The future of recruitment outsourcing

Jim Causey of PhysicianRPO tells EHM of the benefits of outsourcing practitioner recruitment.

“The clinic reduced their costs of physician recruitment by 40 percent”
-Jim Causey

Physician recruitment is a function within healthcare organizations that keep the 'C' suite folks awake at night. Yes, it's a necessary process that feeds the livelihood of your facility. One would think that it's pretty straightforward without much variation in the process, right? In reality many healthcare executives see physician recruiting as frustrating, difficult to manage and very costly with questionable control over success.

Until recently hospitals, medical groups and practices have had only two options for the recruitment of physicians - they could build their own internal system or outsource the process to various firms and manage the process internally. It was only a short time ago that it was proposed that facilities start doing what they do with payroll and HR management and outsource the process. 

In 2004 leadership from the Human Resources and Operations department of a large multi-specialty clinic in central Massachusetts sought to establish an on-site physician and advanced practitioner recruitment program exclusive to the clinic. The clinic elected to outsource to a third party vendor rather than develop an internal recruiting department because incorporating the expertise of a professional firm offered the benefit of a faster start and shortened learning curve, provided the professional firm could replicate their service in an on-site model and adapt to the clinic's culture.

The clinic chose a national physician-recruiting firm to be the backbone of what eventually became a beta model in similar design of a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) service. Professional RPO services have become widely accepted for recruitment in commercial industry sectors and are described by the RPO Association as, "Providing the entire recruiting process including management, staff, technology, job validation, metric reporting and presentation of final candidates. A properly managed RPO will improve an organization's time to hire, increase the quality of candidates and reduce cost."

During the first two years the third-party firm supplied the sourcing expertise and the HR support to provide ongoing recruiting while assisting the clinic staff in the development of a system to manage the numerous and diverse operational components of provider recruiting. Midway through the five-year process, the clinic recognized that the initial vision was the correct path to pursue based on results at that point. In order to move the model to the next level of performance, leadership elected to distribute an RFP to additional vendors in an effort to seek a more palatable business model, higher results and an additional cost reduction.

The new vendor, a physician data management firm, specialized in the collecting and marketing of a state-of-the-art physician sourcing data and management system to thousands of in-house physician recruiters. The new vendor was able to capitalize on the progress made in the previous development of the clinic's leadership vision. The addition of the more sophisticated data and management system, the critical sourcing component was improved.

You might be wondering where I'm going with this, and here it is - after the conclusion of the five-year process the clinic reduced their costs of physician recruitment by 40 percent while increasing their results by 44 percent. The clinic created a culture of recruitment at the facility that involved existing physicians in the process of recruiting new providers, helping raise their rate of retention and increase the support services available for new physicians.

Much like the commercial RPO services, the beta program validated the absolute need for key elements of a recruitment process, such as a reliable and consistent flow of candidate sourcing, milestone based monitoring of every aspect of the process from A to Z, a driving philosophy of matching professional and personal requirements, senior level involvement by the organization and vendor, and the most important factor - an onsite concierge style coordinator, task focused and not bifurcated by non-related tasks. Simply through the beta outsourcing model the clinic was able to under spend their last annual recruiting budget by $1 million. 

Jim Causey is Vice President of Marketing and Development of PhysicianRPO. He has over 30 years of experience in business and product development, physician practice mergers and acquisitions, and experience developing businesses in Europe. Jim pioneered the outsourced physician-recruiting concept and now directs the PhysicianRPO initiative for hospitals, systems and medical groups with large-scale recruitment needs.