Overcoming healthcare staffing challenges with RPO

Greg Karr

Healthcare is one of the most competitive sectors for acquiring and retaining talent.

With demand for healthcare employees far exceeding supply, healthcare organisations must get creative in rising to meet expectations. But with the intense focus on healthcare reform and regulatory compliance, shifting patient care priorities, and a hot mergers and acquisitions climate, transforming the entire talent acquisition (TA) function may not be top priority. This is where many organisations turn to recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) as a way to gain fast access to highly specialised recruiting specialists, amp up agility, and free up key resources to provide the best patient care experience.

Bring in the specialists

Healthcare organisations are in need of an overhaul of their talent acquisition functions. Competing for scarce talent and meeting the expectations of a high-touch recruitment experience is difficult. Candidate experience is often your only true differentiator, and if yours does not live up to a competitor’s, you will lose the best talent to other organisations. Many healthcare organisations haven’t spent a lot of time building a proactive sourcing engine, or customising the recruitment process workflow to be candidate-centric – while those that have, invested a huge amount of time, money, and internal resources to do so. That is an option if your organisation can afford the time it will take to reach maximum proficiency and results. Some organisations are realising that they just don’t have time to wait anymore. They turn to RPO as a way to access specialists and create a highly efficient, well-run TA function that provides a truly caring, engaging experience for candidates.

The best RPO firms leverage proven, dedicated specialists to help you build a best-in-class recruiting function. If you’re struggling to optimise your TA programme and keep pace with the transformative intent mandated across your workplace, bringing in an accountable, performance-oriented, mission-focused RPO partner may be exactly what you need.

What does RPO do for you?

A great RPO firm will partner with you to evaluate everything from the candidate experience to, ultimately, how your hiring affects patient care. It’ll address solving short-term challenges: redoing your careers site; evaluating your benefits and compensation; sourcing more qualified candidates; sourcing candidates to work in challenging locations; finding unique skillsets; reducing time to fill; improving the quality of hire, and so on. It will also help you continuously solve unexpected challenges such as rapid expansion, new skillsets or unpredictable hiring volumes. A good RPO partner brings an advanced tactical skillset and a level of flexibility that is often hard to garner with in-house TA teams.

RPO will also help you align your TA function to drive true progress and improvement. Many organisations see TA primarily for the impact it has on patient care and the community. It’s essential to take the approach that TA is also a critical revenue-impacting function; everything you do in TA should have a positive impact on the organisation and on the quality of patient care. For example, say you need three more cardiothoracic surgeons. As long as you don’t have them, your current physicians are overworked, which means they are more susceptible to being poached, or to take their skills elsewhere – not to mention patients having to wait longer for their surgery.

This profoundly affects the level of care patients receive, as well as your ability to retain physicians every day they are overworked because the positions are not filled. RPO brings the art and science of ‘the people factor’ to your organisation and will help you fill those positions faster, with higher qualified people. Improving efficiency through better people and processes will support your entire organisation, leading to better care and a better service for patients.

By leveraging highly skilled RPO specialists, you can diagnose what’s no longer working in your TA function, strategically position your organisation as an employer of choice, and drive meaningful value to all that it does. RPO is the fastest way to address the critical challenges you’re facing, and can be game-changing. If you want to learn more about RPO, please feel free to contact me.

Greg Karr is Executive Vice President, Seven Step RPO