New Trends in Healthcare Recruitment and Retention
Lizz Pellet, Chief Culture Officer of EMERGE International and Fellow from Johns Hopkins University
It’s that time again when all the predictions for the New Year are stated and we have to wait 12 months to see if they are real or imagined. My thoughts on what will be an important activity in 2011 bring me back to Employment Branding. When I wrote The Cultural Fit Factor, How to Create an Employment Brand that Attracts, Retains and Repels the Right Employee, published by SHRM in 2009, the country was just heading into an economic downturn. But here we are, just one and half years later and we’re just beginning to see glimmers of hope. Now is the time to realize that the need to find the right cultural fit is stronger than ever.
An article in CNN Money.com on January 6, 2011 stated that the economy had added 103,000 jobs in December, which was below analyst predictions, but at the same time unemployment sunk to 9.4% – its lowest since May of 2009. We have to factor in the December push for temporary workers, but this may be an indication we are putting people back to work.
We are also starting to see the trend to re-open searches for some positions that had been frozen in 2010 (or earlier). As these searches are opened again, we have the opportunity to look at our brands and how we are marketing our facilities. Is the marketing message really a reflection of the true employee experience or is it just a spiffy tagline which sounds great but is not 100% authentic and congruent?
I want to look at employment branding a bit differently for 2011. Let’s take the perspective of a consumer, versus a job seeker. Look at your brand like buying a new car. Consumer Reports has published its 2011 Car Brand Perception Study and it has some very interesting points of view. Number one, they say that Ford leads in the factors that matter most to car shoppers. Really? For years I have held the perception that Ford stood for Found On Road Dead. It’s hard to change perceptions. The study reflects how consumers perceive each brand in seven categories: Safety, Quality, Value, Performance, Design/Style, Technology/Innovation and Environmentally Friendly/Green. When I look at these seven, this really could be criteria that top talent is using to evaluate your healthcare organization.
Safety: Do I want to work for an organization that is not JCAHO certified? I think not! Most allied health workers are seeking magnet hospitals. Candidates know the gold standard, so we have to be sure we have that certificate, logo or indicator on our career site.
Quality: Same goes for quality. If you have customer satisfaction figures, post them on your career site just like you would employee satisfaction statistics. Your career videos should indicate something about the level of quality patient care that you deliver or the level of satisfaction your employees convey. Press-Ganey scores do matter!
Value: This is an easy one! List your organizational values – all of them, but don’t do it in a typical laundry list – convey them in behavioral terms. If your performance evaluations include a rating system on how the employees live the values, state that. We are seeing a trend of organizations posting their values on the page before you can enter a job search. They state things like – “here are our values, if you agree to uphold them, click here to continue. If these values do not match your personal values, thank you for considering employment at our organization, but we would not be a good fit for you”. Nice gate keeper approach. Remember – repelling employees that don’t fit is as important (if not more important) than attracting ones that will.
Performance: How fiscally sound is your organization? If you have public numbers, publish them. If your organization has recently merged or is expanding and building new hospitals or clinics, list them. Candidates want to see the potential for growth and don’t want to make a career change to an organization that is perceived as stagnant.
Design/Style: What does your organization “look like”? A great way to show off is to have a video recording of your campus. Google started this practice five years ago with “a day in the life of a Googler”. Get out there and shoot some real footage of your hospital and your employees. Everyone knows that the Microsoft stock photo people don’t work at every hospital website they appear on!
Technology and Innovation: How about we weave in some of the state of the art technologies your organization uses? This could be anything that demonstrates that your hospital is innovative and cutting edge. It could include the way you use social media in your recruiting efforts or how technology is used by your physicians or hospitalists.
Environmentally Friendly/Green: You may not have given this category a lot of thought but this is an important one! The new trend in recruiting is to switch to live virtual interviews via webcam versus phone screening or flying candidates in for second round interviews. The reduction in carbon footprint is just as impactful as the cost savings of candidate travel. Baptist Health System in San Antonio, Texas took the “Best Candidate Experience” award at the 2010 Onrec Global Expo for their physician recruiting practices by implementing the GreenJobInterview.com solution. This innovative solution is cashing in on the green – in more ways than one!
So begin the New Year by taking your employment brand for a spin and see how it matches up to the factors car shoppers use. You just might see the similarities in consumer branding and the employment branding process.
Lizz Pellet, Chief Cultural Officer of EMERGE International and Fellow from Johns Hopkins University, is the author of the new SHRM publication: The Cultural Fit Factor, Creating an Employment Brand that Attracts, Retains and Repels the right employees. She has also written Getting Your Shift Together: Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change. Lizz is a master facilitator and educator. She is a member of the National Speakers Association and has presented over 70 professional learning sessions in the past three years. Her high energy, use of humor and relevant business content make her a very popular keynote speaker.
