Hiring Solutions for Healthcare Providers with Krista Sullivan de Torres

As organizations around the globe confront talent scarcity challenges, even the most seasoned talent leaders find themselves in uncharted territory. This profile shares insights from PeopleScout Global Leader of Solutions Design, Krista Sullivan de Torres. Krista is a seasoned professional with more than a decade of human resources and talent acquisition experience. While Krista’s professional experience spans many industries, she has a passion for and deep expertise in healthcare recruitment. Her experience includes launching RPO programs for healthcare startup organizations, managing RPO operations for managed care, population health, behavioral health, and healthcare system clients. Krista’s specialties include global talent acquisition team design, talent acquisition operations, analytics and reporting, recruiting, sourcing and retention. Krista holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Krista shared her insights about hiring solutions for healthcare providers from her home office in Florida. 

Ebook

How RPO Can Solve The Top Challenges In Healthcare Talent Acquisition

What are some of the hiring challenges facing the healthcare industry right now? 

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, there were already many challenges around healthcare hiring. We all hear about the shortage of nurses, but there’s also a shortage of clinicians across the board. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, we’ve seen an increased number of patients, so these shortages have become even more acute — particularly in the areas that have been hit hardest with the disease. In addition, some challenges arise when clinicians who have COVID-19 risk factors, or live with someone who does, are now unable or unwilling to work in order to protect themselves and their families — causing a large strain in hiring for these specialized roles.  

Hiring for a healthcare role, clinical or nonclinical, is much more difficult than hiring in many of the other essential industries right now. How and why is that? 

Regardless of whether we’re hiring for a role that is clinical or nonclinical, there are a lot of additional requirements for working in healthcare than there are in most other fields. If a candidate is going to be working directly with patients, particularly those that are most vulnerable, an extremely thorough background check is necessary to protect the safety of patients. So, rather than a traditional pre-hire online form and standard background check, healthcare candidates will undergo additional criminal history checks, fingerprinting and more. These critical checks tend to slow down the hiring process and can add a layer of complexity when we’re looking at the available workforce. 

Another factor affecting hiring is that a lot of people are a little afraid to work in the healthcare industry right now. As I mentioned earlier, people may be cautious about taking a job in healthcare in order to protect themselves or high-risk family members against COVID-19. In addition to there being a challenge in the number of candidates available to start, we are faced with the challenge of selecting the right people for the job and ensuring we have a pool of candidates who are excited and available to work during this unusual time.  

Lastly, a major factor we consider in the healthcare industry — particularly in a clinical setting — is ensuring healthcare workers are extremely customer-focused. We look for people who are very focused on the patient and the patient’s family. We’re facing challenges in the spike in the number of people who are severely ill, so ensuring we have workers who are correctly educating and caring for patients is of the utmost importance.  

What sort of hiring solution for healthcare providers are available right now? 

A lot of healthcare organizations are really trying to get creative during this critical hiring time due to the healthcare talent shortage. They’re looking to potentially bring back previously retired workers, flexing up hours for part-time associates and bringing in traveling nurses or clinicians to support them where their internal teams are at capacity. Many organizations are also interested in implementing a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) solution to quickly get short-term support in locations that are particularly hard-hit.  

How do these RPO solutions work in practice? What are some of their benefits? 

That’s a great question. One of the many benefits of healthcare RPO is that we’re able to ramp up very quickly to meet client needs. For example, a client came to PeopleScout when they needed to rapidly scale up hiring to support their hospitals. We spoke with the client, came up with a solution and worked through the contracting phase all within three days. It helps that PeopleScout has a large team of clinical and nonclinical healthcare recruiters who are trained to know the industry and can identify high-quality candidates to get the pipeline filled quickly. 

When it comes to on-demand recruitment support, the beauty lies in rapid engagement and disengagement. Once immediate hiring needs are fulfilled, an RPO provider can pull recruiters back in-house and assign them to a new project. This is a great benefit for clients — they don’t need to deal with the stress of layoffs and furloughs because they’re able to engage and disengage experienced recruiters as needed.  

The most important thing right now is to keep everyone safe and healthy. What is the best kind of solution for that? 

One important way to keep people safe while still meeting critical talent needs is to use a virtual hiring solution for healthcare providers. PeopleScout has a bit of an advantage here because we were a virtually based culture even prior to the COVID-19 crisis, so many of our recruiters were already working from home. Our virtual solution allows us to conduct digital interviews — on-demand or live — so we can continue to safely service our clients without interruption. We’ve been able to effectively maintain — and in some cases exceed — productivity while also minimizing the risk for our clients, candidates and internal teams. 

Are there any final thoughts on hiring solutions healthcare providers you’d like to leave us with? 

We’re all going through a really challenging time right now and trying to support one another. We’re all in this together and PeopleScout is here to support our clients, candidates, teams and prospects in any way we can. 

PEOPLESCOUT’S RESPONSE TO COVID-19: Working Together to Prevent, Protect and Contain

PeopleScout
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Response
March 17, 2020 Update

At PeopleScout and the broader TrueBlue organization, the health and well-being of our employees and clients around the globe is our top priority. We are operating with an abundance of caution to keep our employees and clients safe during the fast-evolving coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. We also stand committed to supporting our clients and suppliers through this time.

The PeopleScout and TrueBlue crisis response team is monitoring the situation closely and adjusting our internal policies in alignment with global, country and local health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the U.S. Department of Labor and the National Safety Council.

Policy Approach: In setting policies and taking action related to the coronavirus, our intent is, at a minimum, to follow guidance from relevant authorities such as the WHO, CDC and OSHA. When additional or more extensive actions are prudent in light of the nature of our operations, we will do more than the standard guidance suggests to safeguard our employees.

Information Sharing: We have established a coronavirus information hub for our employees to make it easy for them to stay informed and protected with access to safety recommendations, frequently asked questions and links to useful resources. On the hub, employees can also submit individual questions and report risks to our crisis response team for immediate action. We also are producing a regular cadence of outbound communications and in-office communications to ensure that our employees are kept up to date on policy changes and critical developments. 

Work From Home Policy: The vast majority of PeopleScout employees are equipped to work from home, which provides us with a great deal of flexibility when the situation calls for work site restrictions. Work from home protocols are part of our business continuity plans and have been implemented at our locations around the world and at client sites based on elevated risk, mandated social distancing measures and changes to client policies.

Healthy Work Environment: As part of our usual protocol, PeopleScout promotes a healthy work environment by encouraging sick employees to stay home and by providing office cleaning services and hygiene supplies such as hand sanitizers. As part of our coronavirus response, we have implemented enhanced environmental hygiene measures and are regularly sharing and reinforcing the measures recommended by the WHO, CDC, OSHA and other health authorities to help protect against coronavirus.

Travel Policy: We have temporarily suspended international travel and have restricted all non-critical domestic travel. Employees who have traveled to high-risk areas will be asked to work from home. Our goal is to reduce the risk that anyone at PeopleScout might contract or inadvertently spread the virus. These policy changes are important steps to help minimize the spread of coronavirus. We will continue to monitor the situation and adjust this policy as additional information becomes available from world health authorities.  

Self-Quarantine Procedure: All employees and contractors who have traveled (or whose household members/those with whom they have close or frequent contact have traveled) to, or transited through, any high-risk area, or who have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 are required to complete a 14-day waiting period at home before returning to an office or client site. The timeline begins the date the individual undergoing the waiting period or household member returned to their home country or when they came into contact with the infected individual.

Business Continuity: PeopleScout has well-planned and documented capabilities for continuing to provide world-class service to our clients no matter what challenges we may experience in our work environments. This includes crisis-management, emergency response and business continuity plans, as well as client-specific protocols. Our scalable global delivery centers and virtual teams provide a great deal of flexibility about where work is performed, and our client-specific plans take into account our work sites as well as our clients. As part of our response to the coronavirus outbreak, we are currently conducting exercises to ensure our readiness to implement regional business continuity plans and client-specific protocols and that our employees are well-informed and prepared.

Supply Management: We have implemented rapid-reporting cycles to enable us to quickly identify potential candidate or worker availability shortages and are implementing plans to increase candidate benches for in-demand worker types. We are ready to work with our clients to redirect recruiting or staffing efforts to different facilities or regions as well as to examine current talent acquisition processes to find ways to make them more virtual through our technology platform.

MSP Supplier Management: PeopleScout’s MSP supplier management team is sharing the steps that PeopleScout is taking to promote a healthy work environment with our MSP supplier network and asking them to follow the WHO, CDC and OSHA recommendations. Suppliers are being instructed to engage with clients on local facility business continuity plans, to bring questions to our team for triaging and to notify us immediately of any concerns. We are also communicating regularly with our suppliers to ensure that we have as much advance warning as possible about issues that could disrupt supply and are proactively evaluating our supply base to ensure that we have adequate coverage in high-risk areas and high-demand skill types.

Virtual TA Solutions: We are offering virtual interview solutions to support clients who have enacted no-contact hiring. We are also are ready with recruiter on-demand solutions and can support contingent staffing needs through our MSP practice and our PeopleReady staffing brand.

Client Resource Center: We have developed a client resource center to provide up-to-date information on PeopleScout’s response to COVID-19 and useful information for managing through these uncertain times. 

PeopleScout is committed to supporting our clients’ current needs and emerging needs through the coronavirus outbreak. First and foremost, our commitment is to continue to deliver excellent service while communicating transparently. That begins with regular sharing of our response to coronavirus and continues with ongoing communication about how coronavirus is impacting the markets in which we operate and sharing any specific threats to supply.

Additionally, many organizations have already experienced significant impact to business demand and operations. We are seeing a meaningful shift in client talent needs; demand is down in some markets and peaking in others, and we are receiving requests for workers to help safeguard employees and clients and reinforce response efforts. At PeopleScout and TrueBlue, we are committed to nimbly supporting our clients through this situation.

Whether our clients need to scale up their workforce, tap into new talent pools or find high-quality contract workers, we stand ready to support them. PeopleScout has proactively engaged in resource management and training for key talent sectors, including both on-demand recruitment support and contingent labor pools. We are experts in quickly identifying and placing talent and can help our clients deliver on their organization’s response team recommendations. We can also help guide their business continuity plans, sourcing workers from geographically dispersed talent pools or pulling together spot teams to maximize operational readiness to ensure minimal distribution and service disruptions. 

If our client’s organization is on the front lines providing critical care to those affected, or their business will be impacted by the global response, our goal is to help them fulfill their organization’s commitments to their employees and customers.

COVID-19 Series: Keeping Candidates and Employees Safe with a Virtual Hiring Solution

As organizations around the globe confront the challenges presented by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, even the most seasoned talent leaders find themselves in uncharted territory. We’re creating a miniseries with our experts here at PeopleScout about the issues that are most pressing during this uncertain time.

We are focused on the safety of our employees and clients, friends, families and loved ones. However, it is important for many organizations to keep their talent acquisition functions moving – whether to provide essential services or to serve our communities by providing jobs. Many organizations are also now adapting to a newly virtual workforce.

In that spirit, in this podcast, we share insights from PeopleScout Global Leader of Affinix Client Success and Strategy Allison Brigden on transitioning to a virtual talent acquisition solution.

Allison has been with PeopleScout since 1995 and has served in roles related to implementing and managing complex RPO programs as well as operations and technology. In her current role, Allison focuses on leveraging technology to elevate the talent strategy and client success through Affinix, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology platform. Allison leads an Affinix Client Success Team and our strategic technology partnerships. The Affinix Client Success Team is focused on understanding our clients’ objectives with Affinix and creating positive outcomes. She also possesses a deep commitment to corporate social responsibility, with an emphasis on military veteran advocacy. Allison holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah.

At PeopleScout, we’re all dealing with the same changes—working from home and recording these podcasts from a distance, so things may sound a bit different than you’re used to hearing.