The temporary healthcare staffing industry is still full of opportunities if you’re prepared for them—the segment is expected to grow 18 percent from 2016 to 2026, far outpacing the projected seven percent growth for overall employment. But with competition for limited talent increasing and a host of compliance challenges for staffing firms, it’s also rife with unique obstacles and pitfalls. Is your firm equipped to handle them?

With the right technology built specifically for the needs of healthcare staffing firms, you can be more productive and provide better service to your candidates and clients. Ask yourself the following questions and jot down your score to assess how well you are leveraging healthcare staffing technology.

1) Stay on top of your relationships

Healthcare staffing is built on relationships—relationships with your clients, providers, and recruiters. But much of the current technology used in the industry isn’t built to manage relationships. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) built specifically for staffing professionals are designed to handle complex and numerous relationships across both candidates/providers and hiring facilities all in one system. If you aren’t able to answer yes to the questions below, it may be time to invest in a solution that helps you efficiently manage your candidates and clients.

Goal: Give your relationships the attention they deserve to provide a better experience

Assessment:

Providers (Candidates):

• Do you have insight into the best time of day to contact candidates, as well as the best means for reaching them?
• Do you leverage automation to know far in advance which of your providers have upcoming expiring credentials and do you have procedures for collecting documents electronically and getting them renewed before the expiration date?
• Do you have SMS/text capabilities integrated with your ATS so you can engage with candidates who are on-the-go all the time?

Facilities:

• Do you understand the goals of the facilities you work with across multiple decision-makers—the percent of clinical staff expected to be contingent workers, the areas in which they’re struggling to improve, and how you can help them achieve their results?
• Do you have real-time visibility into your relationships with all key contacts at multiple management levels across your top accounts?
• Do you know when is the best time of day to try and reach those contacts? Do you have ways to automatically identify problems and alert your team to them before they get escalated?
• Does your ATS help you assess the risk level of your relationships?

Add Up Your Score:

For each section, add up the number of questions that you can respond to with a positive answer. This will help you determine which areas you may want to supplement with a healthcare staffing technology solution.

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What your score means: A low score means you have room for growth when it comes to managing relationships with your providers and/or facilities. Examine your answers. If technological limitations are preventing you from providing the attention your providers and facilities deserve, consider using an ATS built for staffing healthcare professionals.

2) Redeploy more of your workers

The talent shortage—the number one challenge across the industry, according to most professionals—isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. With new candidates becoming increasingly hard to find, how can you make up for the gap?

One solution: redeploy more of your existing workers after their assignment ends. A quarter of staffing firms redeploy less than 10 percent of their workers, meaning for 90 percent of workers, the time and resources to find, credential, and place those providers is lost. To maximize your efficiency and profitability, redeploy more of your workforce.  

Goal: Use your staffing technology to redeploy more providers immediately after their assignments end

Assessment:

• Does your ATS allow you to monitor when workers are coming off assignments and contact them?
• Can you easily identify open shifts that are a fit for your available providers and easily identify qualified providers to fill an open shift?
• Can you identify if their credentials are still valid, help expedite renewal, and/or request and process any new credentials that you need?
• Are you able to update their credentials electronically? From any device?

Add Up Your Score:

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What your score means: A low score means you have an opportunity to redeploy more candidates—and become more profitable and efficient as a result. Leverage an ATS with the above capabilities to boost your redeployment rate.

3) Execute your growth strategy—then track and measure it

Your firm isn’t going to grow by accident. An ATS with robust reporting capabilities is critical if you want to understand your business and how you can grow it. Check your current capabilities against this set of questions to see if you have everything you need to flourish.

Goal: Measure your data and use it to make smarter business decisions

• Do you have a defined growth strategy in place to achieve your 2-3 year growth goals?
• Are you able to track all of the KPIs you need to understand your business?
  • Time to fill?
  • Fill ratio?
  • Gross margin(by recruiter, job type, segment, office/region)? 
  • Drop-off rate—The number of candidates you lose during the credentialing process?
  • Average ratio of providers working per recruiter?
  • Recruiter performance metrics—placements, job orders, and reps?
  • Ramp up time for new recruiters?
  • Pipeline status—including views based on job order importance/value or created date, and conversion rates at various stages of the placement process?

• Do you have a good understanding of the reports you need to run to make actionable changes that’ll help you grow your business?
• Do you have easy access to the following data?
  • Placement volumes—the number of providers you place.
  • Pipeline velocity—The ratio of your win rate and deal size compared to the number of days it takes to complete a sales cycle.
  • Margins—The profit leftover once operating costs are accounted for.
• Is your reporting system fully ad-hoc, so that you can analyze data in a way that makes most sense for your business, like by location or specialty, or are you refined to limited options?
• Do you know which sources for providers are most effective?

Add Up Your Score:

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What your score means: If you have a low score, you may consider using a reporting solution that lets you track all of your pertinent business data. Monitoring this data enables you to make more informed decisions about your time, resources, and investments.

4) Be more productive and provide a better service

Healthcare staffing is only getting more competitive. Are you delivering a better service than your competition? If the technology you use to run your firm is limited, your ability to deliver a great experience will be, too. Here are some top performance questions to consider.

Goal: Use your healthcare staffing technology to maximize your performance

Assessment:

• Does your ATS offer a flexible search solution so you can search by radius, credential, or custom fields?
• Does your ATS make it easy to shortlist candidates by skills and credentials?
• Do you have a best-in-class platform that’s extensible and customizable and extensible, so you can easily integrate with other software solutions?
• Are you able to integrate easily with other software solutions that’ll help you place your candidates?
• Can you automate:
  • Credentialing?
  • Onboarding?
  • Shift scheduling?
  • Back office activities (invoicing, payroll, timesheets, commissions, billing hours, etc.)?
  • VMS job importing?
• Can you easily stitch or merge PDFs into a compact collection of credentials in one place?
• Does the time you spend on manual processes limit the amount of you can spend nurturing candidate relationships?

Add Up Your Score:

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What your score means: Each ‘yes’ is a feature your firm can use to provide an incredible service and perform more efficiently. Take note of the capabilities you’re currently lacking and determine if they’ll help you meet your goals.

To succeed in healthcare staffing, it’s essential to be able to perform a wide array of tasks and do them well. Technology built with healthcare staffing needs in mind allows you to execute on the unique demands of the healthcare industry and on the unique demands of the recruiting profession. With the right approach and the right technology, your firm will be in a great position to increase business and provide an incredible experience to your candidates and clients in 2018 and well beyond.