Innovative Approaches to Coronavirus Healthcare Talent Challenges | How to apply these post Covid-19

Many health systems are currently under an enormous financial strain, while also having to expand care delivery for COVID-19-related cases. These circumstances have placed organizations in a stance where there is no simple solution. Some systems have decided to furlough clinical and non-clinical talent, while others have offered voluntary furloughs to help alleviate the organization’s financial burden.

However, necessary care remains just that. Faced with new talent challenges and the pressing need to maintain care delivery, health systems are becoming more innovative in filling personnel gaps. Here are some novel approaches that strike the right balance between the need for adequate care and long-term financial stability.

1. Maximize Existing Employees

Health systems have prioritized their existing employee base to keep labour costs at or below pre-pandemic levels. Systems look to their entire staff, across all departments, as a pool of potential talent to fill roles where they are most needed. Rather than hiring new employees as the demand for clinical talent grows, maximizing the workforce already on-hand means less time spent onboarding and training newly assigned employees. Here are some examples:

• Redeploying clinical personnel from out-of-hospital settings or med-surge into acute and urgent care departments.
• Using a tiered ICU Staffing model to supervise multiple ICU teams by pairing an experienced ICU advanced practice practitioner or a reassigned non-ICU physician with reassigned hospital staff members.

• • A detailed resource on how to set up and deploy the model is available

• • Non-ICU healthcare workers can access free online training

• Looking for non-clinical talent, including employees in corporate functions, to help with taking temperatures for teams starting shifts, reception, call-center helplines, and other duties.
• Due to a shortage of available nurses on staff or in the market, having Certified Nursing Assistants operate at the top of their license to maximize support within critical units.
• Using hazard pay as an incentive for employees who work in an unusual environment. This has happened for both clinical talent moving to front-line care and talent within support services.

2. Utilize Your Past Candidate and Past-Employee Community

Health systems are engaging previous employees (including retired employees) and warmer candidates on file from preceding job openings to meet staffing demands quickly. They can identify and re-engage qualified talent faster than they can source new candidates into the pipeline using their HRIS and ATS systems. Using finished interviews and records can save even more time. These individuals in your talent pool are valuable because they are familiar with your organization, either as candidates or as past employees. Organizations are collaborating with their existing external partners, such as Cielo, to have these individuals join the organization as temporary employees as soon as possible, substantially reducing the time from hire to start. Consider the following people:

• Nurses and clinical staff who have recently retired
• Candidates with silver medals from previous job searches
• Previous voluntary terminations

Organizations are tailoring proactive campaign messaging and content to current candidates, in addition to using an HRIS and ATS system to identify talent. Consider messages that speak to the nature of compassion and care that can be found among all healthcare workers. Courage and bravery are two other qualities to emphasize in your messaging. Inviting people to fight alongside their colleagues on the front lines.

3. Partner with a Local Organization to Skills-Match Furloughed Employees

Consider furloughed employees from other companies in your area as a potential talent pool. Companies in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries have had to make difficult decisions to temporarily furlough their employees, creating an opportunity to collaborate with other local organizations to support their impacted individuals while also addressing a talent shortage. These industries, for example, recruit many front-line workers who can serve in areas such as environmental services within a hospital. Consider how to match these employees to in-demand roles where there is a direct transfer of skills.

Putting Creative Talent Solutions into Practice

A large community healthcare system Mastercare is meeting its patient demand by increasing the use of contingent labor for rapid scalability. Integrating new strategies into the overall RPO partnership has contributed to a more efficient process and experience for both candidates and hiring managers.

Furthermore, the Staffingpower network has used its database of qualified former employees and candidates to quickly re-engage needed talent. Proactive campaigns for targeted communities have been developed in collaboration with Staffingpower to efficiently move interested talent through the hiring process. In cases where contact records were incomplete, Staffingpower used its sourcing capabilities to quickly build up the organization’s database with complete candidate profiles for future outreach.

Building Creativity for the Future

Any health-care system prioritizes providing high-quality care. Using creative talent solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic has assisted systems in carrying out their mission while improving their financial outlook during the crisis. However, recent events have demonstrated that no single solution can fully address the talent challenges of a changing environment. To incorporate flexibility and creativity into their approaches, health systems must continue to innovate and adapt. Finding new ways to apply creative solutions – for both talent acquisition and talent management functions – is the path to successfully addressing any type of talent challenges.