Rapid growth in unfilled healthcare roles is forcing teams to build better hiring strategies. Learn how direct sourcing, when combined with the power of a vendor management system (VMS), can help organizations fill vacant roles.
Over the past two years, the healthcare staffing industry has grown rapidly. According to Staffing Industry Analyst’s US Healthcare Staffing Market Assessment, US job openings in healthcare and social assistance roughly doubled in 2021-2022.
Nonetheless, the increase in job openings doesn’t match the number of hires in the industry. Although hires in healthcare and social assistance in the US have increased, they’re far from equaling the number of job openings. There’s a big imbalance in the demand over the supply of healthcare practitioners.
In these circumstances, hospitals and medical institutions need to start implementing more efficient staffing business models. Direct sourcing has been the answer for many institutions that need a more accelerated strategy. Indeed, 60% of large organizations are expecting to utilize direct sourcing in the next couple of years.
Direct sourcing is a process through which organizations attract talent using their own brand. That is, without the help of a third party such as a healthcare staffing agency or nursing firm. This sourcing method has plenty of efficiency and budget benefits that speed up and improve the recruiting process, especially when used alongside a VMS.
In this blog, we break down three essential steps any healthcare institution needs to follow to ensure a successful direct sourcing program.
1. Attracting the Right Talent
With direct sourcing, you’re in charge of getting the word out about job openings in your medical center. Once you open the position in your VMS, you have to increase traffic to the job posting by pushing it out to different job boards. In this step, it’s important that your brand is consistent across all your channels, including in job postings on your website or via social media. You don’t want to confuse candidates about who your organization is and what kind of talent you need.
Besides job listings, you can also leverage other talent attraction strategies, such as rehiring known talent or encouraging employee referrals.
Rehiring Known Talent
Sometimes, the ideal person for a role is someone who has already worked in your organization. With the right technology, contacting excellent former workers becomes an efficient way to quickly source talent and fill positions.
VectorVMS provides an automated way to track individuals who are eligible (and ineligible) for rehire across the entire program. Some of our healthcare clients use this to bring back well-trained, reliable talent to fill positions in their medical centers. In addition, the system can link to HR or HRIS systems to incorporate FTE (Full-time equivalent) data. This information helps determine the rehire eligibility of each candidate.
As a plus, extending engagements with a previously engaged employee allows you to fill new roles without having to repeatedly revalidate compliance. This means less time spent filling out new information for everyone.
Employee Referrals
In a webinar we hosted, employee referrals were highlighted as one of the most regularly used hiring sources across several industries.
Why is this? First of all, they improve the quality of the hire and the retention rate. Applicants that are referred by an employee tend to move forward in the process much faster and are more likely to stay longer in the position. Moreover, this is a method that can significantly cut down recruiting costs in your program.
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2. Building a Private Talent Pool
A successful direct sourcing strategy requires you to create a private talent pool.
You need to curate all your candidate leads into this pool. Once curated, it will act as a database containing useful information about all the talent you attract.
By leveraging VectorVMS’s enhanced talent pool functionality, you can create talent pools for nurses or other types of roles. By nurturing this pool, you have the ability to directly source contingent talent that will show up in the candidate review area of the system. You never know if a candidate you find today might be perfect for a position in the future.
Furthermore, through this database you can regularly engage with your candidates, let them know about future job opportunities, or keep them posted about the hiring process. Coupled with in-built assessment tools, it can also be useful to test candidates for particular types of vacancies.
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3. Approaching Your Candidates
Once you’ve attracted enough submissions and curated your pool according to your requirements, you can take a vital step in the operation: engaging the candidates.
Without the right technology in place, this can become a cumbersome task, with a lot of manual procedures that could result in errors. Making mistakes during the process due to poorly organized data or misplacement of confidential information could ruin the candidate experience. No healthcare organization would want to lose an exceptional health practitioner because of a poor hiring experience.
A VMS provides the perfect system to prevent that from happening. It allows you to have all of your job postings and candidate data in one place. By having all information centralized, you can automate all the interactions with your contractors—from the first engagement to the offboarding process. This doesn’t only make an otherwise admin-heavy task easier—a VMS also provides insights that help you better understand the talent and data you’re gathering in your talent pool.
If you want to learn more about how to integrate direct sourcing into your VMS, we can help you! Get in touch with one of our experts—we’ll be glad to help you!
Meet the Expert
Irene Koulianos – Program Manager
Irene Koulianos brings a decade of experience in contingent labor staffing and recruitment to her role as Program Manager. She helps new and existing clients to develop best-fit vendor management solutions for their contingent labor programs. This includes product demonstrations, completing bids, and supporting the product team with roadmap initiatives. In addition to this primary role, she is passionate about building eLearning solutions for clients, partners, and internal VectorVMS staff leveraging Learning Technologies Group products. Prior to joining VectorVMS, Irene worked for large international staffing organizations as well as smaller boutique IT recruitment firms. She has a deep understanding of the contingent workforce landscape which helps her create meaningful solutions for her clients. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
