Staffing Robot - Healthcare Staffing Technology, Design & Marketing Blog

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.

Largest Healthcare Staffing Firm in the Nation Rebrands - AMN Healthcare

AMN, the largest healthcare staffing company in the nation launched a major rebranding campaign yesterday. According to AMN the effort was put forth to more accurately reflect their interconnected service offerings. The branding campaign has created a new visual identity across all of their divisions including a new logo and design on all AMN Web sites and materials.

"The AMN Healthcare of today has evolved significantly since our inception 25 years ago. During 2009, in particular, we made significant enhancements to our client-focused processes and re-aligned our brands and service offerings to ensure we are focused on what our clients need and value most from us," said Susan Nowakowski, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of AMN.

Right now is perhaps the best time to focus your company efforts or your brand. The heatlhcare staffing industry has seen several changes in the last year so coming out with an improved identity, renewed focus and new service offerings can go along way toward getting clients to notice you.

It's always a risky move to go through a rebranding effort, especially when you have such an established and well known brand as AMN. Further, there's more to a brand than a new logo and website. However, from the looks of it, AMN has done it right and will continue to improve upon their well respected brand.

Should Hospitals Focus on Eliminating Their Agency Staff?

It's a question that never seems to go away. Can hospitals truly eliminate all of their agency usage? Perhaps a better question is - should they? From a management perspective, the healthcare staffing industry seems to be one of the last to see the usage of temporary labor as being negative.

By now we've all read the L.A. Times article that highlighted some bad practices of a few staffing agencies and used these examples to paint the entire industry with more negative stereotypes.

The American Staffing Association had a great response to the article that was necessary and expected. What was nice to see, however, is people like Rebecca Hendren from Healthleaders Media who has written a couple of excellent articles on how hospitals can better manage staffing agency professionals. In her first article Rebecca discussed how positive work environments and better orientation practices can improve the process for working with agency staff.

This week, Rebecca wrote another article about how hospitals are making effective use of technology to reduce their reliance on agency staff. She points out hospitals that have effectively deployed internal staff scheduling software to fill more shifts with internal staff, offer more scheduling flexibility and improve morale. The Healthleaders Media article made several great points on this topic and I wanted to add a few of my own.

1. It's no secret that scheduling software applications can dramatically improve a hospital's staffing situation. However, software won't solve the nursing shortage. It bothers me to say that. I'm a huge believer in technology but sadly, it will not solve all of our problems. Even though the economy has given us the illusion that the shortage of healthcare professionals has decreased, this is only a temporary situation (no pun intended). All analysis suggests the shortage will only continue to get worse. According to the Bureau of Labor, at 23%, the demand for nursing will be much greater than the average for all other occupations between 2006 and 2016. So no matter how efficient the software, if there's no staff to manage - there's no staff - and working with temporary labor is still necessary.
2. Deploying a solution to better manage your internal staff while ignoring the management of staffing agencies won't solve your hospital's staffing problem. Hospitals need a solution that will manage all of their staffing - both permanent and temporary.
3. The article includes some popular generalizations about the use of healthcare agency staff such as: using agency requires more organization and effort and that it "can sometimes lead to resentment among the permanent staff, who question why their hospital is willing to pay twice as much to agency nurses to fill open shifts as it pays to its own loyal staff."

Healthcare Vendor Management Systems ensure that the process for managing agency staff is simple and effective. Implementing such a system means that the same, if not less, effort than managing internal staff is required. In addition, nurses do not get paid 2x as much if they work for an agency. The mark up on pay rates to agency staff does not equate to being 2x the cost of internal staff (especially if you factor in other benefits for internal staff) and this money is not all paid to the nurse. Further, there is an implication in this statement that the mark up is unnecessary. The mark up exists to provide quality staff, often under short notice and goes to cover the business costs of properly recruiting, screening, hiring and placing these professionals.

The solution is to more effectively utilize staffing agencies - not work toward eliminating them. Attempting to eliminate agencies can actually end up being more costly to hospitals in the long run due to increased staff overtime, burnout/turnover and higher management costs due to a lack of efficient processes if/when using agency staff is necessary. Additionally, until the nursing shortage is over it's not feasible for every hospital to fully eliminate their agency usage. Therefore, a better goal is to focus on more effective agency management - not elimination.

In the past I've written about several reasons to use agency staff so I won't repeat myself here. I'll only close by saying that focusing on things such as improved orientation, better credential compliance management and process automation with a comprehensive workforce management system is a more effective solution for hospitals in regard to addressing their concerns with agency staff.

Symbio Solutions Files for Bankruptcy

Late last year I blogged about the struggle of several healthcare VMS companies in the industry. Symbio Solutions was no exception. As they began having trouble paying their staffing agencies, organizations such as the National Association of Travel Healthcare Organizations (NATHO) started calling them out.

It looks as though the situation has not improved for them and this week, Symbio Solutions filed bankruptcy. Symbio Solutions was started in 2003 and was a viable competitor, selling workforce management solutions, in the healthcare staffing industry for several years.

And then there was 1...

I do my best to remain objective and not overly promote ShiftWise on this blog but I think it's relevant and fair to point out that, in terms of vendor neutral healthcare VMS systems, ShiftWise appears to be the only company left in the industry. It will be an interesting year.

What's Your Email Address Saying About Your Company?

I have a confession. Yes, I secretly judge people and companies based on their email address. It's true. Granted, I judge personal emails differently than business email - but I still judge.

I won't go into all the thoughts that run through my mind when I see someone with an email address ending in @aol.com. However, I must chime in on business emails.

It's simple, if you have a business you have to have a website. If you have a website you have to have a domain. Purchasing this domain entitles you to an email address of the same name. Use it. If you have not set this up you aren't in business yet. Be patient.

On average I have seen contacts from 5-10 staffing agencies every week for the last several years. This has led to an extensive list of healthcare staffing agencies I've worked with. Of all of these contacts I still see at least 2-3 agencies per month with an email such as 'istaffnursesallday@aol.com' or simply, 'sally@comcast.net'. (These are fictional examples)

Whenever I see an email address like this I automatically think - how can I take you seriously if you don't realize you need a website with a domain and a proper email before you start making business contacts? What else are you overlooking? Further, how is it I can seriously help represent you as a business partner?

The worst is when these same companies actually send information requests. I personally won't send any business information electronically unless it's to a corporate email address. How am I to trust that you're not a competitor? You may not be but your email certainly isn't helping me to know that.

The summary - as a business owner, one of the first things you should do is register a domain and get your email account set up. You can even do this before you have your actual website built. There's no reason to wait. 

Please, use a corporate email address. It's the least you can do.

Never A Dull Moment: Clearview Staffing Software Acquired by API Healthcare

Before I left for vacation a few weeks ago I ended the year with a post summarizing some of the more important trends in the healthcare staffing industry for 2009, as well as some of my predictions for 2010. However, proving the industry to be full of surprises, a major event occurred during the last weeks of December that certainly would have made it in to my previous post.

Clearview Staffing Software, the leading provider of web-based staffing applications to healthcare staffing agencies was acquired by API Healthcare, one of the largest providers of web-based staffing applications to hospitals in the nation. This new alliance will certainly prove to be a formidable competitor as they present their comprehensive set of offerings to the industry.

With hospital budgets being minimal and their IT focus on electronic medical records, I imagine that API has had a difficult time selling their applications to hospitals over the last year. So, it's interesting to ponder API's strategy here. Was the acquisition to provide more products to hospitals - those that are fully web-based and present a different pricing model? Was it to enter the staffing agency market? Or is their goal to provide an end-to-end solution to the industry?

Watching what they sell, to whom and under what pricing conditions will be very telling. API will definitely be a company to watch in 2010.