There’s a battle going on within health care today. While nurses, doctors, and technicians continue to wage war against germs and diseases and broken bones, hiring managers and staffing directors are in the midst of an equally fierce struggle just to keep systems running smoothly. They’re on the front lines of health care’s ever-heated war for talent.
A shortage of health care job candidates continues to mount, and the U.S. Department of Labor doesn’t expect things to change any time soon. They estimate that, by 2012, more than one million health care positions will need to be filled on an emergency basis.
In the midst of such a shortage, the quality of care we too often take for granted is at stake. The promise of a warm body on the job might seem reassuring, but as you know the implications of hiring the wrong staff are huge. Far beyond productivity, customer satisfaction, and profit margins, the impact of making inappropriate health care hiring decisions can mean the difference between life and death—for patients as well as for the entire organization.
A recent study highlights the need for a revitalized approach to finding and keeping the right talent. Feeling the Pain of Health Care’s War for Talent: Selection Forecast 2006-2007, released by DDI and Monster®, the leading global online career and recruitment resource, reflects 280 responses from health care staffing directors, hiring managers, and job seekers.
The study shows that, in order to survive this struggle, health care organizations need to be at the top of their game in recruitment, selection, and retention. Their processes and practices must be strategic, efficient, and have bull’s-eye accuracy.
Bull’s-Eye: Targeting Behavioral Competencies
According to the Selection Forecast, today’s health care staffing directors are more concerned about competition for talent than about finding and identifying appropriate applicants. They review fewer resumes than do their counterparts in other industries to fill just one open position.
And while health care organizations excel in evaluating perspective employees’ knowledge and experience, they often overlook candidates’ motivation and personal attributes. That’s a potentially dangerous oversight.
Health care employees need to be well-rounded—they need not only the technical skills, they also need the right behavioral competencies. Technical skills can be taught or developed. Behavioral skills are much more difficult to cultivate. When filling a pediatric position, for example, a health care worker’s ability to connect with children—and calm their fearful parents—is imperative.
Hiring managers and staffing directors need to take care of first things first by clearly identifying the behavioral competencies needed for all key positions. DDI has identified lists of behavioral competencies as those most commonly associated with success for various jobs. A set of behavioral competencies in health care may include:
- Collaboration.
- Patient Focus.
- Work Standards.
- Adaptability.
Organizations can in turn use these competencies in creating comprehensive job profiles which detail the purpose of the job and job family. The profile should also highlight information and examples gleaned from existing data and expert sources—including the individuals currently in the targeted position.
The entire employment cycle—from hiring through on-boarding—can really be jump-started by knowing what the right candidate will look like before seeking them out. By constructing a holistic, realistic profile, organizations can clarify their target, ultimately hiring a staff member who is a good match and who will add lasting value to the entire operation.
Survival of the Fittest: How to Select the Best and Screen out the Rest
There’s no question—making a good hiring match is key. But according to the Selection Forecast, health care staffing directors and hiring managers are often dissatisfied with their selection systems. Fewer than half of them rate their level of satisfaction as high or very high.
What these selection systems are lacking, most often, is a concrete behavioral approach to hiring. As a whole, health care organizations were found to significantly undervalue behavioral information. Few of them use techniques that evaluate personal attributes or directly observe important behaviors, even though these tools offer substantial validity and distinct advantages to the selection process.
Assessment tools, including behavior-based tests and inventories, can greatly help hiring managers streamline the process and increase the accuracy of hiring decisions. By using such tools early in the process, the applicant pool can be prioritized—and the quality increased—before conducting more costly and time-consuming interviews.
In crafting assessment tools for their organization, hiring directors should keep in mind the differing needs of each position. Well-planned tests are tailored to the unique needs of the job families for which they were designed. At DDI, we’ve identified four different health care job families—all of which have specific career batteries (tests) customized to their needs. The job families we focus on are:
- Patient Services, for patient-facing, non-clinical care positions, such as medical secretary, claims recovery coordinator, and unit clerk.
- Support Services, for support service positions such as environmental or custodial services and food service.
- Nursing, for nurses—typically RNs.
- Health Care Leaders, for first-level supervisors across all functional areas.
Assessment tools tailored to each family should be as multifaceted as possible, taking into account different elements of the candidate. These elements include the candidate’s work-related judgment, their work style and disposition, and the type of background experience they have. By creating a user-friendly web-based battery, organizations can streamline the entire process. Information can be made available in real time, so it may be reviewed as soon as a candidate completes the battery.
Avoiding Minefields: Implementing Effective Interviewing Tactics
The Selection Forecast also reveals the importance of the actual job interview. Nearly two-thirds of the health care job seekers included in the study say the interview ultimately impacts their decision to accept a position. Interviewer mistakes—such as treating the interview as unimportant, taking an insensitive approach, or asking inappropriate questions—often drove candidates away, as you can see in the following chart.
One way to avoid such pitfalls is to adhere to a structured method like behavior-based interviewing, which focuses on gathering descriptions of behaviors relevant to job success. This approach helps health care hiring managers and staffing directors select individuals who are not only a good fit with the job, but also with the overall organization. Interviewers can be trained to focus on critical behavioral competencies, such as building patient loyalty, decision making, and communication. They can also be coached on creating targeted follow-up questions based on the screening, testing, and motivational fit results.
Hiring managers trained in behavior-based interviewing are able to interview candidates quickly and effectively, make accurate hiring decisions with minimal effort, and ultimately create a more positive organizational image.
Building a Corps of Veterans: Keeping Great Employees
Once organizations find and hire the right employees, the next step is keeping them—a persistent issue within health care. Selection Forecast results show that the majority (58 percent) of candidates seeking health care professional positions feel that a potential employer should expect them to stay two years or less. How can hiring directors change this?
The logical place to start is with selection. Putting the right people in place from the get-go is arguably the most powerful way to improve retention. Next, a good on-boarding program gets new hires up to speed faster. New employees become empowered and engaged more rapidly. (Tips for increasing a new hire’s time to productivity were revealed in detail in the February issue of Directions.) Finally, look internally when filling higher-level positions. Seventy-three percent of job seekers said that advancement opportunity was important to them in a job, yet 38 percent of first-level management hires are filled externally. Simply put, if your good employees can’t advance with you, they’ll advance elsewhere.
Make no mistake, the health care talent war is far from over. If your organization is to thrive, you need to have the right weapons—perhaps most important of which is a strong selection process.
Next Steps
To learn more about how to tailor-make your selection process and hire employees who best fit your organization, please join us for an upcoming webinar titled, What if the Staff You Hire Doesn’t Care About Patient Safety or Quality of Care?, on Wednesday, May 14, from 1 to 2:15 p.m. EST. To register, click here or contact DDI's Customer Relations Group at 1-800-933-4463.
To download the study, Feeling the Pain of Health Care’s War for Talent: Selection Forecast 2006-2007, click here.
About the Author
Mike Kempa is a senior consultant for DDI’s Selection Solutions. Mike designs and implements assessment and selection systems to fit organizations’ talent management strategies. Contact him at mike.kempa@ddiworld.com.
