outside resource, particularly in challenging markets, with the goal of improving their efforts to find talent. National Recruiters specializes in finding the best home healthcare, home infusion, nurse and physician candidates.

Whether it’s an experienced home healthcare provider, nurse, doctor, or a home infusion specialist, National Recruiters can help healthcare providers improve their talent acquisition pipeline. Contact our top healthcare recruiters today!

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