You’ve got staffing questions—and Melanie Boroosan, Director of Healthcare Innovation at Apploi, has answers. We searched Quora for inquiries about HR and hiring to bring you healthcare recruiting tips and insight into the industry’s trends.
About Melanie Boroosan, Director of Healthcare Innovation
Over her six years in healthcare administration, Melanie Boroosan has managed human resources, legal, compliance, payroll, and recruitment efforts at a corporate level.
Now serving as Director of Healthcare Innovation at Apploi, Melanie draws from her experience in healthcare HR and ancillary long-term care to pursue a vision of holistic healthcare staffing. She works with employers to offer healthcare recruiting tips, support, and tailored hiring strategies.
HR Questions and Healthcare Recruiting Tips With Quora
Quora: What’s the impact of staffing shortages in healthcare?
Melanie Boroosan: Staffing shortages affect pretty much everything.
Number one is that the quality of care for patients decreases. It takes longer to get appointments and it’s harder to get care. And when patients do get care, it’s probably from someone who doesn’t have enough time to really sit and talk.
Number two: staff is more likely to get burnt out. They probably have to work more and longer hours with less support, and if staffing is unstable, it’s also stressful to not know who will be working with you from week to week.
And related to that, there are more errors. Errors with diagnoses, medical records, paperwork, everything. Which of course feeds back to patient care.
At the most extreme, staffing shortages force healthcare facilities to shut down. There’s really no aspect of healthcare that shortages don’t affect.
How competitive is healthcare recruitment?
Extremely! Healthcare employers are dealing with a national staffing shortage that’s been going on for years and keeps worsening. Recruitment is really competitive, and it’s getting even more so.
How do HR professionals identify compassionate traits when hiring healthcare workers?
There are two things I want to say about this. First, I’ll answer your question.
I like to use situational questions in interviews. That’s a question that focuses on a specific scenario. So, I might ask what you would do if a resident was getting upset while you were trying to administer medication. I’ll also ask candidates about their stories, how they came to healthcare, and why they want to be here. Someone who decided to go into healthcare as a career change might have really different motivations than someone who enrolled in a nursing program when they were eighteen. You ask these kinds of questions and personality starts to come through.
But the second thing I want to say is that, in my opinion, trying to identify compassion isn’t the best use of an interview. People show compassion in different ways, so it’s tough to pinpoint. The important thing is that they can do their job professionally and respectfully. And whether you’re feeling really empathetic, or if you’re privately feeling frustrated, if you can do your job and stay professional, you’re still a good hire.
What are the benefits of hiring outsourced healthcare accounting firms?
Healthcare accounting has a lot of nuances, so the real benefit of hiring a firm is not needing to worry.
Healthcare has a bunch of extremely delicate financial items. You need to know how Medicaid and Medicare payment schedules work, and you have to understand private pay, which is really complicated. You need a grasp on admissions, what happens if a patient doesn’t have a way to pay, all of that. And then there’s also tax credits, staff stability forms, PBJ, cash flow, and payroll.
It’s just a lot to understand, so hiring a healthcare accounting firm is definitely worth it.
Is there anything different about the nursing shortage today than nursing shortages in the past?
The current nursing shortage is really extreme. Healthcare staffing always has ups and downs, but now, the staffing shortage is a problem that has no projected solution.
We had an enormous nursing shortage before the pandemic even started, and then almost one in five nurses quit their jobs. We’ve had staffing shortages, but it’s never been like this before.
Why should we hire a nurse who is a fresh graduate?
Because there’s a huge staffing crisis! You need those candidates!
But I’d go even further and say that new graduates are amazing for employers. You can train them in exactly what you want them to know. It’s financially better for you to train a new graduate than to sink more time and money into recruiting other candidates who aren’t materializing. And because you gave them their first job out of school, they’re likely to be very loyal.
Every nurse is a fresh graduate at some point, so trying to avoid them just doesn’t make sense.
And just to say it one more time: there’s a huge staffing crisis!
How do recruiters hire healthcare professionals?
Recruiters and employers find healthcare workers any way and every way they can. That might be job fairs, job boards, internet marketing, actively reaching out on networking sites, going to community events, social media, or building a web presence. It’s all on the table.
What are the best ways to recruit nurses?
Having an excellent, authentic company culture.
It’s all about culture now. Workers aren’t going to take a job if they know it will make their health and happiness plummet. Especially not with so many employers looking for workers, and especially not after the past few years of the pandemic.
Some hospitals are trying to recruit with massive sign-on bonuses, but bonuses are meaningless if candidates would need to sacrifice their mental health. Big bonuses might attract workers for a while, but nobody can be bought long-term, at the end of the day.
What’s the most wonderful thing you’ve seen someone do for a resident of a nursing home?
Honestly, it’s not about grand gestures. That’s not what residents need. It’s the small things. A phone call, a letter, taking the time to visit. Spending time with residents and showing up for them is really the most wonderful thing you can do.
Better Hiring With Apploi
Ready to bring healthcare recruiting tips and an optimized strategy to your whole team? With Apploi, access tools to help you recruit, hire, and onboard healthcare staff faster than ever. Contact us today for a free demo of our hiring platform.
