Healthcare Recruiting - Keep Your Eye on the Metrics!
Posted on Thu, Jun 02, 2011
By Judi Dorazio
A competitive healthcare market, managing turnover and vacancies, ensuring the right mix of new grads vs. experienced healthcare professionals, and managing through the changes resulting from Healthcare Reform. These are just some of the challenges healthcare organizations face while striving toward the ultimate goal of providing top quality patient care. One key component in attacking these challenges head on is to acquire the best possible talent.
There are many aspects to consider in designing a best in class talent acquisition function. However, we will focus on the metrics. It is critical to tie metrics into your overall recruitment strategy. Establishing recruitment metrics will help you track cost and measure the effectiveness of your recruitment function. Additionally, well defined metrics are important for setting performance and productivity goals, as well as ensuring the whole recruitment team is striving forward with an eye on the same target.
There are many possible metrics to track, but it’s best to keep it realistic. Be careful for the pitfall of having so many metrics that they just become numbers that are not tied in with an overall business strategy. When choosing your metrics, ask yourself: "What am I trying to accomplish in my recruiting function?"
These days it’s not only about time and cost, but also quality and satisfaction. Some examples of recruitment metrics include:
Time to Fill
Time to Hire
Cost per Hire
Quality of Hire
Hiring Manager Satisfaction
Candidate Satisfaction
90-day retention
Source Effectiveness
Candidate Pipeline
How quickly have you been hiring bedside nurses to fill your vacancies? Are they the top talent? What recruitment source was effective to bring them in? How often are your new hires turning over? Are you acquiring top talent, with the right skills for your vacancies, at the time when you need them? With the numerous challenges in healthcare recruiting today, tracking metrics is essential to understanding where to adjust or makes changes and to providing clear data towards continuous improvement in your talent acquisition function.
