Keeping In Touch With Interns

 

As your beloved interns return to their Alma Maters to resume their studious classes by day and presumably their beer pong tournaments by night, don’t let your on-boarding efforts and rapport with these potential future new hires slip through your fingers.

Sure, interns are a dime-a-dozen, but ones who took the bull by the horns and really made an effort to contribute to your organization are potential future top performers.  As a new hire after graduation, they’ll start their career with existing knowledge of internal processes, company policies and the corporate culture specific to your organization.  Meaning, they’ll ramp up and prove more valuable than a new hire who didn’t intern for your company.

Though it’s imperative to maintain a relationship with star interns, don’t ignore the ones who turned out to be duds.  Former interns (good and bad) have more access to young, smart and employable new graduates than you, as a recruiter, ever will.  A positive review from one of their peers carries more weight than your spiffy career fair brochure.  Intern Becky may have been more excited with her new “work wardrobe” than running reports for her boss.  But, she’s also Social Chair for her sorority and whatever Becky says, goes (as far as Kappas are concerned!).  If Intern Becky speaks glowingly of your organization, you might land a star intern in a younger pledge class down the road.  Don’t risk damaging your reputation on campus as a good company for interns.

Develop a relationship marketing program to maintain lines of communication with former interns.  Create an alumni page on Facebook where you can broadcast company achievements, company news and events to the group as a whole.  For those interns who remain in close proximity to your organization, allow them to play on the company softball team, participate in the chili cook-off and invite them to the company picnic.  Though there may not be funds to pay their way to a conference, explain they are more than welcome to come and pay their own way. Don’t let them feel excluded from your organization just because the summer came to an end and they’re back in school.

In addition to group communication, be sure to also communicate individually with top-performers via email.  Let them know of recent openings that would fit their skill set and how to apply.  Tell them when you’ll be in town for a campus career fair and arrange for a visit. Individual attention will make the intern feel special and personally selected for success for your organization.  They’ll be more likely to accept an offer post-graduation.

Don’t sweat it if you’ve kept in touch and made recruitment efforts for former interns and they accept a full-time job with a competitor.  They may find the grass wasn’t greener and apply at your company later.  They’ll still enter your organization with the previous knowledge gleaned from their internship and will ramp up faster than their co-workers.

Filed under: advertising, recruitment, recruitment

Cell Your Jobs

Hospitals across the nation are beginning to embrace mobile technology and implement mobile systems of communication within their organizations. One such hospital rolled out an iPhone platform for its’ nurses this summer.  The mobile technology allowed for critical care alarms to be sent to nurses and enabled these employees to make voice calls and send and receive text messages.  Hospital executives say using iPhones as a medium of communication resulted in nurses’ ability to respond to patients faster and reduced the number of overhead pages by 78%.

While it’s certainly beneficial that mobile technology provides opportunities for improved operations, it’s also vital to realize these efforts provide a unique opportunity to enhance recruitment efforts.  If your healthcare organization has adopted new media technologies, it’s imperative to include these initiatives while selling and promoting your vacancies to job candidates.

Tout your organization’s use of technology.  Healthcare employees desire to work for innovative organizations that deploy best in class technology.  Candidates are dissuaded from organizations with outdated equipment and lack of materials.  It’s also important to healthcare employees that they be employed by organizations on the cusp of research and development, providing them with opportunities for training and enhancing their skills.  Your organization’s use of mobile technology demonstrates it is not afraid to try new things and advance.

Promote your organization’s stellar internal communication.  Hospitals utilizing mobile technology receive the added benefit of an increase in and improvement in communication.  For example, nurses equipped with iPhones and Blackberries are provided two-way communication abilities with their co-workers as opposed to one-way communication inherent to pagers. Studies estimate that nurses spend 10 % to 25% of their time tracking down their co-workers. Mobile technology and social media increases the efficiency of communication with co-workers, patients and patients’ families.  This enables nurses and healthcare employees to spend more time doing what they enjoy most, attending to patients.  Because deploying mobile technology platforms may lessen a nurse’s workload, the number of nurses needed to adequately staff a floor may be decreased, possibly cushioning the blow of the nursing shortage and allowing room in the budget for a potential salary bump for employees.

Sell your organization’s superb patient care.  Mobile technology certainly can improve the manner in which patients are cared for.  Not only do mobile initiatives allow nurses more time for attending, they also ensure the reduction of overhead pages, resulting in a quieter environment for patients to heal.  Many smart phone applications exist that are able to house a patient’s medical history, track their progress, their medication dosage, etc.  The applications help to improve a nurse’s performance and accuracy.  Nurses and healthcare employees want to work for organizations providing superior patient care – that’s most likely why they chose healthcare in the first place.

Use mobile technology to communicate and interact with candidates.  It’s important to realize that a vast majority of candidates are accessing the internet via their smart phone are receptive to advertising.  According to Neilson, 28% of the mobile web audience is between 25 and 34 years old while 38% are between 35 and 54 years old. A Pew study found that 32% of all Americans have accessed the internet via their cell phone.  Minorities lead mobile technology adoption with the majority of wireless internet users being African American. Because most people carry their cell phone with them at all times, you’re most likely to reach them in a timely manner.  Candidates may receive your messages even when they are “unavailable”; while they’re in a meeting, traveling, after business hours, etc. Furthermore, the recall rate of ads appearing on iPhones is 41% and 33% for other mobile devices and a third of those recalling the mobile ad will respond to it. Because more and more candidates are adopting mobile technologies every day, it’s imperative to include these initiatives in your recruitment strategy.

Filed under: communications, healthcare, recruitment, retention, Social Media

Don’t Wait… Communicate!

The National Association for Business Economics feels the recession is officially over and job cuts will begin declining by the end of March, 2010.  NABE panelists agree that there will be continued job loss during the rest of 2009 but they expect job losses to “bottom” during the first quarter of 2010.  However, 61% of the panelists believe there will not be a full recovery of lost jobs during the recession until sometime in 2012.

If these predictions are correct, organizations should be preparing now to ensure their recruitment procedures are streamlined and optimized for future hiring needs.  Data collected from TMP Worldwide’s New Hire Surveys indicate employer communication with candidates during the application process is consistently low.  Take advantage of this lull in recruitment to train your recruiters and hiring managers on the importance of communicating with applicants during the application process.  Develop standards requiring recruiters and hiring managers to personally follow up with applicants within 24 hours of receiving their resume.  Reach out to candidates within a day after an interview and check in with them regularly to advise them of their application status. Candidates should receive an employment offer or notice of rejection as soon as possible.

By consistently communicating with candidates during the application process, they will feel special and important to your organization before they are even hired.  And, if a candidate is not offered the position, they will take their positive application experience with them and may re-apply for a better suited position at a later date. It’s never too early to start building a platform for retention; it starts in the pre-employment process!

Filed under: recruitment, retention

Where Have All The New Grads Gone?

As more Baby Boomer nurses begin to discover the freedoms of retirement or change to a less stressful career, healthcare recruiters are challenged with replacing them. One logical choice is a younger candidate, possibly a recent graduate, who will be able to contribute to an organization for years to come.  But as recruiters begin to seek out new grads to fill these vacancies, they find a sparse candidate pool – a nationally occurring phenomenon.  Where have all the new graduates gone?

When it comes to the nursing challenge, it’s all in the numbers.  The nursing shortage in the United States is projected to grow to 260,000 RNs by 2025.  This shortage will be double what the industry has ever seen since the mid-1960s.  In August, 28,000 new jobs were added in ambulatory care settings and in nursing and residential care while 216,000 (nonfarm payroll) positions were eliminated nationwide.  By 2016, nursing will be the number one profession in the country in terms of job growth with more than 587,000 new positions being created.

These statistics paint an extremely positive outlook for nursing professionals.  You’d think that young people everywhere would be eager to enter into a career with such an abundance of available jobs.  And in fact, there has been a heightened interest in nursing.  In 2008, enrollment in entry-level baccalaureate programs in nursing increased by 2.2%, translating into 3,069 more entry-level students.  Since 1980, the total number of RNs has grown at every 4-year interval. However, the nursing population growth rate has recently slowed.  From 2000 – 2004, there was only a 7.9% growth.  For comparison, the nursing population grew by 14.2% from 1992 – 1996.  Obviously, this small surge in enrollment and nursing population growth will not satisfy the projected demand for nurses.  The Health Resources and Services Administration officials say, “To meet the projected growth in demand for RN services, the U.S. must graduate approximately 90 percent more nurses.”

However, most people who want to become nurses can’t.  The acceptance rate for nursing school is only 42.3%.  Despite the urgent need for more new grads, 49,948 qualified applicants were rejected from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2008 due to a lack of faculty, classroom space, clinical sites, preceptors and budgetary constraints.  It’s estimated that 56% of nursing schools have vacancies and need additional faculty; 21.1% of nursing schools do not have vacancies but need additional faculty members.  The faculty shortage will only increase as professors age and retire.  Currently, the average age of professors is 59.1 years old.  In hopes of combating this issue, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) introduced the Nurse Education Expansion and Development Act, nicknamed the NEED Act, to aid nursing schools in increasing faculty.  Approval would result in Capitation Grants for nursing schools to hire more professors and accept more students.

Despite the high demand for nurses, there are a few students graduating from nursing school who can not find employment.  Because of the economic downturn, retired nurses are returning to the workforce, nurses previously working part-time shifts or per diem are choosing to work full-time and nurses who were voluntarily unemployed are returning to the workplace.  These more experienced nurses are taking open positions that have been traditionally filled by new graduates.  The adverse economy also affects patients’ healthcare decisions.  Many people are choosing to forego medical insurance and are opting out of preventative healthcare, non-emergency care and elective surgeries.  This means there is a lesser demand for nursing services and many hospitals have implemented hiring freezes and some have even terminated members of their staff.

So, where have the new grads gone?  In short, they’ve gone nowhere.  There’s just an exaggerated demand for them.  Until more funding becomes available to educate more students and those students graduate, recruiters are stuck trying to attract new grads with a limited supply of candidates.  More importantly, once a new grad is hired, they must be retained. That’s no easy task given that 37% of newly licensed nurses desire to change jobs after only one year and 24% plan to change jobs after two years’ tenure.

TMP Worldwide specializes in retention and is able to provide expertise regarding the retention of younger employees.  It’s best to invest in the recruitment and retention of new grads now, while the state of the economy is preventing many older nurses from retiring.  Once the economic winds change, more Boomer nurses will leave the workplace.  Nurses who were once voluntarily unemployed will once again end their employment and nurses previously working part-time hours may choose to revert back to their previous schedules, leaving many more nursing vacancies than their currently are.  All of these factors will result in an ever greater demand for new graduates.  Will your organization be left understaffed?

Filed under: healthcare, recruitment