Sustaining The Momentum

The Indian healthcare sector is growing at a brisk pace, and thereby making a contribution through revenue and employment. With enterprises catering to the global healthcare markets, it has opened up multiple opportunities for healthcare professionals in India. However, increased automation and the specialised nature of work have intensified the challenges. In order to sustain the momentum, it is imperative to prepare the workforce to perform niche functions effectively and improve the quality, affordability and accessibility of healthcare. It has been predicted that job opportunities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics will increase across industries. With IoT based telemedicine solutions poised to grow exponentially across the healthcare sector, a demand has been created for professionals skilled in these areas. In the future, there are possibilities of combining skills like medical coding and physical sciences with new age capabilities of AI and machine learning, which will be key in creating domain differentiation for healthcare organisations. For mitigating challenges with hiring the right talent, it is important for organisations to gauge candidates and design recruitment strategies accordingly through new age hiring tools. These evolving, specialised skill-sets require innovative and predictive hiring strategies and a personalized approach.

Scout for young talent for the future

It is a well-adopted practice wherein companies hire candidates from colleges and train them in niche skills like medical coding and more. However, there has to be an enhanced emphasis on campus programmes with companies identifying talent from undergraduate colleges to business schools. Organisations can closely work with colleges to develop the curriculum to suit their requirement. It is the need of the hour that traditional tests (numerical ability or logical reasoning) evolve into sophisticated simulations assessing the talent pool’s application and skill orientation. Another key area would be to deploy social gaming recruitment solutions such as hackathons that challenge programmers to test themselves against peers. These new age recruitment strategies can help in spotting the right talent, and similarly make the millennial and the Gen Z aware of the technological advancement of the organisations. Of late, the trend to hire talent on the basis of referrals has proved to be quite effective for organisations where recruiters tap talent through strong referral programmes. It is often seen that peer recommendations carry greater weightage in decision making as against relying on the organisation’s reputation. Such trends are much stronger both in transitional healthcare skill sets and in new age capabilities. With the fast-changing technological landscape and its impact on healthcare, peer influence and other strategies may not be sufficient to attract resources. Apart from engaging with millennials on social networks, companies are trying to create a favourable ecosystem by offering incentives such as lease for house/car, relocation assistance, and sign-on bonus etc. This is bound to provide a competitive advantage to companies to hire specialised talent, including physicians, nurses, medical coders etc. across the country.

Integrated talent management

Today, talent acquisition and retention have become all-encompassing. The hunt for talent through proactive and prospective recruitment is the next wave. Organisations are trying to ascertain whether candidates are a culture fit as against the earlier approach of hiring for a given role. Such an approach helps companies evolve through better people culture and practices that carry long term sustenance. There is an increased focus on wellness and employee welfare programmes to bring alive the healthcare sector’s mission of care for its own employees, since such a value proposition contributes to talent attraction and retention. Today, recruitments are driven by analytics that help in determining individual-specific insights, salary trends, location heat maps, new world psychometric testing, identification of talent pools, and much more. Utilizing analytics can make the recruitment process contextual, proactive, and predictive. Besides, these new age knowledge sharing through data mining are helping organisations in their decision‑making process. AI enabled selection processes can elevate the recruitment process to the next level. Companies are trying to promote a culture where candidates can directly interact with leaders which will not only help them in understanding the culture, strategy, and vision of the organisation, but also facilitate assessment of potential employers.