Company: Published Articles: Managing Your Career
by Niels Andersen, President & CEO, KAMedData.com, Inc
Published in PhysicianRecruiter.com, 2000
Our industry is growing up. The healthcare business is more competitive than ever and
physician recruiters are expected to be more accountable and productive than in the past.
Healthcare management is increasingly shifting the emphasis from recruitment to acquisition,
and recruitment is becoming less of a priority in many environments. Physician recruiters who
want to survive the shakeout in the healthcare industry need to enlarge their skill
inventories, expand their knowledge base and be prepared to change their job descriptions
quickly in order to justify their positions and prove their value to their employing
institutions.
Many companies are downsizing as a result of the healthcare shakeout. In many scenarios,
management will quickly initiate a large layoff. The highest paid Directors and Vice Presidents
with the least political or financial leverage are among the first to go. In-house recruiters
are often tied-in with this group, with management overlooking the value the recruitment
department brings to the table. The feeling is often that recruiters are overpaid sales people
with little or no analytical substance. Whoever is responsible for this perception, physician
recruiters are the only ones capable of changing management's understanding of their value to
their organization.
PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT IS VITAL IN A POLITICAL ORGANIZATION
In order to obtain professional credibility and value, the true benefits of what you do and
its importance to the organization must be understood by management. Unfortunately, once a
recruitment program is set up and running smoothly, the most visible activity of a recruiter is
the wining and dining of a promising candidate. Some may view this as a luxury the organization
can no longer support. This perception results in a demand for constant justification of what
is being done in the recruitment office. The physician recruiter's corporate public needs to be
educated on the complexity and scope of activities that lead to a successful placement.
One of the best ways to disseminate consistent positive information is to make it a part of
the department's own public relations program. This should be an ongoing process. The physician
recruiter should not wait until pressured by upper management to initiate such a program,
because by then it may be too late. If you don't begin to let your organization's management
know how valuable you are, no one else will do it for you.
GAINING NEW SKILLS INCREASES JOB SECURITY
Job security is directly dependent on the fiscal health of an organization, and the
professional growth of the recruitment department. As a company grown, its needs change.
Recruiters and their departments must also evolve and change.
Today's physician recruiters are fast becoming more business development generalists with
specific expertise in recruitment and now, acquisitions. Planning, marketing and finance are
three areas in which the recruitment department is getting more involved. Although it is not a
prerequisite to become a guru on these topics, a solid foundation is valuable, particularly as
it relates to communication with other departments. It is imperative not to step on any
internal political toes and damage relationships with other departments by telling them how to
do their job. A far more effective strategy is to demonstrate to top management how a strong
recruitment and acquisitions department contributes directly to the bottom line.
A strategic vision is crucial to an organization's long term success. Ideally, everyone
within the organization should know what the goals are, and it is management's responsibility
to ensure that this happens. If there is no recruitment plan, or if a revision is necessary,
the recruitment department may want to take the lead in initiating the process, and provide
some guidance on implementation. By nature, recruitment and acquisition departments have a need
for explicit, long term directives, which serve to assist management with the development of a
vision for the department. This can help assure that expectations are achievable and realistic.
It also provides an opportunity for the physician recruiter to influence the general direction
of the organization.
Medical staff development helps to determine where, when and why physicians are needed in
each specialty. It is from this plan that the organization will determine the ratio of
acquisitions versus recruitment. Today, recruitment departments are playing a larger role in
the development of these plans, which is only logical, as they are heavily involved in their
implementation. If the recruiting department is not involved, recruiters simply become order
takers, without a grand vision or a stake in the outcome for the organization.
Physician recruiters today need to have not only a solid understanding of the fundamentals
of recruitment, but also have their arms around budgeting and job costing. Financial
forecasting and justification is important in recruitment and acquisitions, for both economic
and legal reasons. At one time, the healthcare industry could and did make huge capital
mistakes and usually recovered nicely. Today, every dollar is counted and accounted for. If you
spent it, you had better be able to justify it.
Job costing is one way to help maintain control of the investment in each recruitment or
acquisition. This is common practice inmost other industries where money is expended, and
should also be applied to ours. Additionally, it can help you later should you need to prove
the reasonableness of an amount invested in any given transaction for the IRS or the Department
of Justice. Included for consideration are items such as travel, accommodations, mileage, and
staff labor, including recruitment, legal, accounting and opportunity cost for interviewing by
the recruitment committee and so on. This data can ten be used for various management reports,
including cost comparisons between using in-house resources versus outside consultants.
THE MOVEMENT TOWARDS INTEGRATED DELIVERY SYSTEMS
Practice acquisitions and the development of integrated delivery systems are the growing
trend. Practice acquisitions are a relatively new phenomena for hospitals and hospital systems;
as a result, very few experts exist in the field. Most of these individuals are outside
consultants, with the few in-house experts gaining their experience on-the-job. Now is the
window of opportunity for the recruitment department to naturally expand its mandate by
positioning itself as the logical department to head up these operations.
Recruiters, healthcare legal counsel and other administrators are taking steps to learn
about practice valuations, deal structures, compensation packages, negotiations and all of the
other components of provider network expansion. They are becoming the in-house experts.
Many of the analytical financial formulas for valuation are taught, but usually not to the
degree that would enable someone to go out and put a deal together. There are many components
of an acquisition other than the valuation and financial package which must be understood such
as planning, negotiations, operations, legal issues, politics, the acquisition process, and
presentation of the offer. A knowledge and understanding of this process will be the most
important career advancement tool you will need for the next three to five years.
STRENGTHEN THE ORGANIZATION, DELIVER WHAT IS PROMISED AND DEMONSTRATE SAVINGS
These areas, s well as new provider integration and retention, are continually evolving and
provide new challenges every day. Our industry is not static and it is the recruitment
department's responsibility to keep up with and meet the needs of the company. To the extent
that we don't demonstrate value, the use of outside consultants to recruit and acquire will
proliferate. While you are busy doing the work at hand, consultants' sales teams are busy
positioning themselves to get work. You need to keep in mind that the vast part of their effort
is leveraged to sell themselves to your management.
While spending all of your time selling yourself is not an option for the physician
recruiter, learning new skills and becoming more involved in the planning of the work will
enable you to keep your promise of provide timely results. It is easy to become complacent and
overwhelmed by daily tasks and headaches, but take the initiative to set aside time for the
department to brainstorm on what it can do better, and what innovative things it can do to help
the organization help itself. Identify specific deliverables, demonstrate value of your
organization, and continually market the information in-house to key influentials.
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