Knowledge Article

A Diagnostic Tool to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Recruitment Plan

Developing a new recruitment plan can provide you with the opportunity to evaluate past recruitment successes and failures. It also offers a clean slate for developing a plan that sets new goals, targets and metrics for measuring success. The following is a “check up” tool to evaluate the effectiveness of your past and future recruitment plans. If your recruitment department or staffing office did not have a plan, it provides criteria to begin the formulation of one.

• Do you know where your best source of new hires came from during the past year? (They should be tracked according to source code.)
• Did you measure the effectiveness of your advertising and media plans? Do you know what venues brought you the most qualified applicants? (This data should be captured by source code as well.) Don’t plan to spend more money out of next year’s budget in areas yielding little or no return.
• How many hires resulted from conference and job fair attendance. (These statistics should also be captured by source codes.) Make adjustments to the plan by only attending events yielding results or necessary to organizational image. Ensure nurse managers support and attend with HR to interview “on the spot” and make employment offers contingent upon references, health screening, and credentialing verification.
• What percentage of your new hires was attracted through an employee referral program? If the percentage is below 40%, analyze the barriers, give the plan a “face lift”, and re-market the program in a highly visible manner to your employees. Be sure to include program information during orientation.
• Review your application processing time for effectiveness. Are nurse’s resumes being responded to within 24 hours?
• Review your “walk in” applicant process. Do applicants get escorted to the nurse recruiter from any point of contact within the hospital? Are managers willing to interview “on the spot”?
• Once the job offer has been accepted, what is the timeline for getting the new hire working? If the timeframe is not acceptable, what are the barriers?
• Do you have a college relations “strategy”? (Showing up on special career days, or posting your organization’s information is not a strategy.)
• Does Nursing Education meet with Recruitment to understand the candidate pool not meeting minimum qualifications? You can discover local “hidden” pools of talent willing to work if the right educational program is developed so they qualify for vacant positions.
• Do you reconcile the posted vacant positions against position control at least twice a month?
• When was the last assessment of your current RN market conducted?
• When was the last assessment of your local competition conducted?
• Do you interview each new hire after 90 days?
• Do you conduct exit interviews with each nurse who voluntarily leaves your organization?

This diagnostic tool will supply you will quantifiable information to get started on formulating a “first time” recruitment plan, or serve as a means for evaluating what you did in the past to improve outcomes in the future. (Many times dollars can be shifted from areas yielding marginal outcomes to areas in need of budget support, e.g. a new education program focused on developing competencies for new pools of candidates.)

Whatever your purpose, opportunities will present themselves to improve your performance metrics in vacancy and turnover rates, overtime and outside registry usage, time to fill vacant positions and cost per hire.

This article was written by Cross Country Staffing and originally appeared in the Journal of Clinical Systems and Management.

© 2003 Cross Country Staffing