How to Streamline Your Physician Recruitment Process

Just as accountable care models rely on data and technology to facilitate better care outcomes at a lower cost, accountable recruitment can drive economic advantages through hiring the best physicians at the lowest cost on a sustainable basis.

Here's how your medical practice can begin the path toward accountable recruitment and maximize return on investment.

Establish key recruitment and retention benchmarks. In today’s healthcare environment, all business operations within a medical practice must deliver measurable value. Do you know how much recruitment inefficiencies are costing your organization? Do you have the resources to maximize the ROI of your human capital investment?

Track the following metrics to ensure that your recruitment initiatives deliver on the triple aim of revenue opportunity, cost and efficiency, and retention:

1. Time-to-fill: By cutting the time it takes to fill a position by nearly half, you could gain almost a half a million dollars per filled physician vacancy.
2. Interview-to-hire: On average, medical groups conduct 5.3 physician interviews to fill a vacancy. But lowering that to three interviews saves an average of $18,048 per vacancy.
3. Turnover: Turnover rates peak during the first three years a physician is in a practice, at an average of 12.4 percent. Reduce this turnover rate by just 20 percent by screening candidates for cultural fit, motivation, and family interests. You could save nearly $300,000 based on an estimated $1.3 million in annual replacement costs per physician.

A final note: Many organizations take a shot-gun approach to marketing their open positions. Do you know where your best candidates are coming from? By tracking candidate response and placement outcomes, you can avoid wasting money on recruitment marketing that doesn’t work.

Accountable recruitment requires investing in proven recruitment processes which deliver measurable results. Establishing key benchmarks and measuring your outcomes can lead to an accountable recruitment program, successful hires, and long-term retention.

David Cornett is Senior Executive Vice President at Cejka Search, a nationally recognized physician, health care executive, advanced practice and allied health search firm providing services exclusively to the health care industry for more than 30 years. Email him here.