Pre-Hire Assessments for Healthcare Staff

Staffing problems top the list of industry challenges for healthcare companies. Beyond the tangible costs of recruitment, hiring, and training, organizations are having to cope with interim staffing expenditures and navigate a drop in productivity as new hires get up to speed.

Moreover, the impact is also felt on existing staff, who can encounter a morale dip, often exacerbated by compensation disparities with interim personnel. The solution is hiring right, the first time around and preventing new hire churn.

The Statistics

  • The cost to replace an unskilled healthcare worker is typically six to nine months of their salary. For specialized professionals, it can be up to 200% of their annual salary.
  • Patients lose trust in their healthcare provider when they see many staff changes and feel they aren’t getting the best care, harming the provider’s reputation.
  • In 2022, turnover rates for segments of the healthcare industry ranged from 19.5% at hospitals to 65% for at-home care providers to 94% at nursing homes.

Why Use Pre-Employment Assessments for Healthcare Jobs

Technology alone won’t fix the employee turnover problems of healthcare workers. But, hiring the right people in the first place can make a big impact. The right assessment can help improve hiring accuracy and reduce new hire failures and the right technology can help streamline the process and improve consistency.

There’s a clear distinction between the recruitment processes of highly skilled healthcare jobs like doctors and nurses and that of unskilled healthcare roles such as Care Workers and Healthcare Assistants. The use of pre-hire assessments can be helpful for both role types, however where and how they’re used will be different.

  • For lower skilled jobs using assessments as an initial pre-screen will help save time in the recruitment process. Applicants can be organised by their job suitability at the top of the recruitment funnel so recruiters can focus their time on the most eligible candidates
  • For specialized healthcare jobs that require qualifications it’s best to use assessments after the qualifications have been verified and the candidate has been screened. These role are typically harder to fill so engaging candidates before sending them an assessment is important.

Because of this, using bespoke pre-hire assessments rather than a generic tool like a personality or cognitive test is the best approach. For unskilled positions it means you can give candidates a realistic experience of the job ahead of them joining. For high skilled positions it means that the questions in the assessment will be job relevant, and may include knowledge based questions that someone with their level of qualifications should know. 

ThriveMap’s Assessments helps companies hiring healthcare staff to:

  • Improve new hire retention
  • Hire more productive workers
  • Save time recruiting
  • Reduce hiring bias
  • Improve hiring consistency

Healthcare pre-hire assessmetn graphic

3 Ways to Use Pre-Employment Assessments for Healthcare Jobs

  1. Assessments for unskilled roles can be used instead of the traditional resume review to automatically screen candidates for the job. Job-specific assessments can also communicate role realities to candidates encouraging ones that aren’t fully committed to opt-out of the recruitment process. 
  2. For experienced hires, you should use assessments after an initial resume review. The assessment results will tell you which areas the candidate is strong and weak in and give you a better overall picture of a candidate’s job suitability.
  3. Most companies that use assessments for healthcare roles use them at the start of the hiring process – just after the point of application. Hiring managers can use the insights generated on each candidate to make a more informed hiring decision and recruiters can use the time they would have spent screening candidates on finding great people to apply in the first place.

Where to use assessments in the recruitment process for Healthcare staff?

When recruiting low or unskilled healthcare staff its best to use assessments at the top of the recruitment funnel, automatically after job application to identify which candidates to prioritise in the applicant pool for faster, more effective hiring.

What Tests to Use

Healthcare jobs are not all the same. As such, generic assessments don’t work in this sector. ThriveMap works with companies in a range of different industries to create bespoke assessments that model the skills and competencies required to thrive in your unique environment.

Tests often involve a combination of behavioural questions to measure attributes like resilience and empathy. They often also include skills-based questions to measure essential attributes such as attention to detail, written and verbal communication.

In recent years we’ve seen the emergence of technology-literacy questions to measure whether candidates can cope with operating computer systems. ThriveMap’s approach to this is to typically involve simulating the tasks that people find challenging when in the role and designing realistic scenarios and tasks. This has been proven to be more effective than generic tests at establishing whether candidates will be able to perform the tasks your roles demand.

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Identifying which candidates have the right behaviours and skills required to work in sales is difficult to do with resumes and CVs. That’s why a number of forward-thinking sales leaders are using pre-hire assessments to streamline their hiring processes.

Healthcare pre-hire assessment mobile screenshot

Why Use ThriveMap Assessments?

ThriveMap is the #1 Realistic Job Assessments platform.

Combining the most predictive selection methods into one assessment, ThriveMap’s Realistic Job Assessments take candidates through the experience of a working day in the role in your company – giving you and them a better picture of suitability from the outset.

We’re different for the following reasons:

You’ll get complete personalisation

Each company is unique. In fact, each role within each company is unique. Someone could perform well in the same job in another company and fail in yours.

We measure behaviour in context.

People behave differently in different contexts. Measuring someone’s ability in one environment does not mean they’ll display that ability in another.

We give you full transparency.

Jobs are constantly evolving. Unlike other assessment providers, if something’s not working, you have the power to change it.

We make your candidate the hero of the story.

We place the candidate in the heart of the story of a typical work day. If they don’t like the sound of the role or culture they can withdraw from the process at any time.