Credentialing is one of the most important tasks that a healthcare recruiter carries out. It can also be the bane of a recruiter’s existence.
Credentialing plays an incredibly important role in specialized and regulated industries like healthcare and IT. By confirming that a candidate meets established standards, and is recognized as capable of carrying out a specific task or role, you do your bit in ensuring the safety of the public, and the ongoing quality of services such as healthcare.
It’s what guards us against situations like Leonardo di Caprio faking it until he made it as a doctor in Catch Me If You Can, although in fairness I’m sure that most patients would be quite happy to see Leo bedside, no matter how counterfeit his qualifications.
Collecting credentials is a thankless and time-consuming task. You’ll call, email, and text the candidate, then call again. And finally receiving their credentials only marks the beginning of your work. Paper-based approaches create mountains of difficult to manage information. Standalone credentialing solutions can help to reduce the weight of the filing cabinet, but tend to create disjointed islands of information themselves.
All of this results in credential management drag. You spend so much time on checking that an individual is qualified and authorized that you have little time left to ensure that the candidate experience is a pleasant one. The inefficiencies of the process mean that corners are cut and important steps are ignored, lowering the chances of the best possible candidate being served up to your client.
In the worst-case scenario, you might place an under-credentialed candidate in an important role, compromising public safety and the healthcare service at large.
All this is to say that reducing credential management drag should be a healthcare staffing firm’s top priority if it is to achieve real and long-term staffing success. Which you most likely already know by now is the case.
As with almost any modern business problem, technology offers a solution. Credential management can be made endlessly easier with the right tech. It can streamline and automate credential management, increasing productivity, decreasing human error, and allowing a healthcare staffing firm to deliver a high-end candidate and client experience.
The first step is to remove paper from the equation. Think about the amount of data that you deal with in credential management, from the moment that a candidate applies, through to the ongoing management of their credentials. You need to track inbound applications, eligibility requirements, disclosures, fees, exam results, renewals, and employee verification information, to name but a few pieces of the puzzle.
To have this information printed on paper and stuffed in a filing cabinet is to resign yourself to hour upon hour of flicking through files, scanning documents, and manually inserting data into the necessary business systems.
Imagine trading all this for a system that does almost everything for you; one that a candidate can speak to directly, having been automatically prompted by said system to upload and update their credentials when and where necessary. A good credential management tool is like moving from the stone age to the space age.
The benefits of using technology to reduce credential management drag extend beyond those enjoyed by recruiter and firm. The best solutions will also heighten the candidate experience by making it interactive, simple, and even fun.
Perhaps, like Able, the process of supplying or updating credentials is completed via a mobile-friendly and gamified form. Credentials can be uploaded in any number of file formats, there are simple skills checklists that ask the candidate to rate their competencies on a scale of zero to five, and there are green ticks and status bars that give the candidate visual cues on how they are progressing through the process.
Having been integrated with the ATS, all of this information is automatically updated in your database. Such a self-service portal can potentially remove the recruiter from the process completely, leaving them to concentrate on further elevating the experience, and finding the very best candidates for their clients.
Credential management is a prime example of the sort of monotonous and laborious work that must be delegated to technology if an organization – staffing or otherwise – is to remain competitive.
This isn’t a case of robots taking jobs. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
A smart credential management solution is the ultimate recruiter’s assistant, able to take care of the leg work, leaving a staffing professional to concentrate on the high value and distinctly human parts of the job – the relationship building and soft-skilled activities that separate them from a customer service representative and data entry clerk.
The things that they have been employed to do.
The best bit? The tools you need to reduce credential management drag already exist, and they are incredibly simple to both institute and use. There’s really no reason not to, unless of course you really want to inappropriately place Leonardo di Caprio as a surgeon in a client’s hospital.
And those that are ready to make their staffing lives easier can begin by clicking here.
