By Danielle Miller

Whether you work inside a large academic medical or a small rural community hospital, you can employ hundreds or thousands of employees. In either case, your process for streamlining the selection, retention, and development of employees is critical to your success. The right technology can help you create a cost-effective strategy to find candidates, narrow searches, and onboard new employees.

What is the key to your success? Incorporating the right technology into your hiring efforts can help save time and financial resources. Technology can speed up the recruiting process while opening doors to more qualified candidates. Organizational leaders who do not implement solid strategies to leverage technology into the competition for top talent will most definitely fall behind in the industry.

Twenty-first century technology that allows you to effectively attract and recruit talent with predictive models helps you better select, retain, and develop the right talent across the entire employee life cycle and, over time, completely transform your healthcare organization.

One area you should consider is incorporating assessment technology to screen candidates against behavior markers specific to medical jobs. This offers your organization an advantage with selecting, hiring and retaining new employees that have the same values and passion like those currently committed to your healthcare organization, and those employees have a direct impact on patient care quality. The positive impact of the congruence between employee and organization value is not surprising considering research in other work environments that indicates workers’ perceptions of value congruence with their organization positively impacts the individual’s productivity and the quality of product produced or service provided.

The key is to make technology work for you during the retainment, recruitment and selection process. To better retain staff, some providers are turning to recruiting and talent acquisition technologies that provide predictive analytics. Analytics can reduce health systems’ turnover rates by reviewing all the data and compare high-achieving individuals and applicants to predict quantifiable outcomes, such as success in the position and likelihood that the newly hired employee stays with the health system.

Technology also allows for comparisons between the position an applicant applies for and other departments for which the candidate will be a better fit based on the applicant’s strengths and skills.

So how can technology improve the recruitment and selection process? First, it can make the recruitment process less time consuming and costly, and save both time and money. Here are three examples of how technology can help.

Increased employee productivity

Technology involves the automation of very manual processes, which cuts down the time it takes to complete tasks. The automation feature streamlines social sharing, managing emails, and delegating tasks as well as organizing and acting on available data.

Better hiring decisions

Employee turnover costs organizations millions of dollars. You can reduce turnover by avoiding mismatches in the selection process, and easily compare each candidate’s qualifications – avoiding those that do not fit the culture inside your organization.

Strategic planning

Your organization needs a recruitment process that requires you to manage multiple tasks. Analytics allow you to measure how well your hiring strategies are working, and imbedding analytics into recruiting technology allows you to become more strategic about your selection process and fine tune your organization to become a well-oiled, hiring machine.

Leveraging technology into your organization not only reduces turnover and improves performance, but it is also offers the best strategy to overhaul your company’s culture and ensure its “corporate DNA” reflects the ideal workforce to take your organization to the next level. By hiring to the benchmarked qualities of your best performers, you can effectively transform sales, performance, and culture to better drive vital corporate business goals. A successful deployment not only increases the speed of decision making, but also frees up business analysts in the organization to move away from mere data extraction and synthesis to more strategic analytics. This will help to create data-backed strategies to improve your recruitment and selection process.

Danielle Miller is Chief Nursing Officer, Clinical Applications – Infor.