Deepali Jetley , Managing Partner, Deepali Jetley, Managing Partner, Qwazent Health Search outlines how leveraging digital space will enable healthcare companies to expand their candidate outreach but also facilitate the selection of niche talent
Over the years, the Indian healthcare sector has been expanding at an exponential pace and is widely anticipated to clock growth rates of $280 billion by 2020. Healthcare encompasses diverse functional domains including hospitals, medical devices, health insurance, medical equipment, clinical trials and telemedicine, outsourcing and medical tourism. The healthcare industry is set to emerge as one of the largest employment creators in the country. It is broadly estimated that the dynamically growing sector is likely to generate 40 million jobs by 2030. It is also broadly estimated that Ayushman Bharat, the world’s largest publicly funded health protection scheme will create around 100,000 jobs.
With a significant rise in the number of qualified jobseekers across the Indian healthcare spectrum, the challenge for any healthcare organisation will be to attract and retain the best human resource talent. Defining clear pathways for digitising core HR functions will be key for healthcare companies to decode candidate profiles and make suitable recruitment decisions. Companies will need to deploy advanced talent acquisition technology tools and recalibrate their personnel recruitment strategies to align with broader organisation goals and vision. Apart from ensuring that recruitment process are simplified and streamlined, technology-centric initiatives will prove to be a great cost-effective alternative in attracting and on boarding potentially qualified candidates.
Mobile devices have become an indispensable part of everyday life and surveys have alluded to the fact that a major chunk of job searches originate from them. Job aspirants, especially belonging to the millennial generation, traverse the digital route and are hooked on to their mobile phones to browse for employment opportunities and send job applications. HR specialists of healthcare organisations will need to formulate effective mobile marketing strategies as part of their recruitment policies. Leveraging the digital space will not only enable healthcare companies to expand their candidate outreach but also facilitate the selection of niche talent.
Debunking conventional candidate assessment and recruitment policies, data and analytics technologies are dynamically transforming the functional competencies of HR teams across diverse organisations. Healthcare organisations can no longer remain an exception to this trend. The HR teams of healthcare organisations also need to harness the potential of data-driven technologies to draw a sustainable recruitment roadmap. The new-age data intelligence tools will be key in identifying, screening and appointing the right candidates to the right jobs.
It is pertinent to note here that a jobseeker always seeks a personal connection with his job. It is in this context that big data can play a crucial role for healthcare organisations to personalise the job seeking experience for a potential candidate. It is highly important that a job aspirant fits in with the cultural and organisational DNA of the organisation apart from having the requisite technical skill sets for the job. Doing away with advertising blanketed job alerts and template employment descriptions, big data can also be deployed by the HR departments of healthcare firms to devise customised recruiting strategies and gain crucial insights into candidate competencies.
The accuracy in predicting future recruitment outcomes can be greatly enhanced through the increased deployment of predictive analytics. It involves leveraging the power of historically available data of potential candidates to correlate their qualitative efficiencies to job variables like leadership positions and understanding of market dynamics. The healthcare domain also needs to employ a predictive model to remove the element of uncertainty from recruitment processes and increase the level of accuracy in making hiring decisions. Predictive analytics also goes beyond the mere function of candidate assessment and retention and perform crucial organisational tasks. Data compilation of a team’s performance can be analysed by predictive analytics and a suitable action plan can be formulated to plug operational lacuna, optimise processes and performances and achieve enterprise objectives. Healthcare organisations can harness predictive analytics in promoting workforce diversity and use it to analyse, address and ameliorate problems like employee turnover and workforce discrimination that impact organisational productivity and brand reputation.
A healthcare organisation can make efficacious use of digital dashboards to engage employees and keep them attuned to latest developments in the organisation and sector. They can be effective in ensuring greater participative involvement of employees and position them as stakeholders in the organisation’s growth and development. Employee engagement can become a relatively easy task by curating critical information and presenting it in an easy graphical format to employees. Dashboards can also prove to be crucial change agents in encouraging positive behavioural changes among employees.
In today’s digital era, the online brand positioning of a healthcare company assumes paramount importance in attracting the right candidate. Healthcare firms today need to focus on formulating candidate-focused branding campaigns with an emphasis on high visibility and transparency. Employer branding will play a decisive role in positioning the market reputation of a company and prove effective in extending the right value proposition in the minds of prospective employees and retaining existing employees. It is pertinent to note here that employees-past, present and future, are the company’s brand ambassadors. They will play the role of facilitators in promoting the company brand message to their network, which in turn will contribute to increased brand awareness, ensure enhanced brand loyalty and create a positive company image in the minds of potential employees. In an age and era of digital marketing, a dominant presence in the digital space and well-planned and executed outreach campaigns will be key to any company amplifying their brand image and enhancing their reputations in the minds of potential candidates. A well-conceived and executed employer branding strategy should become a core component of HR recruitment policy, a maxim that also applies unequivocally to healthcare companies.