If you know much about the demand for healthcare information technology (HIT) talent, then you know there’s not enough of it to go around. Healthcare organizations everywhere are trying to locate and recruit this talent – some with more success than others. I’m involved with recruiting HIT talent, and I have some insights to share about how HIT staffing works versus how it could be better. Allow me to state my position and see if you agree.
The best staffing relationships are more than agreements – they are partnerships.
Staffing firms that will be the most helpful to you will act more as partners – augmenting your staff in strategic ways. Partners will:
- Learn about your short- and long-term goals, the problems you are trying to solve, the impact of the problems while they go unresolved, and the new opportunities that will exist when the problem is solved.
- Work to understand the capabilities of your current organization to help you inventory the skills needed in a contracted resource.
- Help you assess your priorities to support day-to-day needs and enable progress on your strategic imperatives, too.
- Advise on staffing model options before providing the first contractor.
| | Find a staffing partner that values the success of your organization and is invested in making it happen. |
Specialized staffing partners know your business and produce results.
For best results, contracted HIT resources should have direct experience with healthcare implementations. Some technical skills are transferable, but understanding of clinical environments, the impact of technology changes in them, and knowing the gravity of missteps in HIT is what differentiates IT professionals who know healthcare. Specialized staffing partners can:
- Prioritize quality of candidates over quantity. They’ll help you hone in on a few experts who may be a good fit for your team and the job at hand.
- Identify the right number of skilled experts to involve based on your budget, project complexity, timeline, and other factors.
- Understand what’s upstream and downstream from the technology change you need to implement. This is where being familiar with clinical operations is critical – to your timeline and to the success of what you’re trying to do.
- Help you if your scope creeps. It happens. Choose a partner who can help if the start and end points of your project get more complicated or call for more progress than first anticipated.
| | Staffing partners with knowledge of healthcare IT ecosystems like yours produce better project outcomes. |
Effective staffing partners have vision for staffing strategies that could work for you.
Options for HIT staffing can range from single resources for a very specific development project to full-service management of your hospital’s managed services (support, maintenance, breaks, fixes). Choose a partner that understands the options.
- Virtual support has its place, but for some phases of some projects, local support, on site, face-to-face at your facility is best. Less obviously, a technical expert who is also a member of your community working where they live and have families, is even more invested in the success of your organization.
- HIT staffing for implementations involves specific experience that is highly effective to involve on your team during the throes of implementation. HIT implementation experts are acutely aware of how their work improves patient care during critical points of implementation or everyday scenarios. The right implementation specialist is passionate and dependable right when you need them.
- An often-overlooked tactic to identify the right candidate for your project is a temporary to permanent hire scenario. Both parties benefit from the “get to know each other first” model with much success. The temp to perm scenario works best, of course, when your staffing partner is very effective at identifying candidates to try temporarily.
| | Temp to perm candidates are willing to bet on themselves. They are confident in their ability to assimilate with a team and to be an impactful member. |
Your staffing partnership experience should issue a dramatic improvement for hiring managers.
Hiring managers everywhere know the problem of being inundated with resumes that have 60-80% of the qualifications, but interviews and more detailed skill reviews ultimately determine many are not the right fit.
An effective staffing partner will change the circumstances for hiring managers by:
- employing an effective screening process
- reducing their time on recruiting
- offering vetting services performed by sourcing and subject matter experts
- focusing their time on about three qualified candidates with maximum potential
- saving money – because time spent on recruitment is costly for the hiring manager and, of course, a project on hold or under-resourced is costly, too
- sourcing candidates with experience on projects like theirs at even larger scale with even more complicating factors – you want someone who has seen it all and can help you come what may
- working as diligently to source one candidate as they would for many. It’s a part of being supportive of your success on this project and others you may choose to involve them in.
- providing high quality candidates within days, not weeks – another indicator a staffing partner understands the urgency of healthcare IT projects
- stating a feasible start date for most promising candidates – this means they know where these resources are, and they are keeping them busy and current with the needs and tools of healthcare IT
- finding candidates that know the pace of certain HIT phases – implementation, for instance. Some people thrive on the pace and urgency of implementations. Others don’t. Still others aren’t even familiar with the potentially stressful surroundings of implementation work.
| | An effective candidate vetting process aims to yield fewer “bullseye” candidates – ones that very closely match position requirements. |
One size does not fit all. You should not feel like a client, you should feel like THE client.
- Healthcare IT is unlike other disciplines. You need specific candidates with specialized backgrounds. A stack of resumes with general experience will not be helpful.
- Some staffing models work for some implementations all of the time, some staffing models work for some implementations some of the time, but no staffing model works for all implementations all of the time. Experts who have relevant experience can help you know what will work and they can help fast track a plan for what you need.
- Experts in healthcare IT connect with the idea of how their work changes the lives of people who help save lives – the clinical experts who use HIT. An equipped partner will earn your trust, will demonstrate their compassion and expertise, and will bring undeniable value just by being involved with your project.
