Raising Dreams and Lives...Together: 4/4: Teamwork

Raising Dreams and Lives…Together
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My Four Part Series for Employer Medical Recruiters, The Final Part Four – It all comes together with Teamwork
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Employer medical recruiters and their efforts directly impact the lives of their patients and communities. It’s an incredible responsibility. Because of this, it there is a solemn and moral responsibility to be dedicated to continual improvement and professional growth. By raising the dreams of people to obtain their ideal career choice in the medical profession with your employer, your goal is also to raise the standard of care – and the lives of your patients. This series is focused on the four core components necessary for employer medical recruiters to excel and be great.
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In Part I, I made it clear that claiming “I love my employer” and your community, and showing up for work every day, and eventually filling your open jobs, is not enough! Because your work impacts lives, you owe your employer and its patients the focus on recruiting the best practitioners and not merely filling a job opening – and growing and improving in this dynamic market where there is intense competition is required, or else you are “behind” before you know it.
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Part II: This was acknowledgement that growing your marketing and selling skills and committing to being a real “sales professional” is necessary.
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In Part III I hammered you with exactly what you need to do in order to be your very best:
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You are committed to understand and then identify your “target market,” and then craft your “sales presentation.” As a sales pro you understand you are competing – you present yourself and your employer in a manner that positions you to both sell as well as outsell your competition – you are not recruiting in a vacuum. You are committed to being an expert on issues candidates need to know to promote your expertise so you are perceived as a bona fide advocate by candidates as opposed to merely an interview scheduler – a secretary can do that. You understand the importance of choreographing candidate visits (in a general sense; naturally, candidates will have different or specific needs). You need to develop a Q/A protocol that is incorporated into your position to monitor your success. All great sales pros have a sales tool – you have committed to not settling for anything but the best tool (Naturally, I recommend Online Job Tour® as the optimal approach to harnessing the Internet to achieve success).
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Before we get to Part Four – a note on acquiring/harvesting candidates. I mentioned in Part III that although this is for another blog entry, I am not a believer in the reliance on third party recruiters as the source of candidates. Employers need to understand that all jobseekers now use the Internet and there are ways to brand your employer as well as communicate with local and regional education institutions in order to obtain proprietary candidates (which are far better in most cases than those presented by contingency-based recruiters). The art of recruiting has been lost in the haste of trying to fill jobs and it can and should be focused on again – Promo Web Innovations has many solutions for our clients and is available to offer ideas to you. Nonetheless, I discuss the development of relationships with third party recruiters below.
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Now to Part Four – It all comes together with Teamwork
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Even Michael Jordan needed good teammates and everyone working together in order to win championships. Legendary basketball coach John Wooden, who won an unprecedented 10 national championships at UCLA, needed great players – and it took both years before they reached the pinnacle.
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• This is when I need to stop and remind you that greatness and the “ultimate success” will not happen overnight. Success is also elusive – your market and prospects change. But what you must have is the right motivation and mindset, developed skills, as well as tools and teamwork with others, in order to be a champion employer recruiter. At some point when you become expert, much of your work can either be put on “automatic pilot” or trained upon others.
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With our focus on your becoming a great employer recruiter, similarly, you must a good support system min the form of a staff and outside assistance – the formation of your “team,” if the budget is there, is integral to your success.
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If you are a sole recruiter (and on your own) for your employer:
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Sole employer recruiters need leverage because you are going to be so busy dealing with the logistics of communicating with candidates and your organization’s superiors. Here you need a great sales tool to “do your selling for you” and also save time if the selling tool educates, answers questions, and positions your employer to maximize your marketability and competitiveness – you have to anticipate the obvious questions and needs of your candidates and their families regarding your employer and service area.
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Again, I strongly encourage you consider our patented Online Job Tour – which is a web based system in the form of a recruitment website that does all this automatically, and our test market proves its ability to educate and compel prospective candidates while saving time and effort for both sides while helping our clients compete. Our staff is an excellent source to assist you with technical answers to your challenges up until you design proformas/offers/negotiations with physician and high end practitioners, which will likely be coordinated with your senior administrators (job offers to department directors, mid level and staff positions are often packaged by HR Directors at an employer of your size). The point here is, if your responsibility is from the point of advertising the opening through introducing a legitimate and authentically interested candidate to your employer’s key hiring personnel, then Online Job Tour can be the anchor around which your dealings with jobseekers can be coordinated along with a solidly developed recruitment protocol – which we can also assist you in crafting. For you there would be nothing better than a recruitment process that runs on optimal efficiency that you can “turnstile” easily and effectively.
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It is likely that as a sole employer recruiter you have sources from which you obtain candidates (if you are a smaller operation, then most are primary care practitioners). Due to your limited time, I appreciate your initial impulse may be to immediately turn to outside recruiting sources, but I encourage you to consider developing relationships with residency program directors in your region as well as medical academic programs, and key in on major job fair events – the former prefer to deal with you – an employer, vs. recruiters, and job fair events are great opportunities to develop and leverage relationships, talk to prospects, and get referrals. Saving the $15,000 to $30,000 “recruiter fee” would be welcomed by your employer when filling that key opening. Employers often forget to incentivize their own employees to draft prospective candidates for their open positions.
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If your employer allows for the creation/development of a recruitment team:
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Bring together different talents: Here you are a larger organization with a larger budget that includes staff, so there is the initial challenge for you to have clear responsibilities identified for your team members to promote efficiency while you can leverage what are hopefully different skills among them. For example, you may have a professional designated to deal with outside recruiting sources to help source prospective candidates as well as be responsible for your employer’s branding and proprietary recruiting efforts. You may have someone to assist you in coordinating all interview visits – a laborious task that in volume is expensive but also can be designed shrewdly to get discounts from hoteliers and other local organizations/vendors/even restaurants. Another may be a person at your employer who will work with candidates at the stage they are ready to construct offers/financial packages/incentives/benefits.
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The Selling Tools: Nonetheless, your conundrum is that jobseekers will find your job openings online – their first impression and introduction to you. And with how our culture is online and has a preference to shop there – especially the newer, younger medical jobseekers, I again recommend Online Job Tour to be your anchor tool as your first communication and continual reference point with candidates.
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• Our 2009 Survey showed our clients fill their jobs 19% faster, reduce their need for site visits by 33%, and they also reduce their use of expensive third party recruiters by 1 in 7. Among other benefits, Online Job Tour attracts the better candidates/professionals and has even served to put our hospital clients in a better negotiating position because the candidates are truly motivated and want the job vs. the employer being desperate to land them and feel the need to offer higher bonuses and guarantees.
• As an FYI, there are now studies out there which point specifically to the revenue generated by physicians and specific specialties to hospitals – your ability to fill an open physician job one month sooner can mean as much as $100,000 to your employer. So filling a key job faster with a better employee or physician can have a huge impact on your employer’s bottom line.
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Try to Curb Recruiters and their fees: And if you have a larger volume of recruiting than a 150 bed hospital or less, there should be a meaningful effort to curb third party recruiter fees, which can easily exceed $200,000 annually at your employer. I suggest learning about SEO strategies regarding marketing your openings – be on search results for Google, Yahoo and Bing for key words and phrases your target market will use when looking for jobs – Promo Web innovations has developed successful working prototypes for our clients that we can share with you. Candidates especially from contingency-based recruiters have been shopped to many places and their origins can be dubious. They are also coached in favor of the recruiter making that placement with you or anyone.
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Use the Internet Proactively: With your budget you have a great opportunity to market your employer online. There are many services out there, such as Constant Contact, which can continue dialogues with many different professionals, jobseekers – even those you do not land but may have a chance for in the future, and representatives of services. While most hospitals have a marketing department, it is usually focused on marketing the services of the hospital and there are few professional “closers” or sales pros there. Consider engaging a local PR firm to at minimum glean ideas from them as to how you can use the Internet and any other tools to grow your presence and marketability.
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Consider making vendors like recruiters feel like they are a part of your team: Because it is likely you will need to utilize vendors such as third party recruiters to source candidates, I advocate choosing professionals who demonstrate experience and an expertise that extends beyond sourcing – let’s face it, candidates pretty much come through the internet and so merely providing resumes is not an indicator of anything more than that. A vendor with prior professional selling experience who understands the art of closing a deal, and even a professional who brings skills to the table that include help with putting together offer packages can help to grow your own skills. While you generally should keep your vendors on somewhat of a need to know basis, if you have a good relationship with them and make them feel a part of your team (in a general sense), you will likely get better attention from them as well as more attention to the details of the candidates they provide.
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Your team should be a well-oiled machine where its members understand their roles, so that you can turnstile the process (at least to a reasonable degree) so that every new job opening is not “reinventing the wheel.” Those outside your inner circle (recruiters, PR groups, industry contacts, local professionals who may assist you during interviews, etc.) should be made to feel important and special to you. I am a big believer in customizing interview visits down to routes you drive them around town and people you “coincidentally” run into when out and about.
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A note about Facebook and Social Networking: Hospitals creating a Facebook page has become trendy and I am not totally convinced that the time put into it, and paying an employee to oversee a FB page, does much for recruiting. Branding itself in its service area – if there is competition, may help its business a little bit. Would employees feel obligated to post remarks on it? Probably not. What about potential problems, such as former patients posting nasty or unflattering remarks and the need to erase them, or the conundrum of leaving the posts? These things have not been though about enough; I think the fact that FB is “free” and is a social phenomenon has created this “phase.”
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• The difference with Online Job Tour, among many, with FB is that our clients have 100% control over its content and making changes to it – it cannot be compromised by outside parties.
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A note about “Retention:” I have seen some terrible figures regarding some hospital corporations and their retention numbers with physicians – some with a 50% retention rate after 36 months. With a great deal of experience and feeling as though I understand the entire recruitment spectrum and the many issues for both sides, I am convinced that the reason for poor retention among relocating medical professionals is primarily due to the hospitals focus on closing the deal and focusing on its terms and not as much focus on educating and selling their service areas and the lifestyle that relocating employees can expect – only after they relocate to the professionals learn about the communities they moved to.
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The issue is about these new employees and physicians not being fully committed to the deal – they don’t establish meaningful relationships right away and there is no connection – especially with the spouse.
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If you think about it, the hardest physicians to recruit away are those who are invested in their service areas – who have relationships, partnerships and businesses there. Our Online Job Tour has shown an incredible “transformative impact” on the recruiting process where candidates interviewing for the first time arrive with confidence and excitement vs. anxiety and unprepared – because Online Job Tour is designed to be more comprehensive than the real interview trip, which has time and money limitations, and separates spouses, among a host of other potential problems. With ultimate goal of making an ideal professional and lifestyle fit, our clients are building upon the familiarization promoted with Online Job Tour to immediately establish relationships with those community leaders featured in their Online Job Tours, as a way to start the process of getting the physicians and practitioners committed to a long term career and life with them – please contact us for more information on the work we are doing here.
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A note about Selflessness: Being a great team member or team leader means you also have a willingness to help others, cheer others on, and revel in and applaud their success. Because your job ultimately impacts lives of your patients and their families, it is important to respect all others, including your vendors, by following the “Golden Rule.” Only bad things can result when you mistreat people. I am also a believer in karma. Treat others with sincere kindness and appreciation. If you’re really good and committed, people will know and respect that you are in charge and you are important.
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Your Final Foundation Commitment:
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It’s been a long series, and I apologize for this last one being a little late – the summer and fall have been busy for me. But I am at the end of this important road with you. You are now a better recruiter for your organization.
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Your Final Commitment:.
“I understand that my work and the work of the people I include in my efforts affect lives. I will commit to seeking excellence, experience and talent to not only contribute, but make me better, when constructing a team and vendors for my purpose of being my best. I will treat others with the respect they deserve and they way I would want to be treated, in order to promote an excellent environment to exchange ideas and information, as well as to get these many influences favoring me – after all, I am in a competitive business. My commitment to being great includes how I treat and involve others in my process and thanking them when I achieve success.”
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Thank you for taking this workshop/series with me and you have my sincere best wishes as you move forward with raising lives and dreams of others. Please let me know how you are doing my contacting me through our company’s website at www.onlinejobtour.com