One of the more significant rippling effects of the coronavirus pandemic, even in the post-COVID era, has been a greater focus on employee retention. Within that scope, there has been greater emphasis placed on attracting quality talent and ensuring all workers feel fulfilled to complete their jobs successfully.
But managing a workforce, particularly one with a large percentage of contingent workers, is easier said than done. With vacancies becoming more time consuming, and thus more costly, to fill, a comprehensive talent management system can help streamline operations and contain costs.
What Is Talent Management Technology?
Talent management technology is any software platform that helps improve the ways an organization attracts, hires, and trains its employees. While there are some out there that focus on either a single aspect or even a few aspects of this process, the most effective talent management platforms support fully integrated systems that oversee every facet of the employee life cycle within the company — from candidate search to offboarding.
Any talent management system worth its salt will streamline and organize tasks such as:
- Candidate seeking
- Background checks
- Recruitment, interviewing, and onboarding
- Continuing education
- Employee performance analytics
- Certification/qualification management
- Upward mobility opportunities
- Offboarding/exit interviews
For most healthcare organizations (and companies in general) talent management is a long-term commitment and is part of every sound business strategy.
How Talent Management Technology Contains Costs
Each aspect of a business strategy involves ensuring operations run as smoothly as possible while keeping costs as low as possible; and talent management is no exception. Here are some ways a comprehensive talent management platform can contain costs.
Identify Training Opportunities
One of the more critical aspects of retaining key employees is keeping them challenged and motivated. The best way to achieve this is through continued training and learning opportunities. When an employee feels that they have the space to grow into a role and sees a clear pathway for career advancement, they become more incentivized to stay with a company for the long haul. By providing learning opportunities, employees are able to acquire new skills to feel more fulfilled in their role.
Talent management software fosters growth by either directly providing interactive, online training or by making educational recommendations based on role or current skill set. It also keeps track of each employees' individual certifications and accolades to ensure each person is on track in their career development. This is particularly crucial in the healthcare industry for contingent staff because it allows the company to select the right person with the right qualifications for each procedure.
Recruit Better Talent
Talent management systems must organize and optimize every aspect of a person's employment with the company, including the pre-recruitment and recruitment processes. HR departments are able to utilize this software in order to more thoroughly research and discover the best candidates in myriad categories and positions within any healthcare system using real-time industry data.
Additionally, once the candidate is contacted, the software will keep each step of the recruiting process organized and manageable including interviews, hiring, onboarding, and training.
Performance Analytics
Gone are the days where annual reviews provide the only insights into workforce performance. A comprehensive talent management system will not only provide training opportunities and certification management, it allows for concise feedback to be entered into a database. This provides real-time performance analytics so that each employee can be put onto the right job or be managed accordingly.
With all of this data a mere few clicks away, managers can more easily identify the traits and experience of each employee, what may have led to their successes or failures, and plan accordingly for the future. This may mean taking that person off certain types of jobs or recommending further training opportunities to get them up to speed.
Contract and Wage Management
Contingent workers in particular are more difficult to manage in larger organizations. Talent management software helps organize all contract data and wages and can even compare them to industry averages to help the organization realize where they are overpaying or failing to stay competitive.
HWL has a proprietary talent management software that does exactly this. In fact, during the volatility of the coronavirus pandemic, we helped the state of Georgia contain costs during staffing surges by assessing market rates. This allowed them to strike a balance between staying competitive and not overpaying.
For more information on this particular case study, read the full version here.
HWL Is Your Healthcare Organization's Solution to Talent Management
Recruiting a diverse pool of talent for your healthcare organization has never been more essential, and with the increased demands placed on healthcare professionals, it’s becoming more difficult as well.
HWL can assist your organization in optimizing and improving your healthcare workforce so your organization remains resilient and flexible, even during volatile or unpredictable times. Our state-of-the-art, proprietary talent management technology leverages customizable functionality to meet your organization's unique needs.
Find out more about our platform or schedule a demo here!