Staffing Robot - Healthcare Staffing, Marketing and Technology Blog

What if Booking A Plane Ticket Worked Like Our Healthcare System?

Whether you're for or against healthcare reform I think it's difficult to argue that our current system is working.

Think about the services you make use of every day from business to personal. Booking a hotel, finding a photo online, sharing information with your friends, or managing your internal work projects. Imagine if any of these services were as difficult to work with as our current healthcare system. Would you continue to use them?

Not being a big fan of the government, what shocks me is that, in this case, we're not talking about the government running something inefficiently. We're talking about private business. It's the private insurance companies that have failed to deliver a viable model or useful service when it comes to healthcare. How people can continue to support this broken system when they would have no tolerance for a similar level of service from the services they use everyday is beyond me.

This video is a parody of what it would be like to book a plane ticket with a travel agency that had a business model similar to our current healthcare system. Makes you think.

Concerro, Inc. Acquires RES-Q Healthcare Systems

Yesterday, Concerro, Inc., announced their acquisition of RES-Q Healthcare Systems. Concerro, formerly BidShift, has come along way since their inception in 1999. Offering more now than just shift bidding technology, through acquisitions and proprietary software development they also offer incident response and management systems as well as a core scheduling and staffing application for hospitals.

RES-Q Healthcare Systems is one of the largest providers of hospital core staff scheduling systems. They were recently recognized as the 2009 Best in KLAS software market segment leader for Staff and Nurse Scheduling.

The acquisition is a good strategic move for Concerro and will better position them in the market through this rapid expansion of their customer base.

RES-Q’s award winning labor management and scheduling applications are the only solutions that align completely with Concerro’s strategy to help healthcare organizations control labor costs through optimization rather than reduction,” said Graham Barnes, CEO of Concerro.

via www.businesswire.com

My Interview on Staffing Talk

Last Friday, Gregg Dourgarian of Tempworks Staffing Software and the blog Staffing Talk had me on his call in show. We discussed several topics such as ShiftWise Healthcare Vendor Management, the current economic state of the healthcare staffing industry, the social media application foursquare, Social Media Marketing (SMM) and staffing agencies and my blog Staffing Robot.

Gregg is an active blogger and continues to try new things. He is definitely helping to further advance the use technology and social media in the staffing industry. Thanks for having me on your show Gregg.

You can watch the show here.

Google Search Getting More "Social"

Seems the rage these days is aggregating content and data from social networking sites. As the web becomes more segmented through various platforms from search to social media, having a single source to search, deliver and index data is becoming increasingly important. Especially when it comes to monitoring and promoting your brand online. Google Social Search is making this easier.

After creating a Google profile and linking your social, blog and other similar sites, you can begin searching your content as well as the content of people to whom you are connected on these sites.

Here's a video that describes this in more detail:

My favorite feature of this new service is seeing the connections and content behind the search result sources. Google lets you drill down into your search contacts and see the various methods by which you are connected to each of them.

Google Social Search will certainly have a further effect on your SEO | SEM campaigns as it puts more emphasis and personalized, social search. More and more, Google is enabling ways for people to search based on their preferences, location and connections as opposed to content in aggregate across the Web.

Google is definitely keeping it interesting.

TweetDeck Launches New Recruiting and Job Service - JobDeck

My favorite social media site is Twitter. Although there are several tools for interacting in different ways with Twitter the best tool out there by far is Tweetdeck. I've mentioned this app several times in previous posts, particularly on how staffing agencies can use Tweetdeck for recruiting and new business leads.

Tweetdeck has now expanded this ability even more. By partnering with TwitJobSearch, a Twitter-based job search engine, Tweetdeck now offers a custom branded interface that finds job and recruitment related Tweets called JobDeck.

Essentially, it's Tweetdeck with two additional columns added by default: ‘Job Search Experts’ and ‘TwitJobSearch’. Add in your own personal search columns, in addition to your Facebook and LinkedIn columns, and you have a fantastic source for online recruiting.

In addition to posting on Twitter, with a few extra steps, recruiters can also have their tweets posted and indexed by TwitJobSearch, helping them to more effectively connect with potential candidates online. You can also post premium job listings, or "Tweetured" (terrible name) as they call it, on the TwitJobSearch site on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. 

I'm curious to know if any of you start using this service and what the results are.

What is the Hospital Job Growth Outlook for 2010?

This article in Healthleaders Media talks about some encouraging signs that could point to increased job growth at hospitals in 2010. Interestingly, it also illustrates how dismal of a year 2009 was.

Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary data show the healthcare sector created 267,000 new jobs in 2009. This is a significant drop from 2008 when healthcare created 363,600 new jobs.

One thing we've learned is that healthcare was not completely recession-proof over the last year and a half as we've seen a number of large-scale layoffs across the board," says David Cherner, managing partner of Health Workforce Solutions, LLC, a San Francisco-based research firm. But, certainly, it is much stronger than any other segment of the economy.

Here's to hoping the healthcare segment stays strong and proves to be a good year for jobs.