You have a lot riding on ensuring recruiting success to your FQHC or community health organization. The longer the time to hire the harder it is on the team that’s picking up the extra work stemming from the vacancy. The pressure is on. But if it’s been a while since you’ve recruited for that particular position, it’s far too easy to make mistakes. This is particularly true if you’re looking for a high-level health center executive. These negotiations are tricky and the cost of getting it wrong is exorbitantly high. That’s why we’re sharing some of the most common mistakes we see community health organizations making when they recruit health center executives. This blog will help you avoid costly mistakes that could lengthen your time to hire.
Mistakes to Avoid When Recruiting Community Health Executives
Mistake #1: Failing to track, learn, and improve.
How can you know you’re succeeding if you don’t have metrics to build toward your success? As a permanent placement recruitment firm specializing in the most difficult healthcare executive positions, we have an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. That means we set daily, weekly, and monthly metrics to create the activities leading to our success. These building blocks include the number of contacts, resumes, and interviews we conduct. But there’s more than basic activities to build a candidate funnel. It’s important to track these success metrics:
- Time to fill, or the time it takes to fill the role.
- Quality of hire is a long-term measurement to track employee productivity, tenure, and impact on the organization.
- Cost per hire calculates how much you spent attracting the health executive candidate versus the return on the investment.
- Most productive sourcing channel is a great way to determine which job boards or other recruiting venues.
You should also track retention versus the number of new hires. This is an important measure of your culture and other details about your organization that can stymie your recruiting efforts.
Mistake #2: Failing to Proactively Source Candidates
When the demand for a healthcare executive outstrips the supply, depending upon the job application process to send you good candidates is a huge mistake. Finding qualified healthcare executives in this market requires proactive sourcing, consistency, and network building. Some of the best ways to build your proactive candidate funnel include:
- Using social media to engage with candidates. Your facility and recruiting team should have a strong digital presence across all social media channels. You can do this with published content and social media posts. But whoever is doing your recruiting should also be proactively reaching out to candidates as part of their everyday to fill the roles they’re after.
- Developing an employee referral program is critical to bringing in a steady stream of qualified and pre-vetted candidates. Reward the referring employee with a small bonus or reward if the candidate they recommend is hired. Also, use this program to encourage employees to post your job ads on their social media threads.
We know that following through on all of these proactive candidate hiring steps isn’t something you may have time for. That’s where UHC Solutions can help. We have a team devoted to improving your time to hire. Talk with us about your next candidate search