Reducing Time-to-Hire: 5 Tips for Healthcare Facilities
Many organizations depend on continuous quality improvement measures to combat the rising costs of healthcare. Nursing shortages and high turnover can also lead to price inflation because of constant hiring. Enter: time-to-hire, a hiring metric that can guide facilities to better staffing outcomes.
This crucial metric is the result of a simple math equation:
The day the candidate accepts a hire offer minus the date of entry into the hiring process.
The larger this number becomes, the more it may affect the success of your hiring program. In this article, we’ll detail the potential consequences of an elongated hiring process and provide some recommendations for improved efficacy.
Time-to-Hire vs. Time-to-Fill: Is There a Difference?
Although these phrases are often used interchangeably, they are different. Acknowledging the distinction and tracking them as separate metrics will help inform your hiring program’s evolution and continued refinement.
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| Time-to-fill | The day the candidate accepts a hire offer minus the date of the job posting. |
| Time-to-hire | The day the candidate accepts a hire offer minus the date of entry into the hiring process (applying, for example). |
What Contributes to an Extended Hiring Timeline?
Prolonged hiring can happen for a variety of reasons. The time-to-hire average in healthcare is around 49 days, but hiring a new nurse in hospital settings may take as long as 250 days. Some of the reasons behind these numbers may include:
- Scheduling conflicts between hiring team members due to clinical demands.
- Miscommunication or delayed communication from stakeholders.
- Outdated hiring processes that don’t leverage new technology or evidence-based guidance.
- Data silos that lead to fragmented and disorganized information flows — like a nurse manager relying on emails from a candidate while HR utilizes an applicant database.
- Slow or delayed credential verification, which is necessary for ensuring a candidate has been fully vetted and is qualified for the high-stakes job.
What Are the Healthcare Costs of Lengthy Hiring Processes?
The healthcare industry is known for having some of the longest hiring timelines. This doesn’t just bog down the hiring team’s productivity, it also influences patient outcomes. Let’s investigate some of the key issues of an elongated hiring process.
| Inflated healthcare costs | Nursing turnover can cost an institution an estimated $56,300 per registered nurse (closer to $100,000 for nurse practitioners). These expenses pile up as the vacancy persists due to expensive temporary contracts and overtime pay for maintaining staffing quotas. |
| Suboptimal candidate pool | Quality hires know their worth and will have multiple job offers in an industry facing critical shortages. If your hiring process is on the long side, it may cost you the ideal candidate. |
| Increased staff shortages | The longer it takes to onboard a new team member, the longer a department goes without adequate staffing. This can affect more than cost, jeopardizing regulatory compliance with mandatory patient-to-staff ratios. |
| Decreased staff satisfaction | Dysfunctional teamwork and restrictive, inflexible scheduling are major contributors to nurse burnout. Pervasive staffing issues and being forced to ignore hiring red flags when candidate pools dwindle can contribute to increased turnover rates. |
| Less favorable patient outcomes | Patient satisfaction is integrally tied to their relationships with clinicians. Not only does better staffing increase the availability for that crucial rapport, it also improves safety because outcomes are linked to better retention. |
| Diminished organizational reputation | If patients and staff aren’t happy, it’s often reflected in facility reviews. And when 90% of internet users say those reviews affect choices around healthcare, ignoring reputation is a gamble. |
How to Reduce Time-to-Hire Averages in Healthcare: 5 Tips
If you’re worried about some of the organizational risks associated with extended hiring times, we’ve got you covered. Combat cyclic short staffing and improve patient outcomes by shortening your hiring windows with some of these recommendations.
1. Revisit Protocols Around Nurse Hiring
If it’s been a while since you last reviewed your hiring process, it’s time to revisit your protocols and standards. Research is constantly updating the best evidence-based strategies around hiring. Utilizing that evidence can help refine and streamline your process while ensuring quality isn’t sacrificed for efficiency.
Tips:
- Implement timelines along with each step of your hiring campaign to standardize the process and ensure efficiency.
- Consider working with a job site that can offload hiring tasks from clinicians, allowing them to focus on their healthcare-related work while guaranteeing that the hiring team is focused on the job at hand.
2. Create Routine, Seasonal Hiring Windows
Running a medical organization or department is busy work. When juggling healthcare leadership demands (many of which are time-sensitive and critical in nature) it’s no wonder that hiring can get relegated to the back burner. By creating routine, structured, and seasonal windows for hiring, it prioritizes the process while facilitating greater focus for those crucial quality improvement and day-to-day business measures the rest of the year.
Tips:
- Analyze calendar data and credentialing timelines to identify periods of the year where leadership can dedicate focused time to quality recruitment strategies and selecting the top candidates.
- Host cyclical hiring events like community career fairs that truly reflect how exciting it is to work for your organization and underscore your organization’s reputation for dependability.
3. Make Hiring an Interdisciplinary Effort
Whether it’s collaborating with the public relations department to create a stellar career fair or working alongside human resources to ensure that your emphasis on just culture is maintained throughout hiring, interdisciplinary work isn’t limited to the bedside in healthcare.
Tips:
- Highlight the interprofessional collaboration necessary for maximizing outcomes — clinical and otherwise. For example, utilize IT’s expertise to implement digital tracking and pattern recognition while reflecting on current hiring timelines and issues.
- Harness nurse committees to assist with candidate selection and consider employing a shared-governance approach to reform current policies that elongate the hiring window.
4. Partner With Local Nursing Schools
Streamline your candidate pipeline by going directly to the source of new nurses who are eager to work and have a long, fulfilling career ahead of them. By forming relationships through clinical training opportunities within your facility, you can bypass some of the introductory, get-to-know-each-other hiring aspects that often inflate timeframes.
Tips:
- Incentivize nursing staff to identify quality, passive candidates among the nursing students during clinical rotations.
- Offer professional development credit via clinical instructor training opportunities and teaching incentives. This can also improve the alignment of the partnered program’s educational goals with your standards.
5. Focus Your Nursing Candidate Pool
Weeding through a candidate pool that may have applicants who are unqualified or aren’t truly invested in the career opportunity is time you can’t get back. It’s crucial that you invest in technology and systems for narrowing your pool to only those candidates who are motivated and qualified.
Tips:
- Optimize job descriptions to entice quality potential hires while adhering to your culture of inclusivity and keeping language broad enough to include candidates who may be a great match but don’t fit inflated (often workable) requirements.
- Utilize the best job boards to guarantee access to the top candidates.
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