What Puzzle Piece is Your Recruitment Strategy Missing? [VIDEO]

In this short video, Brian Ackerman will discuss the fundamentals of recruitment planning.

Video Transcription:

Hello. My name’s Brian Ackerman, and I want to talk to you a little bit about your recruitment strategy and the key puzzle pieces that go into that planning process. If you’ve heard me talk before, either in this setting, on our website, or elsewhere, you’ve probably heard me talk about the importance of ensuring you’ve developed a compliant physician needs assessment. While clearly that is important, what we want to emphasize today is that just one puzzle piece into the broader recruitment strategy that your organization should be developing.  Oftentimes, for our clients, a community need is going to be different than what their organization needs are, and so we want to talk through some of those differences, what inputs you might want analyze to understand how those differences really come to bear in terms of your final recruitment targets.

So, the key pieces to your recruitment planning involve a number of things. First, we want to look at your organization’s growth initiatives. Maybe you’ve developed market share targets through a strategic plan and you really want to articulate what those look like and ensure that you’ve got the provider complement necessary to drive that growth. Similarly, program development. Maybe as your organization has a emphasis on cardiac services over the next five years, and so you want to ensure that your recruitment plan is providing the necessary providers to really bolster that program and allow it to achieve its objectives. Succession requirements remain a key piece, particularly today as we look at the aging of the physician complement in most communities, and oftentimes, you can look at that distribution and it is centralized in some key specialty areas, so let’s make sure we’re understanding what that is, understanding the time frame necessary to ensure that we’re recruiting today for some of those needs that may be coming down in the near future.

Care transformation activities. Again, if your organization is more progressive as it relates to population health and things of that nature, that is going to provide a little different lens that you want to look at needs for your community and your organization through, so making sure accounting for that is also another key piece to factor in and we can look at community need as we talked about before, and looking at the community as a whole as well as by submarket can help to kinda understand how that need might vary within the market you serve. Are we understanding provider wait times? Have we done blind, secret shopper surveys for some of the key specialty areas to understand, not only how long does it take to get in to see a provider, but are there any insurance access limitations as I’m trying to enter into the system? And then, finally, we also want to talk about medical staff input, understanding practice dynamics. Again, we don’t want to recruit into a certain practice or area where the dynamics may not facilitate a successful transition for that new provider. So let’s talk with our medical staff, understand what their perspective is on needs.

So, we find that oftentimes, many of the organizations we work with have done this, either anecdotally, portions of this, maybe they’ve done a deeper dive, but have failed to really look at it collectively.  I think the key piece here to understand is looking at all these process components in a formalized way that allows you then to evaluate those results collectively, to understand how they may feed off each other or support each other is gonna be key. And at the end of the day, we want to develop a proactive recruitment strategy and targets that aren’t forcing us to react to changes that are occurring day in and day out, but instead we’re looking a few years ahead and planning for today what our needs are going to be in a few years. Again, done together, all these things can allow you to have an effective recruitment plan that can really support the overall strategic initiatives of your particular organization.