In case you missed it: the National Association of Health Care Recruiters (NAHCR) held its Image 2012 conference in Indianapolis last month. Among those in attendance was Rob Morris, product director for CareerBuilder’s partner site MiracleWorkers.com, who recently sat down with me to discuss what he found to be the biggest takeaways from the conference, including how health care recruiters can leverage social media to reach candidates and what’s ahead for health care recruitment.

What would you say were your biggest takeaways from NAHCR?
The first is that both the HR staff and the recruitment team play such a vital role in patient safety and stratification. It is imperative to bring in and onboard talent that truly believes in the values and mission of your organization. The second thing would be the importance of workforce planning in a tumultuous economy. HR needs to learn how to streamline their process and become as efficient as possible, while maintaining a high level of excellence in their work. Finally, one of the biggest takeaways was about the importance that mobile will play in the recruitment world in years to come. Within the next decade, mobile phones are going to be our primary connection to the internet.

You attended a session about social media recruitment. What did you learn about the ways in which health care recruiters can leverage social media to engage candidates?
When it comes to social media, there’s a great opportunity there for recruiters to get their employment brand and open requisitions out to very large audience. One of the points that really stood out to me was the importance of managing your online reputation. Social media is all about word-of-mouth marketing, so it’s important that health care employers share success stories – from an employee’s perspective – about working with your organization. They can also use social media to share useful content and information that candidates can then share with others. This sort of thing promotes loyalty with candidates, because they’ll see you as a resource to help them with their careers.

Another great takeaway was the reminder to “Listen, Learn and Engage.” The most important thing you can do on any social media site is to listen to your audience. After that, you want to digest the information you’ve learned, and then respond. As you build trust with your community, you’ll be able to engage talent in candid discussions about your company and value.

What are some of the ‘best practices’ health care recruiters should be employing today?
The competition for top talent in the health care industry is extremely competitive in today’s market, so it’s imperative that recruiters are able to build rapport with potential talent. What’s even more important, however, is that they be able to sell the candidate on the organizations and the positions. Recruiters must have a compelling value proposition, because the top talent in this industry will definitely have other options.  Their value proposition should answer two questions for the candidate: “So what?” and “What’s in it for me?”

How can recruiters make the time to be both a consultative business partner and provide exceptional candidate experience?
Time management is key. Plan your day hour by hour to stay on task, and make sure you prioritize your tasks with the hardest – or most critical – activities in the morning. When you leave those things for later in the day, it tends to kill your productivity, because you’ll constantly be worried about getting it done. And make sure you focus on tasks that will really move the needle in the recruitment process.

What are the top strategic HR health care initiatives today?
One of them is to improve patient care and safety by making sure you have the best staff and the best technology to perform the care your patients need.  The other thing HR needs to do is to reduce costs by streamlining your HR processes. In this economy, every department needs to learn how to do more with less.

For the first time in history, we have four generations in the workforce together. What did you learn about recruiting for these different generations?
In theory, there are distinct differences among people from each generation, but when you take a closer look at the best talent from generation to generation, they are a lot more alike than you think.  So it’s more important to design your employment brand and messaging to speak to the A and B performers.  Top performers tend be employed, so again, you need to have a compelling employee value proposition – one that makes them want to switch from their current job to your organization.

In Chip Madera’s keynote, he mentioned that ‘success is solely based on your attitude to succeed.’ Can you go a little more into what he meant by that? I think he was trying to say that, essentially, you control your own destiny. If you strive for success and have confidence in yourself on a daily basis, you will eventually succeed.  And that advice translates across every industry, throughout every profession and at every experience level. To highlight this point, Chip shared a quote from Bill Bachrach which really resonated with me: “If comfort is your goal, success is not is your future.”