SAP SuccessFactors: A Digital Lifeline to Hunt Talent in the Healthcare Industry

Ever since its launch in 2001, SAP SuccessFactors has ushered in a human revolution in almost every industry vertical. It is a complete, cloud-based human resource management (HR) system that covers everything from payroll to employee engagement.

Healthcare is one of the sectors where HR professionals are always surrounded by problems related to staffing. Healthcare organizations have to recruit and maintain a productive, efficient workforce while competing with every other healthcare organization for too-scarce talent. With the rising trend towards performance-based career models in the healthcare industry, many HR departments are struggling to recruit and retain high performing workers due to increased demand for them.

Current Scenario

We’ll consider the scenario in the US for the sake of this blog. But the situation is somewhat the same all over the world.

There is a dearth of skilled labor positions in healthcare organizations in the US. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reported that 46% of HR professionals are finding it difficult to fill full-time roles for nurses, doctors, and specialists.

Underscoring this medical staffing crisis, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) predicts a shortage of 40,800 to 104,900 doctors by 2030. For nurses, the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) predicts 1.2 million vacant nursing positions by 2022. The need for medical talent is there, and we are on the verge of falling short.

Why this talent shortage?

An aging population is the answer to this question.

In the United States, 48% of the population is projected to be over 65 by 2032, compared to just 3.5% projected to be 18 or younger. This means many industries are dealing with a talent drain while struggling to find the next generation to fill in the gaps.

Healthcare is the most affected industry because the aging population impacts it two-fold: it sees employees retire, but also sees growth in aged care patients.

That means HR professionals are left looking for replacements in an already competitive job market.

SAP SuccessFactors solutions are key to solving all such problems in one go. Technology can support HR managers in overcoming challenges related to staffing, regulations, reporting, and talent management. When combined with strategic workforce planning, technology can work wonders for this industry.

SuccessFactors in the Healthcare Industry

SuccessFactors provides a range of benefits for healthcare organizations. These include increased patient and physician satisfaction scores, reduced turnover, efficient recruiting and better compliance.

Besides, the digital platform is also instrumental in other areas of recruitment related to the healthcare industry. They are as follows:

• Improved training and skills compliance through a sophisticated learning management system (LMS).
• Standardized human resources management processes and workflows.
• Solidified foundations for global talent management and workforce planning strategy.
• Improved workforce productivity, with insights into how pay impacts performance and how performance impacts the bottom line.
• Improved workforce analytics, which enables improved workforce optimization.

When integrated with other tools like SAP S/4 HANA Cloud, it can digitally transform almost every business process in the healthcare industry.

Now, we’ll take a look at how SuccessFactors lends a helping hand to HR through various modules.

Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM is a widely used term in customer engagement but now it’s also used for employee engagement.

SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting can streamline the user experience for candidates so that they can find and apply for positions easily. SuccessFactors Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) can increase applicant engagement and make the recruiting process easier.

Using CRM, a medical recruiter can create campaigns for specific needs through forms that directly integrate into SuccessFactors Career Site Builder. This can be done without possessing extensive technical expertise. Similarly, e-mail campaigns can also be created.

After posting a job, medical recruiters can also build talent pools in CRM to create clusters of specific types of candidates. This makes it easy to locate the candidates whenever needed. For example, you can build a talent pool for ER Nurse job postings, separate from the potential ICU nurses and medical-surgical nurses.

Furthermore, CRM provides candidate pipelines using which you can find that potential candidate without ever creating a requisition. Additionally, the tool also unifies all candidate information into a single view, thus saving the time of switching through different screens.

Last but not least, CRM helps track the effectiveness of your recruiting efforts through recruiting KPIs. This will go a long way in improving the efficiency of your recruiting team.

Employee Performance and Goals

Nowadays, it is important that HR managers in the healthcare industry regularly check employee actions and behavior and map out future goals and expectations concerning their performance. When written effectively, employee performance evaluations are very helpful to the productivity of a healthcare organization.

When evaluating employee performance, a manager can measure individual performance throughout his or her team, identify top performers for further development and also establish a pay-for-performance compensation plan. SuccessFactors Performance & Goals solution easily measures and tracks progress giving a stronger understanding of individual and group performances, including gaps in communication. Performance and goals can be directly linked to patient satisfaction surveys and feedback.

This helps healthcare organizations identify areas for improvement and train the workforce accordingly.

Learning Management

Employees are valuable assets for any healthcare organization and their skills should be constantly upgraded based on advancements in the health sector. These could be the latest treatments, advancements in technology, patient satisfaction modules, and much more.

Undertaking learning and development sessions is a mammoth and time-consuming task. It involves the assigning of the appropriate training programs to target groups, building training content, recording, assessing and reporting training completions to the authorities. SuccessFactors Learning Management module addresses all of these concerns related to learning and employee skill development. It helps the concerned training department to improve employees’ skills, develop leaders, reduce compliance risk, and better enable external audiences.

Onboarding

To tackle turnover, healthcare companies need to effectively onboard their employees so that they are in tune with the company processes, culture, and values, as well as understand their own individual goals right from day 1.

SAP SuccessFactors has an excellent module in its armory called Onboarding. It features tools for mentoring i.e. assigning an experienced nurse or doctor as a buddy or mentor for the first 90 days after recruitment. It helps new joiners to get familiar with the hospital environment and SOPs.

Other onboarding processes can also be streamlined through SuccessFactors, eliminating manual entry, improving integration with recruiting, tracking new employee data, and even getting that new hire paperwork out of the way as soon as possible.

A Final Word

Recruiting the right people and retaining them will always be challenging for healthcare organizations. SAP consulting services, like Accely, can help them find a way out before it’s too late. So connect with the experts today and let your HR department feel the difference.