Automate to Accelerate Healthcare Applicant Hiring: Top 5 Pain Points

Doctor conversing across a desk with new applicant

Contingent staffing, also called contingent talent management (CTM), is a business of timing. And in a highly competitive environment where demand is outstripping supply, as it is in healthcare today, every second counts.

To maintain the rapid pace needed, many healthcare staffing agencies have deployed some degree of automation in their applicant hiring process. However, it can be difficult to identify which facets of the process to automate. Making the wrong process selection wastes money and effort.  

Automating the right parts of the applicant hiring process enables your staffing team to:

  • Keep applicants engaged
  • Focus on ideal candidates
  • Avoid wasted resources and effort

That’s why more healthcare organizations are deploying automation in their applicant hiring systems.

Automating processes gives your team time back to focus on relationship-building, one of the most vital components for maintaining a competitive advantage. People in healthcare are relationship-driven; otherwise, they wouldn't be in this line of work. As a result, they want to work with an agency that values human interaction and communication as much as they do.

Enabling your recruiters to make deeper personal connections with applicants via phone calls or texts gives your organization a leg up on many of your competitors. Likewise, your customers benefit because your team has an easier time encouraging applicants to take shifts or travel assignments.

Let’s take a look at five key areas where automation can help deliver a competitive advantage.

Automation eases 5 pain points of contingent talent management

 The following are five major operational pain points of contingent staffing in healthcare. symplr offers ways to deploy automation to address and overcome them—and empower your healthcare HR teams.  

  1. Recruiting limitations: Limiting the posting of orders to your own job websites prevents many applicants from ever engaging with you. Specifically, multi-channel recruitment marketing allows you to post to a variety of popular job boards where more prospective applicants will see them—and this function can be automated. It’s the is key to faster recruiting and it extends your agency’s reach to job boards, your own jobs websites, and popular sites like Indeed and LinkedIn.

  2. High applicant drop-off rates: The situation occurs when an applicant encounters a long and complicated application process, and it’s a symptom of overburdening the applicant with too much data entry too early in the process. Automating a two-step process that separates an initial, faster application process from a more detailed onboarding process makes it easier for potential staff to complete each step.

  3. Gaps in onboarding and credentialing data: One unique barrier in the healthcare hiring process is credentialing. If an applicant doesn't meet the credentialing criteria, they may be overlooked as a potential candidate. An automated and configurable credentialing management capability enables you to identify addressable credentialing issues. Your team simply pre-sets the rules the software uses to automatically determine whether an applicant has the necessary credentials. If someone doesn't meet the criteria, the system alerts recruiters in near real-time so they can quickly contact the applicant and seek a resolution.

  4. Lack of forms customization: All healthcare professionals are not alike, and as a result you must tailor documents to the clinician/professional sought. For example, you wouldn't ask a physical therapist if they have ACLS certification, but you would mandate it for an ER nurse. Unfortunately, many systems default to a standard set of forms, giving applicants a one size fit all process. Applicants then must navigate through questions that aren’t relevant, potentially skipping questions and requirements that are. Automation allows you to tailor the experience for applicants and guarantees the efficient collection of certification, licensure, and other role-specific information.

  5. Lack of mobile functionality: Mobile applications today are a must-have. Failure to provide them means you’re inconveniencing applicants and ceding an advantage to your competition. Mobile applications have advantages that go beyond making standard applications more accessible; they expedite the process of getting individuals to use their phones to:
  • Complete tests
  • Fill out skills checklists
  • Sign documents electronically 

Automating key aspects of the applicant hiring process decreases time-consuming manual data entry, increases accuracy—which nearly eliminates time spent on making corrections—and gets applicants to complete the process faster.

Each improvement we’ve offered above reduces applicant and staffing team frustration and friction using automation, enabling your staffing team to focus on the all-important aspect of relationship-building that attracts applicants to your agency.

Automation truly is the key to remaining competitive and better serving your applicants. Don’t waste a single second more. Learn how to use symplr Contingent Talent Management and automate your processes to get better results today. 

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