Staff recruiting can be, to say the least, a challenge, but when it comes to medical staffing, finding a recruiter to work with can be difficult. There are many questions you must ask a recruiter before you agree to work with them, and you must make sure that everything is up to par on the paperwork side of it, because healthcare services and employees must follow a very strict set of rules.
Make sure they understand what locum tenens is.
Healthcare recruiters need to know exactly what they are finding employees for. Make sure they understand the laws and legalities, as well as penalties they may face if they do something wrong before you consider using their recruiting services.
Ask around.
Who have your friends and colleagues used in the past? Were they satisfied with their services?
Internet searching.
While it is usually recommended not to Google your own medical symptoms because it would probably scare you silly, it is recommended you look up candidates you want to hire and recruiters you might use. What kind of online rating has the recruiter gotten? Can you use the reviews to track down one or two of their clients to ask questions?
Decide if you want a one-person recruiter or a multi-person locum tenens staffing agency.
This all comes down to personal preference. Some people like a team approach, while other people like to work with just one person.
Know if they provide local or national employment placements.
Some recruiters will only help staff people in their local area, which can be helpful, because they probably know the area quite well. However, some locum tenens physician staffing agencies don’t just stay local, they place staff members all over the country. Before you sign a contract with a recruitment agency, you must decide if you would like to stay local or try somewhere new.
Make sure they are knowledgeable about what they are doing.
These people need to know the inter-workings of a hospital or other medical facility. They need to know the backstory of the facility they are working for, as well as what services are currently in demand and which ones aren’t. For example, they need to know there is a chronic orthopedic shortage at hospital A, so that is where they will send the bone doctors, not cardiologists.
They aren’t afraid to back down from a challenge.
Not all job placements are easy. Some job-seekers are just hard sells to medical facilities, which can be for many reasons. A good recruiter can take a job-seeker who is a little rough around the edges and hard to place and make him or her into the perfect candidate for a job. A good recruiter can also look into the hard-to-sell job-seeker’s internal strengths that don’t always shine through. They take them through practice interviews and role-playing conversations, so when the job-seeker gets to the medical facility they want to work for, their knowledge and ability will be shining through.