During a recent product demonstration, Prolucent SVP of Product, Rod Shifflette, was asked an interesting question:
“What do you see as the 3 most significant trends in the recruitment landscape over the next 3 to 5 years?”
Not only is it a great question, it was also posed to the perfect person. Described as brilliant by colleagues and clients, Rod is a product-focused business leader who is masterful at translating client needs into powerful product features. He, along with others on the Prolucent team, pioneered and developed some of healthcare’s first and largest labor marketplace and vendor-neutral VMS and MSP offerings. Since then, he has developed additional healthcare VMS and workforce management platforms including Prolucent’s proprietary platform, LiquidCompass®.
As the product leader, Rod and his team continue to modernize and innovate features and functionalities of LiquidCompass® to keep pace with today’s evolving workforce management needs. With this rich background, Rod’s response to this question is backed by decades of hands-on experience and aligns with the reason Prolucent was created.
Here are the top 3 workforce trends Rod (and Prolucent) foresee taking shape or continuing over the next 3 to 5 years:
1. New Technologies that Innovate the Common Application Process
The most significant change in the recruitment landscape emerged in 2020 and has led to the steadily-evolving trends we see today. Hiring competitiveness rapidly increased and perspectives on life, work, and balance were forced front and center. Employers were required to accelerate improvements in the applicant experience.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are generally focused on the application and the internal steps in the applicant review and onboarding process. In essence, they are largely centered around the talent management team. Improving the applicant experience has far-reaching implications on both recruiting processes and technology. It involves not only the career site and the ease of the application, but also timely feedback, iterative and relevant communication, AI and ML engagement tools, preference-based targeting, and many other aspects of the application and hiring process.
A great career site with an exceedingly easy way to express interest in the right job that correctly integrates with the employer’s ATS and generates a quick, thoughtful response is the beginning. This trend, a rigorous focus on the applicant experience, will introduce new technologies in the engagement stack and will require talent management teams and hiring managers to rethink the common “application processing” mentality of the past.
2. Offer What the Jobseeker Wants
Pay is not the only or even always the most important factor. As noted in our previous blog post, nurses “…ranked attention to their mental health and a focus on work-life balance as their top worries for working in healthcare rather than adequate pay or benefits”. Workers are increasingly seeking good company culture, traditional and new benefits, balance, flexible and controllable schedules, and career path options over salary or rates of pay.
There is much that goes into delivering on this trend but, at a minimum, your career site and job postings need to offer the required information. Your platform needs to have far-reaching distribution capabilities and it needs to be clear about all opportunities that exist in your organization, not only permanent but flexible and travel opportunities as well. These opportunities need to be clear to new applicants, current employees, and past applicants that you are seeking to re-engage.
3. Increased Focus on Active Sourcing
- Improvements in the targeting of job distribution across all channels to drive higher converting and more cost-effective outcomes from each channel
- Improved value for applicants and better management of their application data
- More effective use of already collected applicant information
Prolucent brings a new approach to workforce management. We partner with health systems to build sustainable end-to-end solutions in alignment with your workforce goals. Our AI-driven technology and custom services help you secure the workforce you need for today and the future.
We are reimagining how health systems build a future-ready workforce.
