By Karen Bucks, an iCIMS Blogger

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the healthcare industry is in for an extraordinary boom in this decade. “Wage and salary employment is expected to increase by 22 percent as compared to an expected 11 percent increase for all other industries combined.” I must say, that’s great if you are job hunting in that industry. The BLS further states, “Healthcare will generate 3.2 million new wage and salary jobs between 2008 and 2018, more than any other industry, largely in response to rapid growth in the elderly population. Ten of the twenty fastest growing occupations are related to healthcare. Many job openings should arise in all healthcare employment settings as a result of employment growth and the need to replace workers who retire or leave their jobs for other reasons.”

In a scaled back assessment, Monster.com reported that the expected growth might not be as much as originally expected, though still positive. Preparing for growth is something that HR professionals can face head on. The first step is to re-evaluate current processes for inefficiencies. Removing inefficiencies like source ineffectiveness or extensive paper usage can save money and time that can be spent on areas like recruitment SEO (job posting optimization) or new training programs.

To start, it would be good to re-evaluate your candidate management processes including:

• Sourcing
• Recruiting
• Onboarding
  

Within each of these groups, try eliminating at least one old process. Here are few basic suggestions:

Improve your source effectiveness through source tracking. Source effectiveness tracking can help you understand where most of your talent is coming from. Not only do you need to analyze whether you are getting candidates from each specific source, but you should also evaluate whether or not those candidates are converting into quality new hires. Check out Mike Bohanek's post on this topic! Tracking this will allow you to eliminate ineffective sources (that may be expensive) and draw only from the sources that deliver top talent.

Improve the candidate experience. Draw more top talent with an easy-to-complete application process. My advice, as scary as it sounds, go completely online. Create an online application process and install a kiosk that allows walk-ins to apply online too. While you may have to spend a little to leverage a web-based application process, the overall return-on-investment is probably worth it. The amount of money saved from the reduction in paper usage and the amount of time saved from less manual entry leads to better, more efficient processes.

Improve the employee experience. Do your new hires feel confident after their onboarding training? The only way to know is to send out an onboarding survey. Get their feedback. See what they like and don't like and use that advice to create a better program.

Evaluate your program. If you evaluate and find that you have a largely inefficient candidate management process, try fixing it now. This way, when healthcare employment does speed up, you will be prepared.