There are many challenges in the healthcare industry. Two of the most complex issues to solve are scheduling and hiring. Luckily, there are software solutions for both. Let’s find out how an applicant tracking system can help healthcare providers hire the best staff for services such as senior care and assisted living, and how a workforce platform can help administrators organize healthcare staff.
What Is a Healthcare Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?
An ATS is a hiring and recruiting solution that can enhance a company’s hiring process. A business or organization can funnel its entire recruitment process through its ATS, using it as a central hub for all position openings and applications. By tracking candidates from when they first apply, an ATS allows hiring managers and recruiters to identify and engage the best available talent efficiently.
How Can Applicant Tracking Systems Help Healthcare Providers
Let’s look at some different aspects of healthcare and investigate how an ATS can help organizations in these different subsections:
Assisted Living
Assisted living communities help older adults and those living with disabilities manage their lives while receiving the care they need. Residents of these communities can often make their own living decisions to a degree, but may require regular check-ups and assistance with mobility, medication, chores and errands. These facilities may have one or more registered nurses on staff, but most of their workforce comprises caregivers. These are healthcare professionals without medical or nursing degrees. Their work is very important, and while it’s often rewarding, it can also be tiring and stressful.
Assisted living communities frequently experience a lot of turnover, so they need a highly organized and streamlined recruitment process to succeed. Because of all the shift work, organizing staff and scheduling can also be tricky.
Retirement Homes
Retirement homes are places where seniors can live, but the facilities themselves typically don’t offer personal care. However, residents may recruit private third-party caregivers to see them. The retirement home provides a safe and convenient place to live for retirees and the staff takes care of landscaping, maintenance and some cleaning.
Nursing Homes
Most nursing home residents are people who need a high degree of care. They are often less able to manage their own lives than assisted living residents. As a result, the amount of work required of caregivers may be even greater. This can increase the staffing and recruiting issues that nursing homes experience, highlighting the challenges of healthcare recruitment.
In-Home Care
In-home care involves caregivers visiting the elderly and those living with disabilities in their own homes. This may involve ongoing caregiving or assistance for a set amount of time, such as for people recovering from a surgery or a fall.
Organizations that provide in-home care often need a robust recruiting process to find caregivers who can do the job, provide or access transportation and who can work irregular schedules with minimal supervision. These same companies may work as staffing agencies, supplying caregivers to assisted living facilities, nursing homes, hospitals and clinics when they need staff augmentation.
Hospitals
Hospitals may need candidate sourcing and applicant tracking methods for four different pools of candidates: doctors, nurses, caregivers and general staff. Healthcare staffing and scheduling for hospitals can be exceptionally difficult. That’s why hospitals often rely on workforce management and recruiting software.
Key Features of a Healthcare ATS
Clearly, recruiting enough healthcare talent is difficult for these organizations. Finding the best available healthcare workers can be even trickier. Applicant tracking software can be absolutely vital to a healthcare business or organization, providing an efficient way of finding the best candidates.
Here are some of the most helpful features to look for in an ATS if you operate in the healthcare space:
Automated Resume Screening and Filtering
Healthcare organizations may receive many applications for a caregiving position. But how many of these are from qualified candidates? In the past, the only way to find out was to sift through all the applications, which was a time-consuming and laborious process.
A good ATS, however, offers resume parsing. This is an automated process for scanning resumes and cover letters for keywords, such as skills, work experience and other requirements. This process can filter out unqualified applications before the hiring team even begins to review them.
Credential Tracking and Compliance
An effective ATS can also group candidates by their credentials, ensuring that each available position receives applicants with the appropriate credentials. This can be especially important in the healthcare sector, where government and industry boards often govern compliance strictly.
Interview Scheduling and Communication
As we’ve seen, scheduling healthcare workers is difficult because of the shift work involved. But scheduling can be a problem even before hiring anyone. Working to find an interview time that suits the entire hiring team and the candidates involved can be headache-inducing. The right ATS makes interview scheduling and tracking much easier.
Onboarding and Document Collection
The hiring process doesn’t really end with making a hire. Once a healthcare provider has agreed to terms with their preferred candidate, there is typically a large amount of documentation to share, review and sign. This includes the basic hiring contract and also forms and manuals pertaining to regulations and best practices for the job at hand. Without an efficient way to share and organize all these documents, it’s easy to lose sheets, run into delays and overlook things. A good ATS offers an efficient process for collecting documents to make onboarding easier.
Candidate Database
Candidate management can be key to the success of healthcare organizations. Because of the high degree of churn they often experience, it’s beneficial to be able to reach out to previously considered candidates for new openings. A candidate database helps organizations track and communicate with qualified candidates.
ApplicantStack: Hiring Solutions Built for Healthcare Providers
ApplicantStack offers all the key features listed above. Our ATS can help healthcare providers find and track the best candidates. Being able to streamline the hiring process can lead to serious efficiency gains for healthcare organizations, such as in-home care and assisted living providers.
WorkforceHub for Skilled Nursing and Assisted Living
Swipeclock also offers WorkforceHub, a workforce management platform that’s perfect for healthcare organizations. WorkforceHub can help with:
- Scheduling and shift management
- Time and attendance tracking
- Hiring and onboarding
- Compliance and credential tracking
- Labor cost control
- Staff communication and engagement
Ready To Improve Your Hiring and Scheduling Processes?
For healthcare providers, hiring the best doctors and nurses can be difficult. But because these are professional positions with specific education and certification requirements, there may be fewer judgment calls for hiring teams to make than when recruiting caregivers.
Caregivers are the backbone of any senior care or assisted living healthcare organization. But for these positions, there aren’t the same hard requirements to guide hiring managers’ decisions. That’s why any solution that can provide order and efficiency to healthcare hiring is key. ApplicantStack can do that, helping your team hire the best available staff quicker and more efficiently. And once you have the right staff, you can learn to manage them more effectively with WorkforceHub. Start your free trial today for ApplicantStack today.
