The Importance Of Reliable Staff
What is the most important investment any company will make? Is it in real estate? Is it in equipment? Is it in marketing? Is it in legal fees? Actually, no; it’s in none of these. The truth is, the most important investment for any company will be in its staff. Staff brings not only value but idiosyncratic expertise to any business. Of course, there are costs involved, too.
Beyond salary there’s training to consider, there are liabilities to consider, there are benefits to consider and associated taxation. If all of these expenses average out to $50k per year per employee, in five years that’s $250k. For ten employees at that minimal rate, you’re looking at $2.5 million in five years, or about $500k a year.
That’s definitely expensive, and a medical practice that only employs ten people on its overall staff in total is a smaller institution. For most medical practices, there are going to be a lot more employees, and there will be much higher associated costs. Accordingly, if you’re going to see the most Return On Investment, or ROI, per employee, you’ve got to hire right.
Recruitment Best Practices
Recruiting the right people isn’t always straightforward. Even nurses requiring the least qualifications to hold a legal position with a given healthcare practice can be hard to find. Keeping them on over the long term is also a difficult proposition. Not only is it costly to maintain an employee, for many healthcare businesses, but there’s also a “hiring department”.
That department has its own expenses. Accordingly, any hiring decision is a big one. It’s an investment, and that investment may take a few years to mature. Ideally, you don’t want high “churn” or “turnover” across the surface area of your staff. When you hire somebody, you want them to stick around, at a minimum, until you get your investment on them back.
Ideally, you should at least double your investment in terms of productivity and value to your medical practice before an employee moves on, retires, or gets fired. Many large-scale medical practices will set up a hiring department with similar outcomes in mind, and that department will have to justify itself by hiring the right people.
However, there is a less expensive way. One tactic many independent practitioners are turning to today involves the consultation of healthcare recruiting experts. Such experts can give medical practices access to a variety of qualified candidates more quickly, efficiently, and effectively than older methods of hiring staff.
Streamlined Staff Acquisition
Through such avenues of hiring, there is often a larger selection of potential new hires from which to choose, and medical practices can get the “cream of the crop”, as it were, more easily. Working with such experts reduces the time it takes to onboard new people, and assures more qualitative hires as well, maximizing personnel investment quicker.
Granted, there are always situations where, despite everyone’s best efforts, something happens which makes it so a new staff member who seemed like a fine hire must be liquidated or suspended, and investment in them lost. Wise businesses calculate such losses with projected revenue goals.
However, when a medical practice can optimize how it hires people, instances like these are reduced, meaning not only do employee investments have a greater likelihood of maturing, the margins designed to cover losses may not necessarily apply. Reduced churn means greater overall profit—beyond profit, the time it takes to hire is reduced.
Something else to consider is the broad variety of necessary personnel even in smaller practices. Custodial staff, nurses, receptionists, marketing personnel, surgeons, doctors, tech people, attorneys—there are quite a few positions to fill. Going with a solution that has made it a prerogative to organize recruits in one database makes things easier all around.
