Is your healthcare staffing agency the best it can be?
This is a question a lot of agencies are asking right now, especially as we look at current economic conditions, a challenging labor market, and tightening budgets.
It’s not enough to be good. You have to be great.
But what does great look like in 2023? What actions are winning healthcare staffing agencies taking to set themselves apart from the crowd?
Luckily, Great Recruiters is proud to work with the Top Rated Healthcare Staffing Agencies of 2022. And based on our experiences with them, here are some of the actions that set winning healthcare agencies apart from the rest.
1. Capturing real-time reviews to measure experiences?
We live in a reviews economy, plain and simple.
There’s a lot of competition in the marketplace. Coming off a challenging—and in many ways, traumatizing—pandemic, healthcare workers have become very intentional about their career paths.
As healthcare recruiters, it’s critical that you’re fostering the best possible experiences for the healthcare workers you engage with. The only way to measure experience quality is to collect feedback.
But that’s where a lot of healthcare staffing firms make some major mistakes:
- Only collecting feedback at the end of the year—when the time to fix a potential mistake has long passed
- Only collecting feedback from placed talent—not the other 95% of interactions you have
- Only collecting passive feedback—not actively soliciting it
Top healthcare staffing agencies don’t make these mistakes. They understand that if they want to create great experiences, they have to measure them in real time, across all their interactions.
The ultimate goal is to have a full-cycle feedback loop to measure experiences, identify areas for improvement, and celebrate successes.
READ MORE: Why you need real-time reviews to measure candidate & client experiences.
2. Acting on feedback to improve organizational performance
Winning healthcare recruiting agencies don’t just collect feedback. They act on it.
They use real-time feedback as an internal performance and quality assurance tool. Positive feedback can identify those areas where you want to double down. Negative feedback highlights areas for improvement.
What’s more, winning healthcare agencies aren’t just collecting feedback from placed talent. Think about it: the people who you don’t end up working with have as much to say—if not more—than the people you end up working with.
If you want a truly objective perspective on how you’re doing, you need to gather feedback across every interaction.
This can have number of downstream effects:
- More referrals, since candidates, clients, and placed talent are satisfied with their experiences
- Less turnover in staff, as recruiters will want to stay in a job that takes their development and improvement seriously
- Improved brand reputation—since you have other people talking about how great you are
Granted, in some organizations, there’s a fear of the Big Brother effect. No one likes to be under a microscope, and recruiters are no exception.
But when we talk to our top healthcare clients, they point out that positive feedback is a major value-add to their culture. When recruiters hear from a third-party how well they’re doing, it motivates them to do better. This, in turn, makes the whole agency better.
2. Automation across the entire candidate journey
Technology is a hot button issue in recruiting and staffing. For many companies, there’s a fear that technology will replace the human recruiter—the rise of online job boards being a primary example.
However, technology and human recruiters don’t have to be at odds.
In fact, as healthcare recruiters and agencies face tighter budgets, there’s a growing push to do more with less. Technology and automation can be a major aid in this regard.
Far from replacing the human recruiter, the right technologies and automations will take over monotonous tasks, so recruiters can focus on the human parts of the job.
An example of this is review capture. If your applicant tracking system (ATS) is integrated with your review capture platform, when a candidate takes on a placement, the system automatically sends out a review request.
That way, the recruiter isn’t spending their time sending out form emails. Instead, they’ll spend their time reviewing the automatically captured feedback, adjusting their performance or their team’s accordingly.
Additionally, automating review capture removes some of the awkwardness from the process. After all, recruiters may feel weird about sending out a review request. When the process is automated, then it’s out of their hands.
READ MORE: How Canada’s largest staffing firm leveraged technology to fuel a decade of growth.
4. Brand awareness:it’s not just for the marketing department
When you collect real-time reviews, you aren’t just collecting internal performance management data. You’re collecting marketing and branding assets.
So many staffing firms talk about how great they are. But when you have objective reviews from your candidates, clients, and placed talent, you can show how great you are.
These digital assets can be used on your website, social media, and across all your marketing channels. Additionally, when you use Great Recruiters, we provide you with a reviews page that ranks high on Google. When people search for your agency, they can see all your positive reviews in one prominent place.
For most staffing firms, this positive brand awareness makes agency marketing much easier. From SEO to increased traffic to more positive sentiment among prospects, there’s no substitute for having other people talk about how great you are.
At the end of the day, the foundation of a great brand is trust and transparency. You can’t paper over bad experiences, people are too vocal for that. The only way to actually build a great brand is to create great experiences and equip your champions to share those experiences in their own words.
5. Move beyond recruiters: compliance and facility reviews
While capturing recruiter reviews is important, remember that candidate experience doesn’t stop with the recruiter. From compliance, facilities, placements, HR, and other departments, it’s important to know how candidates are interacting with those particular steps in the journey.
These reviews are helpful because they pull back the curtain on aspects of your business that you may not be necessarily monitoring actively. But a bad experience can seriously impact candidate and talent retention. If you can capture and spot these issues quickly, then you can work to fix the issue.
For example, let’s consider a travel nurse company. If the agency triggers a facility review six weeks into the traveler’s assignment, and the traveler leaves a five-star review, the recruiter can work to extend the assignment or redeploy the traveler, rather than put them in a completely new environment.
On the other hand, if the recruiter gets one-star reviews, they can pivot where they place the nurse, or work to advocate on the traveler’s behalf to improve their situation.
6. Measuring the ROI of experience management
One of the biggest discoveries that companies are making now is realizing just how much of a positive ROI there is for experience management.
While the impact on brand is important, measuring other attributes of the experiences you create is important:
- Referrals
- Retention (both internal and external talent)
- Won sales opportunities (or, on the other hand, missed opportunities)
- Internal efficiency, morale, and culture
The experiences you create lay the foundation for your success as a business. By investing in the necessary infrastructure to measure and maintain high quality experiences, you can stand ahead of the crowd and become a true stand-out healthcare staffing firm in 2023.
