Want to Provide Better Healthcare? Start By Updating Your Hiring Forecasting.

The healthcare talent shortage is an unfortunate reality with significant consequences for healthcare organizations, patients, and employees alike. Although hiring forecasts might not stay relevant for long, it is still important that healthcare providers devote substantial time and resources to workforce planning for several reasons.

First and foremost, proper staffing levels are essential for providing high-quality patient care. Without sufficient staff, patient care can suffer, leading to negative outcomes and increased expenses. Workforce planning helps healthcare providers to avoid over- or under-staffing, which can also lead to unnecessary costs.

By forecasting staffing needs and hiring accordingly, healthcare providers can better retain top talent, combat burnout, and avoid high turnover rates. Workforce planning also helps healthcare providers meet all legal requirements for staffing levels and employee safety.

According to a 2022 PwC survey, 55% of healthcare industry leaders believed that the inability to hire and retain top talent was the biggest obstacle to achieving company growth goals. That lack of talent, though unfortunate, is largely due to a talent shortage.

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Leaders must consider how their business decisions will affect the immediate and future workforce. The human resources department can help keep organizational leaders focused on this by serving as a guide, facilitator, and expert for all hiring-related logistics.

Hiring managers can more effectively respond to changes in patient volume, patient demographics, and other factors by adopting a more flexible and adaptable approach to forecasting. They can access different data sources to create more accurate forecasts rather than relying on past data.

Human resource professionals should obviously consider the needs and goals of the organization and involve relevant stakeholders in the forecasting process, including clinical staff and leadership. The responsibilities of modern human resources departments go beyond hiring, onboarding, and benefits. When aligned with strategic goals, HR has vast potential to shape an organization’s success and leave its mark across all levels.

Planning for potential talent demand might be more beneficial than the plan itself. This process can help managers understand what staffing decisions to make and improve their skills when dealing with uncertainty. To gain insight into the required talent pool, companies must take comprehensive approaches that incorporate both in-depth and top-level perspectives.

Streamlining an Efficient Recruitment Process With Personify Search

The process of strategic analysis itself can be highly beneficial for managers, as it helps them plan effectively in uncertain scenarios.

The challenges in the hiring process arise from the gap between demand and supply for talent. Develop a plan that outlines how to fill future job vacancies, which can include looking for external talent, deploying targeted knowledge transfer, and incorporating managed attrition programs to reduce the cost of significant downsizing.

Many HR leaders haven’t been trained in how to forecast hiring needs. This is where Personify Search can be a perfect partner. Personify’s team members and technological tools can help any healthcare provider better facilitate, supervise, and, when necessary, update its workforce planning process.

For HR teams that only need assistance with certain aspects of hiring forecasting, such as creating a hiring needs analysis, Personify can supply market data and perform other a la carte functions. Our team can also be of assistance in sourcing and onboarding external talent in any capacity, thanks to our company’s strong capability in building talent pipelines. In fact, we constantly keep potential employees engaged so they’re interested when hiring is on the horizon.

Forecasting takes time to learn and apply, but it can make all the difference for healthcare entities. To learn more about Personify’s process, drop our team a line today.

Donna Horowitz, Ph.D., is the head of R&D and quality at Personify, an award-winning, globally recognized recruitment process outsourcing firm. Donna is an accomplished human resource executive with profit and loss experience across multiple industries in public and privately held global business settings.