By: Mitzi Kent, RN, BSN | mkent@barlowmccarthy.com
As leaders in recruitment, we’ve all seen the statistics for the growing shortage of physicians. The struggle is real, and with the employment landscape changing, we need to think about how we change our strategies and our approach to stay ahead of the curve. There is no better time than the start of a new year to evaluate your physician recruitment process to ensure its meeting the organization’s needs.
Here are four key strategies to help “reset” your recruitment efforts and ensure that your process and department is as effective and efficient as possible for the coming year.
- Evaluate Your Medical Staff Development Plan. Review the needs for recruitment for the coming year and beyond with senior leadership. Does this align with the hospital’s strategic plan? What new service lines are a priority for 2019? Which ones are new and can’t start without a reliable physician? Which service lines need to be maintained, and where will physician turnover be detrimental to the service line. Review your team’s recruitment priorities, so both your team and leadership are on the same page.
- Assess Your Structure. If you want to maximize efficiencies, look at your organizational recruitment structure. Is there anything you can change to optimize it? Look at criteria that best serves your organization. For larger organizations, would a regional approach work based on search volume or would it be best to structure based on unique specialties? Does your recruitment team focus on primary care and surgery as everyday needs? Are you using an outside organization to help with those offerings or the other specialties? Whichever method you choose, it’s important to make sure your team understands the structure and focused priorities.
- Lead Development. A priority plan for specialties to be recruited helps your team to be effective and efficient. Look at the total number of physicians needed and the number of facilities involved. Assign a “marketing tier” based on priority. Create a list of recruitment marketing tactics to be implemented for each tier. For example, tier one specialties might have six different tactics, such as direct mail campaigns, that are implemented as a series, or advertising in specialty specific journals and physician recruitment publications. Tier three might have two tactics, like information about available opportunities distributed to physician prospects at physician recruitment career fairs and web postings on physician recruitment job boards.
- Review Your Recruiting Processes and Procedures. Spend some time evaluating each step of your internal process, from identifying needs, to interviewing the candidate, to the onboarding process. What works? Where are delays or breakdowns in the process? For example, are the facilities and departments taking too much time responding to the recruiter regarding the candidate? Having a standard interview template that is sent to the stakeholder each time, can help your busy leaders quickly determine if this is a candidate they would want to move forward.
Finally, sometimes it’s just a simple tweak here or a new tool there that will help your recruitment team “reset” to meet the organization’s needs. Spend time talking with your team to find out what they believe will help them be more efficient so that they can spend their time finding the perfect physician for your facilities.
Looking for more? I would love to help… connect with me (mkent@barlowmccarthy.com) for a FREE 30 minute call to discuss what is going on in your program.