As we move into the second half of 2021, the healthcare industry continues to rebuild a workforce destabilized by the COVID-19 pandemic and the preexisting nursing shortage. This moment presents an opportunity—there has never been a better time to reevaluate healthcare onboarding software and best practices to ensure you are hiring and retaining well-prepared employees.
A thoughtful onboarding system can continue to positively impact your organization for months or years after welcoming a new hire. In one recruitment survey, 52% of hiring managers said they found that strong onboarding improved employee retention overall. This feeling was confirmed by a Glassdoor study that found successful, structured onboarding could both increase productivity and raise employee retention rates by 82%. Better retention means less money spent on hiring and training replacement staff. With staff turnover costing hospitals an average of $5.1 million annually, a strong onboarding system offers organizations serious financial gains.
Automation through Healthcare Onboarding Software
Onboarding a single employee can stretch time and resources. Meetings need to be scheduled, training requirements fulfilled, and paperwork distributed, filled out, and filed. When you multiply that time commitment by the number of positions healthcare organizations fill each year, it’s easy to anticipate a huge drain on HR’s bandwidth.
One solution? Automation.
Automation is the process of delegating certain tasks to an automatic workflow (like healthcare onboarding software), freeing up time for human workers to focus on other priorities. This has the obvious benefit of reducing strain on your HR department, but automation offers additional benefits as well. You can reduce the possibility of human error, eliminate the risk of bias creeping into hiring decisions, and simplify messy, disorganized filing systems that make it challenging to find important paperwork at a later date.
Recruitment and onboarding software, like Apploi, may partially or entirely automate aspects of healthcare onboarding. This can include automatically completing background checks, sending bulk email and text communications at the click of a button, and instantly collecting and filing necessary credentials.
Data Security
Security is important to nearly every industry, but in healthcare, it’s more than important—it’s required. The HIPAA Security Rule mandates periodic security training, while the HIPAA Privacy Rule requires all sensitive information to be appropriately guarded. To ensure your organization is abiding by ethical guidelines and remaining in compliance, the best practice is to integrate security training into the onboarding process.
Education around security can begin before a new hire even steps into the facility. Discuss your priorities and security measures during interviews, and include information about security regulations in your onboarding packet. Beginning with a strong foundation of understanding can help your employees grasp why continual security training is important, and increase their engagement when this training recurs.
Security concerns affect both patients and employees. Keep all sensitive data encrypted on a protected platform, and restrict access to these databases. An accessible file cabinet is a security hazard for many healthcare organizations—as far as possible, digitize your paperwork to reduce the risk of unauthorized access and to protect files from loss through human error. When using a healthcare applicant tracking system, understand the security measures that it offers, and clearly communicate to applicants that any information they share will be safeguarded.
Personalized Experience
Wading through onboarding paperwork can be a tedious, impersonal process. When you’re focused on dotting I’s and crossing T’s, it might seem like there’s no time to create a personal welcome. Don’t let this feeling dissuade you—organization and compliance do not have to come at the cost of a personalized onboarding experience. There are ways of gathering the necessary documentation while also extending a warm welcome to your new member of staff.
Complete as much onboarding before your new hire’s first day as possible. If you take care of basic orientation and verification during the application process, you won’t need to dedicate valuable in-person time to these necessities.
The first days and weeks of a new job can be critical—employees often decide whether to remain with their organization or seek employment elsewhere surprisingly quickly. Research from HBR found that a third of employees start looking for a new job after only six months with their current employer. A positive first impression can be one component of your employee retention strategy, saving you time and money down the line.
Consider personalizing onboarding in the following ways:
- Designate pairs of new employees as “onboarding buddies,” keeping them together through each step of orientation and training
- Break up paperwork and HR appointments with scheduled introductions with other members of staff
- Coordinate a time for new hires to shadow an established staff member
- Ask new staff about their goals for the next 5 years, and discuss how they might grow within your organization
- Encourage the new staff to set specific goals for their first 30, 60, and 90 days that will support their ultimate career path
A Mobile-First Healthcare Onboarding Platform
The healthcare industry is facing a serious labor shortage. With only limited qualified applicants, a high level of industry turnover, and a large number of organizations trying to fill similar roles, it’s vital to develop a hiring and onboarding system that captures high-volume talent quickly. Healthcare onboarding software with a mobile-first platform can be part of the solution.
Wide distribution of job posts is one part of effective recruitment, but flexibility is another critical factor. If your application or onboarding process is complicated, drawn-out, or requires candidates to complete lengthy paperwork in one sitting, you’re limiting the number of people who will make it in the door. To accommodate candidates who are already working, provide tools that will allow them to apply and onboard on the go.
Some aspects of onboarding are best accomplished in person. Mobile platforms will never entirely replace in-person onboarding—but when used intelligently. they can help create an efficient, personal, and effective process. A well-designed mobile-first platform will help you get tedious onboarding requirements out of the way quickly, and demonstrate your commitment to supporting staff with families, multiple jobs, and other commitments.
Why Use Apploi
Apploi is on a mission to help healthcare recruit more successfully through smart job distribution, streamlined onboarding, and digital credential management. Our platform automatically distributes job posts across 80+ job sites, and offers 1-click apply to attract the widest possible pool of qualified candidates. With digitized employee recordkeeping and automated credential renewal reminders, we help you make sure your workforce is always ready.
Interested in learning more about how you can recruit, hire, and onboard healthcare staff quickly? Contact us today for a free demo of our end-to-end solution.
