By Ryan Garman, Director of Healthcare at Sterling
Key Takeaways:
- Healthcare staffing firms need to simplify and automate their credentialing and onboarding processes to improve candidate experience, increase efficiency, and boost redeployment rates.
- Automating tasks like ordering and delivering credential-level results, repurposing credentials, and reordering expired credentials can significantly reduce time-consuming manual work.
- Creating an “invisible candidate experience” by eliminating unnecessary interactions and streamlining processes can lead to happier candidates, faster onboarding, and reduced drop-off rates.
In recent years, health systems have sought ways to reduce their reliance on healthcare staffing firms in order to hire internally and outsource fewer placements. A combination of factors are driving this shift, including financial pressures, the need for more sustainable staffing solutions, and ongoing efforts to build a more stable workforce.
Many healthcare staffing firms are reevaluating their current business strategy as a result. During COVID, firms had to overcome challenges emerging from the high demand for healthcare workers and the large volume of candidates who needed to be quickly processed. Now with health systems making more efforts to recruit in-house, healthcare staffing firms need to find ways to keep candidates working with their firm. And it all starts with placing candidates faster and delivering a positive candidate experience.
Rethinking how recruiting and compliance teams can simplify their credentialing process
There are many steps involved when it comes to credentialing and onboarding a candidate. Often, candidates are communicating with multiple people, receiving countless emails on next steps, and having to submit various documents. This disjointed approach can make it difficult for candidates to build a relationship with any single recruiter. Further, candidates may find themselves repeating their information, which can be time-consuming and inefficient. Understandably, these credentialing and onboarding processes can leave a negative impression on candidates.
By automating the credentialing process, healthcare staffing agencies can simplify how they credential and onboard their candidates. This way, tasks that have historically been time-consuming can now be completed within seconds. For example, firms can automate both the ordering and delivery of credential-level results, repurpose credentials for future assignments, and reorder only the credentials that have expired. No longer is there a need to manually track all of these steps.
Streamlining the credentialing and onboarding process to increase redeployment rates
Even if you’re one of the greatest recruiters out there, candidates may not want to work with you if your credentialing and onboarding process is arduous. Having a slow process can result in churning a lot of your candidates, not only resulting in constantly looking for new hires, but negatively impacting that high redeployment rate that everybody is striving for in this market. And with the demand for healthcare talent at an all time high, every single candidate matters.
Healthcare staffing agencies need to create great candidate experiences to eliminate delayed starts and push starts, ensuring their candidates are able to show up on time for their new assignment. By making the credentialing and onboarding process easy with automation, recruiters can use their time in more strategic ways that focuses back on the candidate experience.
By hitting that on-start time, candidates will be more likely to come back and work with your agency due to their positive experience. Technology and automation can make this easy and simple, and achieving that high redeployment rate now looks much more in reach.
Eliminating unnecessary candidate interactions delivers a better experience
Onboarding candidates is a combination of disjointed tasks, endless emails, and multiple points of contact. It is often difficult for candidates to know what they have left to complete and for the recruiter to recognize exactly where the candidate is in the process — from occupational health services, capturing headshots, completing the background check and I-9, and more.
For years, agencies and their vendors have focused on improving the candidate experience, but recent advancements in automation and AI have paved the way for a newer candidate experience that focuses on having little to no interaction with the candidate: an invisible candidate experience.
To deliver a better experience, recruiters need to ensure that every interaction with their candidates is clear, efficient, and meaningful. See if there are steps that can be handled with technology and automation so you aren’t unnecessarily bothering your candidates. Take time to reevaluate your policies and processes to identify opportunities to eliminate candidate steps altogether, which will not only lead to a happier candidate, but will also speed up the onboarding process and reduce drop-off.
In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare staffing, firms need to continue to adapt and innovate. So much has changed and progressed just within the past decade, and we anticipate more of this disruption over the next few years. By prioritizing the candidate experience, investing in automation, and simplifying processes, healthcare staffing firms can maintain their competitive edge and succeed in today’s fast-paced market.
Ryan Garman is the Director of Healthcare at Sterling, the largest provider of employment screening and credentialing services for the healthcare industry. He has been with Sterling for over 10 years and has successfully built screening, credentialing, and onboarding programs for Sterling’s largest healthcare clients.
