Healthcare is one of the most valuable sectors of the economy. Not just because its contribution towards the gross domestic product of a country is significant, but also because it saves a lot of lives. Even though we see a substantial increase in the adoption of technology in the healthcare sector, the contribution of people can’t be ruled out. It is ultimately the healthcare professionals that the industry depends upon. For this reason, hiring the wrong ones can cost organizations more than they can imagine.
Believe it or not, but if your healthcare company has a weak employer brand or outdated talent qualifiers, you might be losing out on a significant number of clients, even without realizing it. Even statistics back this fact.
According to recent research, 33 percent of the jobs in the healthcare industry are clinical. Moreover, by the year 2026, nearly 14 percent of the jobs will be in the healthcare industry. This points to the conclusion that the healthcare app development is expanding at an exponential rate, with the requirement of a vast number of technical and clinical experts. On the one hand, companies are looking forward to hiring experienced candidates, despite fewer applicants each year. On the other side, applicants are looking forward to an enjoyable experience along with a credible employer brand.
Be it the receding number of applications or the lack of investment in their branding; healthcare organizations are hiring the wrong kind of professionals.
Michael Lewis, the bestselling author of the 2004 book Moneyball, points out that what begins as the failure of imagination ends as a market inefficiency. It means when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job just because their appearance doesn’t fit your job profile; you are less likely to find the best candidate for the job.
Just like Moneyball, the healthcare sector is long overdue for such a revolution. The Business will be a push towards value-based payment. It is thus, making clear that hiring professionals need to do a better job in generating outcomes that are of significance to a patient. These may include improved health, positive healthcare experience and excellent quality of life.
Even though the current hiring might not be biased towards funny looking people, it is drawn towards candidates with class and education attainment, race, etc. However, this methodology is much outdated in today’s world. We live in a world where the critical drivers of health include social, behavioral and relational factors along with a patient’s relationship with their healthcare team. For this reason, the healthcare sector needs to look beyond biomedical knowledge to other relevant factors when hiring professionals.
The exiting problems in healthcare
To hire more qualified professionals, the first step is to look at the existing issues that prevail in the healthcare industry. Once organizations have an idea about the current problems, they can easily understand what the workforce needs to do to achieve the desired results.
Let’s say that you are working with a group of patients in a community. To hire the requisite workforce in the area, you must ask your patients questions like what helps them become and stay healthy. Once this question is asked to a variety of patients such as those who are at the risk of poor health outcomes, and impactful community care program can be designed. In this program, you can list specific barriers that the patients face in leading and sustaining a healthy life. Moreover, as an organization, you can also list probable solutions to these problems and the attributes required to execute them.
Now instead of finding candidates with a fixed set of medical skills, look for those who can contribute to the community and have the skills to execute the planned programs. When Harvard University conducted such a plan, they were astonished to find community membership and altruism rise to the top of their list of desirable skills in the candidates. Similarly, when they began searching for candidates with these abilities, they discovered that occasionally a community health worker with real-life expertise but no college diploma had more relevant abilities than the one having a very respectable level.
Look in technology areas
Once medical organizations and hiring professionals know the problems to solve, they must look at a wide variety of spaces for ideal candidates. Posting on employment websites and job marketing sites looks like a perfect step towards the cause. However, while these are conventional methods, they also stop a large number of suitable candidates for approaching medical organizations. It sort of sets a barrier to entry.
On the other hand, organizations must look for relevant skills required to solve a problem along with a candidate’s friendliness with technology. Be it remote healthcare solution or management of staff and patients in the hospital, since cutting edge technology is being used for everything, candidates must be technology-friendly. Organizations can then set out the search by advertising jobs in more local areas.
Right assessment tools to hire people
While grades, degrees and educational backgrounds are generally observed to find the right candidates, they seldom throw light on a candidate’s personality traits. Instead of traditional evaluation approaches, organizations should instead look for multi-modal approaches to hiring professions.
When more than one parameter is considered in making a decision, not only does the outcome turn out to be more fruitful but also more close to the ideal candidate for a particular job.
Conclusion: Machine learning can help
While hiring medical professionals might seem like a challenging task, machine learning can help simplify it without a lot of effort. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have surprisingly many benefits for HR professionals looking to hire the right candidates in the industry. While human nature is prone to a wide variety of biases, ML can supersede all of this and look for more human elements that are required to solve a problem, in a candidate. Medical experts must turn to these emerging ideas to find and hire the best professionals.
