It is no secret that recruiters face multiple challenges when sourcing and hiring the perfect candidate. But what is the cost of failing to overcome these obstacles? Overlooking and failing to implement best hiring practices can harm a company’s revenue, reputation, clients, stakeholders and employees. This is particularly true for businesses that operate within high-risk industries, including healthcare.
With a trending mass exodus in employment, The Great Resignation has highlighted the need for streamlined and efficient hiring practices to stem staffing shortages across the globe. Recruiters face many obstacles such as determining the veracity of documents submitted for job applications. It may be what is written on a CV, a supporting document such as proof of work experience or educational qualifications. Sourcing, screening and hiring the right candidate can be expensive, slow, resource-consuming and risky.
Taking healthcare as an example, sourcing and hiring the perfect candidate for these high-risk roles is crucial. Not only does an employee’s competency impact patient care and well-being, but the cost of a wrong hire can equate to at least 30 per cent of the employee’s salary in the first year. Of course, this cost varies for each employer, but it is still a loss to the business. Additionally, the loss of time spent advertising vacancies, shortlisting job applicants, multiple interview rounds, onboarding new employees, obtaining work permits as well as costs for visas, training and medical insurance should be considered. That is why when hiring, it is in a company’s best interest to hire the right people the first time around.
Garry Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, The DataFlow Group.
So how do we reduce recruitment costs and risks to engage with and employing the right people for job vacancies? The answer is to implement emerging technology to make the hiring process more efficient, mitigate risk and remedy staffing issues in a secure and trustworthy way. At present, many government and regulatory bodies award a licence to practice to professionals based on their credentials and work experience. Verifying the accuracy and validity of these applications can be a resource-depleting, time-consuming and challenging process. To handle these licence applications, processes such as Primary Source Verification (PSV) are implemented, in which a third party, like The DataFlow Group, verifies the accuracy of information provided directly from the source. Innovative processes like PSV enable employers and government bodies to source and hire qualified professionals with great efficiency, inspiring confidence in all parties.
To date, multiple government authorities have leveraged these solutions to verify the information supplied by job candidates or licence applicants. To begin the screening, candidates first upload their required documents for verification to an online portal. These include Documents to support an application including educational certificates and work experience. Once the application and documents are received, it uses its rapidly expanding network of 100,000+ issuing authorities across 200+ countries to validate the information from the source.
Furthermore, sophisticated blockchain-based career hubs, such as The DataFlow Group’s TrueProfile.io, aim to help healthcare professionals while making hiring even more efficient. When an applicant gets their data validated, their verification is stored securely on the Ethereum blockchain, making it tamper-proof and theirs to keep forever. On the recruitment side, employers can use this cutting-edge blockchain technology to verify a candidate’s documents. This pool of pre-verified TrueProfile.io members with authenticated credentials on the blockchain creates a trustworthy environment between parties, reduces time-to-hire and staff churn, expedites hiring decisions, and helps to scale workforces quickly.
To stem staffing shortages safely, healthcare employers need access to a steady stream of qualified and verified healthcare professionals. A verified talent pool is important to maintain as these individuals are ready to engage when positions become available. This has the potential to reduce time-to-hire dramatically, further delivering cost savings. Furthermore, healthcare practitioners who undergo a vigorous recruitment process in which their employment history, experience and credentials have been validated, driven by technology and an objective review, will inspire confidence in patients towards their healthcare provider and the industry itself.
Additionally, a qualified workforce encourages trust and creates assurance for patients, those who need to put their trust, and lives, in the hands of qualified medical professionals.
That is why Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven solutions are being implemented to give an extended overview of a job applicant, which also includes their online presence. Recruitment goes beyond qualifications and experience. It extends to finding a good cultural fit too. The DataFlow Group’s Digital Footprint Verification is a tool that scans an applicant’s presence on the internet, social media channels, and the dark web to determine their online behaviour. This sophisticated technology can also identify and track an individual’s pseudonyms too. The benefit of this type of technology is to give organisations a thorough and transparent understanding of a job candidate to make the right hiring decision. This verification generates a historical and real-time data report for employers to protect themselves from unnecessary exposure to risk as it flags violence, prejudices, and extreme tendencies.Â
While PSV is not yet fully automated, manual human input is gradually being used less. Artificial Intelligence plays an increasingly more prominent role in assessing a job applicant’s suitability for a role, helping healthcare employers to further overcome recruitment challenges. At the rate at which technology and quantum computing are advancing, AI-driven solutions will be able to independently process job applications in the not-so-distant future.
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Garry Taylor is the Chief Technology Officer, The DataFlow Group.
