In today’s fast-paced world, it’s crucial for HR leaders to rethink the onboarding experience. Imagine an ideal scenario where candidates sign their offer letter and automatically receive a prompt to register for the next orientation.
So why does this scenario sound like a distant dream?
Unfortunately, onboarding healthcare candidates usually means a combination of disjointed tasks, endless emails, and multiple points of contact. It’s often difficult for candidates to know what exactly they still have left to complete, while recruiters struggle to recognise exactly where their candidate is in the process. From occupational health services, capturing headshots, completing background checks and the right to work check, the list goes on and on.
In Australia, the Healthcare and Social Assistance sector continues to experience steady growth, recording a 4% increase between 2023 and 2024. By 2026, the workforce in this sector is expected to reach approximately 2.21 million people. This sustained demand is driving healthcare organisations and government agencies to focus on enhancing workplace improvements and ensuring long-term workforce sustainability.
This presents an opportunity for recruiters to embrace automation in onboarding talent to entice top candidates, ease administrative burdens, and enhance the overall candidate experience.
In this blog, we uncover three key strategies health systems can begin incorporating now to onboard healthcare talent.
1. Automate the Onboarding Checklist
Eliminate Manual Processes and Centralise Your Checklist
The traditional onboarding checklist is a huge administrative burden and often involves a chaotic mix of emails and manual tracking. Naturally, this makes it difficult for candidates to know what actions they must take to progress through the hiring process.
However, by automating this process, your onboarding teams can start approaching this as a task-driven process and not just a checklist of items to tick off. Candidates can access and complete all their requirements directly through an onboarding or credentialing platform with a centralised checklist. This approach eliminates the need for your candidates to dig up information through one of the many emails or text messages they’ve received, allowing them to complete their tasks quickly and efficiently.
Get Real-Time Tracking and Visibility into Your Candidate’s Status
Incorporating automation into the onboarding process can also enable real-time tracking and reporting, offering visibility into how candidates are progressing. Onboarding teams can view where candidates are in the workflow, how quickly they are going through the process, and even identify bottlenecks. This transparency not only helps organisations do things faster but also removes the manual need for auditing processes while improving overall efficiency.
2. Seamlessly Integrate All Your Vendors into One System
Onboarding often involves multiple vendors, including background check companies who can support organisations with right-to-work checks, reference and education verifications, and more. However, are these providers being plugged into the right systems so that results can be pulled and placed effortlessly?
Integrating these third parties into a platform or ATS with workflow automation capabilities can ensure a cohesive and efficient process. It wasn’t too long ago that the concept of a workflow automation tool started to arise in order to limit, or even remove, any human intervention. By integrating multiple vendors into the right systems and making sure they have the appropriate APIs, not only can your onboarding team pull and place results into the appropriate systems quickly, but candidates can also finish each of their requirements faster. Consequently, a better candidate experience will impact both how quickly you onboard and retain them.
3. Review Your Company’s Policies and Processes
Identify and Remove Unnecessary Blockers
Regularly reviewing company policies and processes is essential to identify potential blockers that may hinder the onboarding process. Many requirements are often self-imposed rather than mandated by external bodies, such as the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) or the Fair Work Ombudsman. In fact, no single government department mandates background screening for all employers.
However, various laws and regulatory agencies may require screening depending on the industry and role. Ultimately, your company’s policy should guide what checks are necessary, ensuring they align with legal obligations and operational needs.
By aligning your policies with requirements, organisations can eliminate unnecessary steps and expedite the onboarding process.
Reimagine Current Processes to Speed Up Onboarding
There are other creative ways companies can rethink their current processes to get candidates started faster. Exploring progressive screening, for example, allows candidates to start their orientation while certain checks are still in progress. By starting essential screenings early, organisations can ensure candidates are ready to begin work within the desired timeframe.
It’s also becoming more common for health systems to implement same-day or next-day employee health screening. Rather than waiting for an appointment with your employee health department and dealing with disjointed onboarding records, look into using third-party clinics and collection facilities for drug and blood screening.
It’s critical to partner with a vendor who can not only automatically schedule these services but also enable candidates to easily change the test location if necessary. Automation can also help provide the drug and blood screening results to the same onboarding platform housing the onboarding checklist and other candidate records.
Embrace Automation to Onboard Strategically
Exploring the idea of automating the onboarding process may sound like a huge lift, especially with all the current processes you and your team may have already built. However, by embracing automation, onboarding teams can use this opportunity to shift from being tactical to being strategic in how they onboard their candidates.
Taking these steps above can help healthcare organisations reduce time-to-hire, decrease candidate drop-off rates, improve employee retention, and build a larger talent pool. And as your health system starts to look at all of these pieces together, you’ll begin to reduce the overall burden and staffing challenges that likely exist within your organisation today.
To learn more about our healthcare background check solutions, click here.
