Candidate Sourcing Success, Tracking, and the Rule Of Three

Recruiting the right physician or advanced practice provider to your practice involves a lot of moving parts, including managing candidate sourcing tools and opportunity marketing channels. Whether its choosing which marketing channels to promote their opportunity on or what type of candidates to target, the decisions a recruiter makes during the recruitment process can make or break a recruitment effort. In order to ensure the success of a healthcare recruitment effort, it is important that recruiters choose their tools and resources wisely, and make sure that they track how each one contributed to every unique recruitment effort.

In order to do this, recruiters need to follow two key best practices: the rule of three and candidate source tracking.

The Rule of Three

It can be easy for recruiters to get into the habit of posting their opportunities only on a certain site, or only using direct mail. While posting opportunities to a certain site may have generated candidates and resulted in hires in the past, it does not mean it will always generate the best candidates going forward. Additionally, doing this limits recruiters to selecting candidates from one small pool. According to Roger Bonds of the American Academy of Medical Management, recruiters should try to reach the maximum number of candidates using at least three touches along three different channels. This greatly increases the chances that a prospective candidate will become aware of and interested in your opportunity, and improves the likelihood that they will want to learn more about your organization.

Additionally, while it is important to get your opportunity in front of candidates utilizing multiple channels, recruiters should be wary of promoting their opportunity through a specific channel if it fails to produce the desired result. Roger Bonds of the AAMM recommends posting an opportunity on a job board, in a journal, etc., three times, and then measuring the success before deciding to use it again. This brings us to our next best practice: tracking the success and failure of candidate sourcing tools and strategies.

Tracking Success (and failure)

Tracking the effectiveness of your candidate sourcing and recruitment efforts is essential in order to ensure that a recruiter spends  their time and resources on what works – and ceases to use what doesn’t. Some key things a recruiter should ask in measuring the effectiveness of a particular sourcing tool or marketing channel for a specific recruitment effort:

• How many responses did it generate?
• How many of the responses were qualified?
• Did any responses result in a site visit?
• Were any respondents offered the position?
• Were any respondents hired?

The most effective tools and channels will have a high percentage of qualified respondents and a high percentage of offers.

As a recruiter, time and resources are precious and need to be allocated wisely. By using a multi-channel approach and keeping track of what works and what does’t,  a recruiter can develop a comprehensive candidate sourcing and marketing strategy and make any necessary adjustments to it along the way, ensuring a steady flow of qualified candidates and resulting in the placement of a qualified team member.