For most healthcare organizations, staffing is a major operational challenge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, over 100,000 registered nurses left the field, and even several years laters, almost 800,000 nurses intend to leave the workforce by 2027 because of stress, burnout or retirement. These healthcare talent shortages and increased competition necessitate a more robust talent acquisition strategy. To overcome recruiting roadblocks, healthcare organizations can partner with a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner to supplement internal recruiting teams and create sustainable talent acquisition strategies. When implemented correctly, a healthcare RPO program enhances recruiting effectiveness, attracts top talent and reduces cost, providing healthcare organizations with a competitive advantage.
In this post, we highlight six things healthcare organizations should expect from an RPO partnership.
What to Expect From Your Healthcare RPO Partnership
When you enter into an RPO partnership, you will find that a successful relationship is based on collaboration between your RPO provider and internal team, who need to work together to make the engagement a success.
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Expect Seamless Integration Between Your Healthcare RPO & Internal Recruiting Teams
An ideal RPO partner should have a well-developed practice for integrating into a client’s organization and working with a client’s recruiters, hiring managers and leadership teams. During the implementation process, your healthcare RPO partner should conduct a needs assessment to understand your healthcare recruiting requirements. They will then develop a custom solution that meets the needs of your organization and business model.
Engaging an RPO partner is an opportunity to create change in the way you recruit talent across your organization. Changes in the recruiting process can include training hiring managers to be better interviewers, implementing new recruiting technology tools and establishing a unified message and employer brand.
This is the time to take the recruiting process seriously and bring attention to it internally. Your RPO partner will work with you to be an agent of change in your organization in order to successfully implement new tools and processes.
Expect Value-Added Recruiting Functions
As talent acquisition becomes more sophisticated, organizations are looking for additional services from an RPO partner such as employer branding capabilities, advanced analytics and new technology. When considering healthcare RPO partners, look for capabilities that will add value while improving your recruiting processes.
For instance, if your organization is anticipating a merger and requires a solution to swiftly ramp up your current healthcare workforce, talent acquisition services such as social media sourcing, video interviewing and recruitment marketing provide additional value by improving the candidate experience and your position in the talent market.
To determine which value-added services would most benefit you, audit your current recruiting processes and performance to identify where your in-house teams excel and where outside expertise can make a positive impact.
Expect In-Depth Program Analysis and Reporting
You should expect that your RPO partner will provide you with a complete analysis of your healthcare recruitment processes’ strengths, weaknesses and challenges.
This assessment should include:
- Detailed process mapping before, during, and after implementation
- Understanding gaps and opportunities within your program
- Visibility into real-time workforce data and analytics
From this deep-dive, your RPO partner should develop customized solutions for your immediate and long-term talent needs and consult with stakeholders on ways to improve your program.
Recruiting metrics and analytics are powerful tools. When an RPO partner dives into the data, they can provide guidance on big and small recruitment changes that will lead to improved hiring metrics.
Expect Accountability and Transparency
Accountability and transparency are key factors in a successful RPO partnership. As the client, you should be able to ask your RPO partner any question you can conceive of, and in turn, your RPO partner should be able to provide you with satisfactory answers.
To ensure accountability, your RPO provider should work with you to establish mutually agreed upon Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs should be established during the partner selection process, and their governance should be clearly outlined during contract negotiations.
SLAs establish how you and your RPO provider will work together and can cover items like terms, liability, billing and payment, confidentiality, solicitation, insurance, warranties and employment relationships.
Before you draft SLAs, you need to assess your recruitment performance prior to working with your RPO partner. This can prove challenging, especially if your internal recruitment processes do not track and benchmark data. If you do not have benchmarks, your healthcare RPO provider should be able to provide benchmarking data based on their work with other clients in the healthcare space.
When setting up SLAs, make sure they are realistic, achievable and meet your organization’s recruiting needs. RPO SLAs often include the following metrics:
- Time-to-fill: Time-to-fill measures how long it takes recruiters to fill an open role.
- Hiring manager satisfaction: You can measure hiring manager satisfaction through a survey, for example.
- Candidate experience and satisfaction: You can conduct surveys with every candidate, not just ones who are hired, to better understand the impact of your candidate experience.
- Interview-to-offer ratio: This metric is the ratio of the number of interviews to the number of candidates that are given an offer and can help determine the quality of candidates.
- Diversity of candidate: This is the percentage of candidates considered or self-identified as “diverse,” and can be used to track different groups of candidates like women or veterans.
The right mix of service-level controls can help ensure a successful partnership.
Expect to Be Supplied with References
You would not hire a doctor or nurse without checking their references, and the same applies when partnering with an RPO provider. An RPO partner can always tell you about their solutions, skills and expertise. However, to get a real sense of an RPO partner’s true capabilities, you need to speak to their clients and hear success stories directly.
You should receive references from organizations that the RPO partner has worked with, ideally in the healthcare space, that have dealt with similar challenges as you, so you can really understand how the RPO has delivered effective solutions in the past. For example, if your organization is having a difficult time sourcing healthcare talent in a rural community, your RPO partner should provide you with a reference that illustrates their ability to source candidates in lean talent markets.
Expect Effective Recruiting Technology
Your RPO partner should be deploying the most current and best-in-class recruiting technologies to access and leverage data, attract and source candidates, automate recruiting processes, and screen and shortlist candidates. For instance, an RPO partner equipped with an experienced team of recruiters trained in using advanced tools and resources can use AI and predictive analytics to quickly find candidates with the skills and qualifications you’re looking for.
The right talent acquisition technology tool can also help provide a superior candidate experience, including:
- AI-enabled sourcing tools help recruiters find the best candidates faster.
- A streamlined application process can allow candidates apply with just one click.
- Personalized recruitment marketing tools like chatbots, SMS messages, email campaigns and individualized landing pages provide candidates with the consumer-like experience they have come to expect online.
Healthcare RPO partners should also be able to help you quickly implement the best recruiting technologies into your talent acquisition program that can save both time and money.
Healthcare RPO from PeopleScout
Selecting the right RPO partner is a big decision for any healthcare organization and outsourcing recruitment processes can have a tremendous business impact. Your healthcare RPO partner should possess the ability to understand the capabilities and reach of the latest emerging talent tools can provide both significant costs savings and a competitive advantage and provide you access to talent, quality of hires, process efficiencies and workforce management support.
Learn more about PeopleScout’s healthcare RPO serivces by connecting with one of experts.
