Labor_Unions

Supplemental Recruiting Services Henry L Cooke Columbia Southern University Stephen Mitchell wrote an article titled “Supplemental recruiting services“in June 2009. This article describes how an external recruiting firm can augment a Human Resources (HR) department. Mitchell explains this in the context of the medical field with nursing as the field of study. Mitchell provides multiple examples on how augmenting a HR department in a hospital could provide favorable results and be advantageous in his opinion. “To offset reductions in HR staff, brining supplemental recruiting resources on board during an aggressive hiring initiative to fill the recruiting pipeline and augment existing HR resources is both cost effective and prudent”(Mitchell, 2009). This statement helps drive the purpose of the article to exercise the innovative thinking of augmenting HR departments with recruiters. With the documented cut backs in HR departments in resources and manning the desire to recruit quality nurses exists. Finding innovative ways to recruit quality nurses to provide quality care at lower cost is critical to maintaining a motivating stressed forced a hospital desires to retain (Mitchell, 2009). This is critical as HR departments are tasked to always search for the best and the brightest to fill the void of the critical nurse shortages. Mitchell used three sourced references for this article. The three references are related to department staffing, corporate recruiting and a HR magazine. There was research from a hospital in Michigan where they used a supplemental recruiting service to help staff the first 100 of 200 new beds in the hospital. Within 60 days more than 1000 candidates were sourced and screened. The time it took to was significantly reduced with candidate contact at an optimal time. At the end of the contract over 325 RNs were hired. Mitchell also received an educational grant from the Bernard Hopkins Group to provide information for his article. He is the Vice President of RRx Intergraded Talent Solutions, Healthcare Division. With his back ground in this field it leads one to believe he has used his personal experience as a point of reference for a substantial amount of his research. After reading this article it would make one consider that augmenting an HR department is a great idea. There are a multitude of reasons that favor this practice. To offset an HR department a supplemental recruiting source helps saves money by hiring them only as needed. Any time a hospital is reorganizing or requires training or assistance they can use the external recruiting firm to help in the process (Mitchell, 2009). They are flexible and have a systematic process in place that is reliable. Many recruiters are self-employed or fall under an organization (Mitchell, 2009). This can be leveraged determined the experienced the HR department has in dealing with today’s technology when it comes to networking for potential applicants. Stephen Mitchell did a nice job writing this article. It’s apparent that he has a good working knowledge in the field of HR recruiting. His personal experience coupled with the references takes readers through a vast amount of advantages of augmenting HR departments. They way he broke down the article in five different sub-paragraphs helps one see the quantifiable process in how supplemental recruiting source could also work in any industry. Mitchell should have used data showing the amount of money the two hospitals saved by the utilized supplemental recruiting source that he referenced in his article. This would have shown a relationship between convenient of services and cost benefit. People want to see, the bottom line. Does this work and how much money can I save' An area where the author could possible expand is other specialties services in the medical field such as radar technicians, physical therapist, medical transcribers, and phlebotomist. These are a few examples of other medical professionals that are needed at hospitals. Do these supplemental recruiting sources have the technical expertise to recruit other technical occupations' Would it be advantageous for them to branch out to other expertise or is it better to recruit for one specific occupation' Future research should focus on collecting data on money saved by the utilizing supplemental recruiting sources. There should be a breakdown of how much money is saved by not employing a HR staff full time compared to services render by a supplemental recruiting source. The comparison should compare same time and same services. Another area to analyze is to follow a cohort of people that the supplemental recruiting source has placed. Tracking this cohort would allow for surveys to be sent out, where question about job satisfaction, pay, benefits, and loyalty to their organization can be asked and analyzed. This cohort could be compare to other traditional HR recruiting cohorts. The analysis could show if the supplemental recruiting sources are doing a sufficient job at matching employees for the company. This would be a great benefit for the hospital, but more importantly for the supplemental recruiting sources because they could show they provide a service after the sale. References Mitchell, S. G. (2009). Supplemental recruiting services. Nursing Economics, 27(3), 192. Retrieved from Academic OneFile database.