Healthcare Archives - Employment Office

One of the more difficult healthcare areas to recruit for are those healthcare facilities within rural and remote areas of Australia, so when you’ve successfully recruited, how can you retain?

According to 2019 research conducted by SARRAH for the NSW Ministry of Health; ‘Factors that influence retention are broadly categorised as professional and organisational, social (family and personal), and financial. These are modifiable to varying extent.’ So, there are many factors which broadly influence a person’s decision to remain working within a remote healthcare facility.

Here’s a few ways you can improve employee retention rates in your remote or rural healthcare facility:

Professional and Organisational Factors

Provide a professional incentive to remain. Is there any way your organisation can provide the individual with the incentive of professional development through the ability to complete courses relevant to their line of work?
Promote and recognise the work the individual is doing. Highlight how they are really making a difference to the community they are within and their commitment to serving others.
Provide mentorships and support to the individuals. Rural and remote healthcare facilities have small teams and often the ability to mentor and emotionally support an individual, especially when their work is high-pressured can increase their likelihood of remaining within your organisation.

Social Factors

Focusing on family, if the employee has children, is there any way your organisation can support their education or their childcare costs. This will ease the pressures your employee may face when considering their roles impact on their family.
Offering incentives that relate to teamwork and team bonding. Your team is likely to be smaller than that of regional facilities. Are there ways you can provide your team with social incentives, such as quarterly team celebrations and/or team day trips out of your rural location.

Financial Factors

While housing can often be cheaper than within cities and inner regional Australia, rural and remote areas can be more expensive for general supplies and things like fuel. If your organisation is able to ease these pressures for employees, this may increase retention. This doesn’t need to be monetary; it could be as simple as providing your employees with breakfast each day or subsidising the cost of fuel when travelling to work.
Offering monetary incentives such as a yearly review of pay may help your team feel like their work is valued and that you recognise their worth.
Non-monetary incentives like flexible working opportunities and the offer of more than the average holiday days without a change in pay, can help your employees be happier with their work life balance (and therefore their work happiness) without affecting their finances.

Need help with your recruitment process?

Speak to our recruitment experts at Employment Office today. We offer recruitment services that help with end-to-end process and can both advise and execute your next recruitment campaign without removing your control of the process. Call us on 1300 366 573 or email info@employmentoffice.com.au today.

While for some industries their main recruitment issue is attracting talent in the first place, for industries like healthcare and the not-for-profit sector, there is a huge pool of potential candidates. The problem with this, is the need to reduce the candidate pool significantly. So how can we do this?

It is a misconception that in the NFP and healthcare industry, it is easy to find the perfect candidate. Yes, there are plenty of people within the talent pool that have the right hard skills to do the job; but many are similar as the required qualifications are so niche to their industry.

This is where softer skills come into play; however, these are difficult to determine from a resume alone and when you could easily have fifty-plus applicants attracted to one job advert, you could spend hours with candidates determining their softer skills.

How can you filter your candidates down before face-to-face interviews?

We’ve come up with some shortlisting techniques that might help you narrow down your candidates and identify those who have the best attitudes ready for final interviews.

1. Phone Interviews

Conducting phone interviews are a much quicker way of directly speaking to an individual and getting a gut feeling of their attitude to the work they will be doing if they were successful. While this is certainly an option that will take some time, it will be significantly less time consuming to speak with each individual over the phone briefly than to organise individual interviews that could last the good part of an hour.

2. Group Interview Days

Split your candidates into a few groups and organise group interview days. By setting tasks and discussion points, you should be able to quickly determine which candidates have the softer skills you are looking for and those who would suit your organisation. The added benefit is seeing how they interact with other people when performing tasks, their potential for growth and their ability to think on their feet.

Shortlisting tip: When figuring out how many candidates you should invite to group interviews, multiply the amount of people you want to hire by 3 and invite that number. This gives you a nice range of candidates and a better idea of how many resumes you need to screen before finding those candidates.

3. Behavioural Testing

This is where behavioural testing could be an excellent option. Using a Candidate Management System (CMS) you can immediately filter through the candidates that will not fit your preferable behavioural style upon initial application. So those who qualify for their hard skills but whose behavioural style doesn’t fit your desired ethos would immediately be apparent.

“This all sounds great, but I don’t have the time to do this!”

We know hiring for healthcare and the NFP industry can be demanding and time consuming. That’s where we come in. Employment Office can comprehensively screen all of your applicants and determine the best talent from the pool for your vacancy so you can save time and expenses.

If you’d like to hear more about how we can screen your potential hires, contact us today on 1300 366573 or email info@employmentoffice.com.au.

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Techniques for retention: Rural and remote healthcare