Author: amanda

Many US Hospitals were facing significant staffing challenges before COVID-19 hit. Now, the surge in COVID-19 infected patients is overwhelming hospitals in ‘hot spot’ urban centers.  

Compounding the staffing problem is the high infection rate among clinical workers. In the hardest-hit areas, as many as 20-30% of clinical staff and frontline healthcare workers are becoming infected with coronavirus, taking them off-line for 14 days and creating a hole in the care delivery system that cannot easily be filled.

Not all hospitals face this problem today. But they surely will over the next few weeks. 

A number of smart solutions are already being implemented to help alleviate the severe staffing shortages our healthcare systems now face. Accelerating graduations for nurses and medical students, importing talent from other states/regions, moving retirees back into service, and allowing nurses to practice at the highest levels of their licensures are remedies that are making a difference.

Even with these measures, many hospitals will still not have enough clinical staff to handle the surge in patients they are or will be experiencing. 

To match the surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals need to surge their staffing. Traditional staffing processes have hospitals filling RN openings in 20-60 days and MD openings in 3-6 months. These cycles need to be reduced to less than a week. To accomplish this, hospitals will need to immediately develop different staffing approaches using accelerated processes. 

Here’s what’s required to accelerate staffing processes:

1. Create a central staffing control center that has clear visibility into all hiring requirements, all internal candidates, and all external market sources so that talent demand and supply can be assessed and resources deployed as critical needs develop.
2. The biggest time-waster in any staffing process is the back-and-forth between HR and hiring managers for application review, interview set-up, conducting interviews, etc. In a crisis, the clinical delivery staff will not have time to devote to the massive, urgent interviewing required to fill positions quickly. The Staffing Center should be staffed with interviewers who can make clinical evaluations on behalf of the entire hospital in real-time. This single step will cut days and even weeks from traditional hiring processes.
3. Give the Staffing Center the power to make hiring decisions quickly. This may involve relaxing standard hiring process requirements like background checks and reference-checking by allowing people to start working before these processes are completed. It may also require the ability to make on-the-spot offers and accelerate start dates to nearly immediately.
4. Create a COVID-19 Staffing Portal for your Career Website, especially for per-diem workers. Require only essential information from candidates during the application process. Make it easy for the candidate to apply and provide responses to all applications within 24 hours. Compress onboarding time as much as possible.
5. Move candidates from resume/application review straight into interviews using Skype or Zoom (or other video tools). Set high-volume interview schedules and interviewing staff in advance, and populate those schedules based on the strength of the resume/application review. There will be no time for additional screening steps.
6. Open the gates to hire Diploma Nurses and LPNs. All trained clinical specialists will be needed to get through the surge in caseloads.
7. Target clinicians who work outside of hospitals. In any market, only 50-60% of all licensed RNs work in acute care hospitals. It’s time to target the other 40+%.
8. To accomplish all of the above, overstaff the Staffing Center, not only with recruiters but with clinical screeners, administrators, and on-boarders. You will need more staff than you think to accomplish the new speed objectives.

Accelerating staffing cycles is not easy, especially in healthcare where credentialing and quality considerations have always driven process decisions. And please don’t misunderstand relaxing some of the hiring process rules to gain speed with lowering the quality of hiring standards—they are not at all the same and making quality hires should still be paramount for all process decisions. 

Hiring in a crisis requires a highly accelerated process, and rational trade-offs will need to be made in order to meet surging demands for trained workers. If you haven’t started changing your processes today, you are probably already behind.

Two weeks ago, you had a 30-minute commute and a fairly routine schedule. This week, your dining room has been turned into a home office, and you’re navigating the strange new world of working remotely.

At DoubleStar, we have been working remotely since 1993. With so many of our clients working remotely for the first time, we thought we would share the best practices we’ve learned over the years from delivering recruitment services remotely. This Is not a comprehensive list, but rather our best advice for making sure that you can make an impact from working at home that will hopefully equal the impact you are used to making working on-site.

• Make sure you are clear on the overall direction and your goals from your leadership team. Ask questions to clarify what new/different things you will be responsible for delivering.
• Schedule time to reset expectations with your hiring managers during the first week. Confirm current priorities and explain any temporary changes in the recruitment process, roles, and responsibilities.          
• Increase communication with your key stakeholders, including hiring managers and teammates. This will help you to provide regular updates on your progress as well as stay on top of any new developments with their priorities or strategies.   
• If you have the technology, use Teams, Skype or Zoom when possible for critical meetings. Face-to-face video interactions can be just as meaningful as sitting across from someone and more impactful than a phone call.
• Strive to return all voice messages and emails promptly. If your calendar is blocked for specific recruitment activities, send your leader or hiring manager a quick email and let them know you saw their message and will be available at a specific time to discuss.
• If you don’t currently track your activity (i.e. a report from the ATS or Excel) start now. Not all managers are comfortable, at first, having remote employees. When you can show your activity, it will quickly help to build trust as you navigate this new normal.
• The labor market in some industries is about to drastically change regarding candidate availability. Stay up to date on the external market trends and communicate news to all stakeholders so that you can be seen as the expert by your hiring managers.
• If you encounter roadblocks in identifying candidates or filling your positions, raise those concerns early on. Don’t wait to deliver the bad news and re-plan the approach. Be direct and honest with your manager(s) and offer a solution when possible. 
• Speaking of candidates, the conversation that you normally would have with them in person might feel a little different over the phone or the Internet. Take some time to prepare how you are going to introduce your company and the opportunity considering today’s climate. 
• Make sure that you explain your current hiring process to potential candidates. For example, if they are selected to progress to a hiring manager phone screen or video chat, but that is as far as it will go for now, tell them that up front. 
• Develop a communication plan to keep your viable candidates warm. Consider touching base with them once a week via text, email or telephone to stay connected and up to date on their status.

Remember, while our current situation seems unnerving, it will hopefully be temporary. If you are fortunate and your business has not halted hiring, you can continue to make an impact. Focus on the things that you can control including the frequency and speed of your communication, your overall sense of urgency, tracking your activity/progress in a report, and sharing your knowledge/expertise in recruitment. Stay positive and stay in touch and you will be in great shape to support your employer no matter where the location.

In helping our clients make thousands of hires over the years, we’ve seen even the most experienced hiring managers make interviewing and hiring mistakes. Of those, there are three that stand out as the most common, and therefore, the easiest to recognize and avoid.

It’s easy to think that these mistakes are most often made by newer, less experienced hiring managers. But, in a surprising number of cases, we’ve seen senior managers and executives make these same mistakes. Good hiring requires taking a disciplined approach to interviewing and selection, many managers have too little training and too little practice in interviewing to do it well. Knowing these three common mistakes will help you self-diagnose and improve your selection accuracy.

Mistake #1: Not Understanding What Capabilities Are Required for Success

Most managers take the time to write their list of job requirements. However, the requirements are only part of what will make a new hire successful in your organization. Think of it this way: if two candidates possess the exact same set of job skills, how do you know which one will be more successful in your organization? That answer can’t be found in the job requirements. 

Remember that you are hiring a human being, not just a set of skills. It is critical to look beyond the job requirements, and deeper into the candidate’s capabilities and characteristics. Are they an individual contributor in a role that requires high collaboration? How do they handle setbacks in their work? Do they listen and take direction easily, or will every project require negotiation to get them on board? Are they fast learners, or are they resistant to learning new things? Will their ways of working and personality blend well with existing team members, or will they clash? 

Many managers over-rely on an assessment of technical capabilities to drive their hiring decision. They do this because it is relatively easy to assess those capabilities compared to assessing the ‘softer’ areas of performance. Our advice: understand the human capabilities that are required for success in your work group, and interview to gain an accurate assessment of those. Often, a new hire fails because of a bad human fit, not a bad technical fit.

Mistake #2. Relying on ‘Gut Feel’

“Gut feel” is a phrase that should be banned from hiring discussions. It means that the hiring manager hasn’t gathered any evidence about the candidate’s capabilities to perform. It’s just a guess.

Hiring is not a social activity, and simply liking someone, or being struck by a positive impression that someone might make on you, is not a reason to hire them. The first purpose of an interview is to gather facts and evidence about a candidate’s capabilities to execute the work that they will be assigned. You need to gather as many facts about someone’s knowledge, abilities, attitude, and future potential as you can in order to accurately assess their potential in your organization. 

When managers rely on ‘gut feel’, they are replacing evidence and facts with a vague notion about someone’s likability. Likability is a nice trait for anyone to have, but it is hardly a sufficient reason on which to base a hiring decision.

Our advice: focus interview time on gathering facts and evidence about a candidate’s past work performance, their successes and challenges, and the outcomes that they achieved. 

Mistake #3. Hiring in Your Own Likeness

We all have a tendency to like people who share similarities to us. We like people who went to our college, grew up in our neighborhood, or who have similar travel experiences to us. 

In interviewing, we often see managers make the mistake equating similarities in backgrounds and experiences with high competence. The thinking goes like this: “I went to an Ivy League school; I worked at a Big 4 firm; and I am very successful here. This candidate went to an Ivy League school; they worked a different Big 4 firm; and therefore they will be very successful here too.”

We call this hiring a Mini-Me.  

It’s pretty easy to see that these co-incidental similarities have nothing to do with someone’s ability to perform in a given role in a given environment. But it’s also easy to see how this kind of thinking can creep into assessment decisions and create a false positive about a candidate.

Our advice: stick to discovering facts and gathering supporting evidence in an interview. Don’t be seduced by outward similarities that may not translate into job performance.

While there are many other possible interview and selection mistakes, avoiding these three can make a big difference in how well hiring managers can more accurately assess a candidate’s likelihood of success in their organization.