Practice, Entry & Support 101

 

This is not the be-all/end-all of the recruitment and retention part of PE&S, only my methods coupled with PE&S staff ideas that I have incorporated into this document.

 

First thing to know and use is our matching software system, if you do nothing else, promote www.texashealthmatch.com. If your client creates a profile we have them in our data base and the system will begin to work for them even if we get sidetracked. It is also the first step to everything else.

 

To begin your Promotion and Referral (formerly known as “recruitment”) you should make contact with clients from the job seeker side and the employer side. To reach your job seeker clients you should seek out your residency programs, nursing schools, medical schools, conferences, etc. Take lots of paper goods with the website and your contact info on it and disperse it far and wide. Try to set up a luncheon, coffee, or other social gathering that has free food to draw them in. It’s just like hunting squirrel, find out what they’ve been eating and where they go to eat it and be there with it, and you’ll bag a mess of them. For the employer side, some of the above mentioned locales and techniques work well there too. We also have the Monitoring Project tool to use as leverage. Get your data base of contact information for hospitals, clinics, and practitioners in your area, and sit down with a phone and call them up and use a script similar to this one,…

 

{{{One ringy-dingy}}}

 

“Hello, Bob’s Drive-Thru Proctology Center, how may we assist you?”

 

“Good morning, this is Joe Smith of Possum Poke Area Health Education Center (they may not have heard of AHEC before) and I have a program with Benedict Arnold State University to assist our community to find and retain our healthcare professionals and I’m collecting some data to see where our critical needs are within the community. Toward that end I’d like to ask your human resources person 3 questions at their convenience.”

 

That’s your “in”. More than likely they’ll take the bait right there but they might want information to call back. They might call back and they might not. If they do, you’re good to go. If not, put them in a que to call back in a couple of weeks. If they are receptive right away, then ask them question number one,…

 

#1. “Do you currently need any healthcare professionals and/or healthcare related skilled workers?” If they say yes/maybe/or possibly next millennium, promote THM and give them the contact information. If they say no, give them the THM info and tell them they can create a free profile anytime they want. If they specifically mention a type/sub-type of healthcare professional, go right then if you are at your desk to your admin backdoor of THM and go look it up and see if we have any. If so, tell them and invite them to create a profile and look up “Dr. Poolittle the Proctologist” themselves as well as get alerts to any new ones that might post. If Dr. Poolittle’s profile is checked open and not hidden, feel free to send his information to the clinic, but check first.

#2. “In the last 6 months have you gotten any new healthcare professionals, and if so, what were they?” ORCA would love for us to be able to get names here too, and it would be great for us too, so that we could check and see if any of our people from our data base got hired. HOWEVER, asking names this soon in the dating process is like going for a big sloppy French kiss moments after your date has agreed to ride to Sonic with you. Best to build up some trust before you go for second base and ask for specific names.

#3. {Assumes question number 2 was answered in the affirmative} “Where/how did you get them? Private head hunter? Professional recruiter? Newspaper? Internet? Etc.?” This information will help us better meet the employer’s needs.

 

Then before you hang up, let them know that we can assist with their staffing needs as well as other AHEC programs; CEU activities, Practice Management, etc. and invite them once again to create a THM profile. If they need help creating it, have them sit at their computer and talk them through it, or better yet, if travel permits, go meet them first hand and talk them through it over their shoulder.

If we don't have what they are looking for, check with ORCA and DSHS Office of Primary Care, or go to Work in Texas.com and get yourself a free employer login and go look in their data base. Post to your closest craigslist.com, or hospitalsoup.com, etc. Use those resources I sent out in the email with all of those links.

 

Here are examples of selling points for job seekers and employers:

1. The service is free. We are funded by the state of Texas to assist them and since their tax dollars have already paid for it, they might as well use it. At this time, all of THM is free. It will always be free to create a profile as a job seeker or employer. In the future at some point we will contact all of the employers in the data base and begin a discussion as to how much of a nominal fee they will pay to post job ads. This small fee will be used to pay for the cost and upkeep of THM website. For now though, everything is free.
2. They will get the best of both worlds as far as staffing assistance. They will get the THM system which will automatically run matches for them. They can run matches by hand via the internal search engine, and they will have access to AHEC PE&S staff to give hands on human touch assistance as well.
3. You can promote the clinic to the HPs, the HPs to the clinic, and refer each of them to the other.
4. You can approach the city council, economic development boards, etc. and advocate that they consider HP recruitment as an economic development strategy.
5. You can assist the community in creating a recruitment and retention team, followed by a succession plan.
6. You can make referrals both in house and out to our partners and stakeholders. CBE from across the hall might be able to help them. Maybe ORCA or the DSHS Primary Care Office would be the entity they need. We don’t have to be the be-all, end-all, we just need to be the #1 on their speed dial as the go-to folks.

 

You can also always give me a call to help you out. The only thing I insist on is that if you tell someone I’ll be calling them, you must call me first and give me some background and let me know you have committed me.