September 11th, 2024 | Ryan Garman, Director of Healthcare, Sterling
In today’s fast-paced world, rethinking the onboarding experience is crucial. Imagine a scenario where candidates sign their offer letter and automatically receive a prompt to register for the next orientation.
Why does this scenario sound like a distant dream?
Today, onboarding candidates is a combination of disjointed tasks, endless emails, and multiple points of contact. It’s often difficult for candidates to know what they have left to complete and for the recruiter to recognize exactly where the candidate is in the process. From occupational health services, capturing headshots, completing the background check and i9, the list goes on and on.
In this blog, we uncover three key strategies health systems can begin incorporating now to onboard healthcare talent in 10 days or less.
Watch the full webinar on three ways to automate the onboarding process here.
1. Automate the Onboarding Checklist
Eliminate Manual Processes and Centralize Your Checklist
The traditional onboarding checklist is a huge administrative burden and often involves a chaotic mix of emails and manual tracking, making it difficult for candidates to know what they have yet to complete.
By automating this process, onboarding teams can start approaching this as a task-driven process and not just a checklist of items to tick off. Candidates can access and complete all of their requirements directly from a centralized checklist through an onboarding or credentialing platform. This approach eliminates the need for candidates to dig up information through one of the many emails or text messages they’ve received, allowing them to complete their tasks quickly and efficiently.
Get Real-Time Tracking and Visibility Into Your Candidate’s Progression
Incorporating automation into the onboarding process can also enable real-time tracking and reporting, offering visibility into how candidates are progressing. Onboarding teams can view where candidates are in the workflow, how quickly they’re going through the process, and even identify where there are bottlenecks and what’s preventing candidates from moving faster. This transparency not only helps organizations transactionally do things faster, but also removes the manual need for auditing processes and improves overall efficiency.
2. Seamlessly Integrate All Your Vendors Into One System
Onboarding often involves multiple vendors, from background screening companies to i9 solutions to reference check providers. But are these providers being plugged into the right systems so that results can be pulled and placed effortlessly?
Integrating these third parties into a platform or ATS with workflow automation capabilities can ensure a cohesive and efficient process. It wasn’t too long ago that the concept of a workflow automation tool started to arise in order to limit, or even remove, any human intervention. By integrating multiple vendors into the right systems and making sure they have the appropriate APIs, not only can your onboarding team pull and place results into the appropriate systems quickly, but candidates can also finish each of their requirements faster. And a better candidate experience will impact both how quickly you onboard and retain them.
3. Review Your Company’s Policies and Processes
Identify and Remove Unnecessary Blockers
Regularly reviewing company policies and processes is essential to identify potential blockers that may hinder the onboarding process. Many requirements are often self-imposed rather than mandated by external bodies like the Joint Commission. However, the Joint Commission states that you must screen based on what your company policy states. Other than having a primary source verification requirement on license or credential verifications, the Joint Commission only says to follow your company’s standards.
By aligning policies with actual requirements, organizations can eliminate unnecessary steps and expedite the onboarding process.
Reimagine Current Processes to Speed Up Onboarding
There are other creative ways companies can rethink their current processes to get candidates started faster. Exploring progressive screening, for example, allows candidates to start their orientation while certain checks are still in progress. By starting essential screenings early, organizations can ensure candidates are ready to begin work within the desired timeframe.
It is also becoming more common for health systems to implement same-day or next day employee health screening. Rather than waiting for an appointment with your employee health and dealing with disjointed onboarding records, look into using third-party clinics and collection facilities for drug and blood testing. It’s critical to partner with a vendor who can not only automatically schedule these services, but also enable candidates to easily change the test location if necessary. Automation can also help pass back the drug and blood test results to the same onboarding platform housing the onboarding checklist and other candidate records.
Embrace Automation
Exploring the idea of automating the onboarding process may sound like a huge lift, especially with all the current processes you and your team may have already built. But by embracing automation, onboarding teams can use this opportunity to shift from being tactical to being strategic in how they onboard their candidates.
Taking these steps above can help healthcare organizations reduce time-to-hire, decrease candidate drop-off rates, improve employee retention, and build a larger talent pool. And as your health system starts to look at all of these pieces together, you’ll begin to reduce the overall burden and staffing challenges that likely exist within your organization today.
Let’s discuss onboarding automation for your organization today. Contact us to learn more.
To watch the full webinar on automating the onboarding process, click here.
Explore our full suite of healthcare-specific services here.
Sterling is not a law firm. This publication is for informational purposes only and nothing contained in it should be construed as legal advice. We expressly disclaim any warranty or responsibility for damages arising out this information. We encourage you to consult with legal counsel regarding your specific needs. We do not undertake any duty to update previously posted materials.
