By: Mitzi Kent, RN, BSN | mkent@barlowmccarthy.com
Leadership’s understanding of how your team works to fill your organization’s needs is vital to showing the value of your in-house provider recruitment program. With internal buy-in and support, your team’s efforts show your understanding of the organization’s goals they are trying to achieve and, more importantly, the quality providers you are trying to bring into the organization. Leaders are vital to getting the dollars, people, and organizational attention needed to impact recruitment success. As recruiters, we need to elevate our roles to show administrative teams how our team is setting priorities, managing the impact of the physician shortage, and ensuring there are adequate resources to get the job done. How do we do that? Here are a few metrics to share with your internal leadership.
- Average Days to Fill – Talk with your leadership about how long your team takes to fill key service lines. Be sure to share benchmarks provided by AAPPR to show how your organization compares to national data. Often, when leadership understands the time your team needs to find the provider to expand or start a new service line, leadership better understands how to support your team through the process. Leaders want to know how long it will take to find the right candidate so they can manage the impact on the organization. Providing this metric gives them that insight.
- Average Site to Sign – This metric provides awareness of the onsite visit realities and opportunities to ensure we are giving the best experience to our candidates. What are the ramifications of potential candidates meeting with unsupportive medical staff? Are we making sure the candidates leave with no questions unanswered? Are we making sure the significant other is also having the best experience? Questions like these show leadership how you, the recruiter, can play a strategic role in the process.
- Fill Source – Tracking the sources that attract new hires to your organization helps track the effectiveness of filling your pipeline. Having a clear understanding of which resources work and which don’t helps you to focus on efficient ways to source, bringing you the most ROI and decreasing spending on those that aren’t. This will show leaders how you continue to be fiscally responsible and what resources you need to be successful.
As leaders of recruitment programs, take the time to meet with senior leadership to inform and share lead activity, barriers to success, and tactical adjustments to the search or the offering. Including a dashboard that illustrates days open, fill rates and time to sign to start, educates leadership on where there might be operational improvement opportunities, and connects what we are doing and what they are trying to achieve.
Elevating the recruitment role in leadership’s eyes requires the expertise of provider recruiters to understand the candidate’s needs, monitor competitive offerings and ensure the organization is positioned effectively in the recruitment market. Our role as provider recruiters is to educate that successful outcomes don’t happen by chance, but instead, through intentional metrics reviewed with leadership, we can ensure we are meeting the organization’s needs.