What Every Candidate Needs to Ask Their Recruiter

Questions to ask recruiters:

How long have you been recruiting?

What is your focus?
Contingency vs. Retained?
Perm vs. Consultant/Contractor?
Geography?
Function: (IT, HR, Finance, etc)?
Level: Hourly, Salaried, Staff, Manager, Executive?

Placements Made: Overall, Past Year
Ask them for specifics on recent placements.

Are they full desk or split? Account side or Recruiting side?

Client relationship: Signed contract, prior client, marketing, or spamming resumes?

Is it your client, someone else in your firm? Or a split partner? How many prior placements have they made with this client? When?



Questions you should be prepared to answer from recruiters:

Type of position you are seeking: Specifics: salary, geography, travel, relo. Do you have a house to sell? Is your wife/family in agreement on these decisions?

How long have you been looking? Where is your resume posted?

HIT Market Fairly Robust

The chatter in the HIT recruiting space lately is that we're back to talent shortage again.

Consultants are consistently saying they're getting called regularly, and there's more work available than resources.

Consultant demand is driven typically by two things: One, a desire on the part of the client, in some instances, to not hire full-time staff, due to the expectation that the work required is finite in nature. Two, an inability to find full-time resources in a timely fashion, thereby driving a need for consultants to augment.

This latter issue is driving a larger portion of the current demand than usual. The housing market is still multiplying the challenges with full-time staffing, and requiring clients to resort to consultants more often than otherwise.

I expect this will continue not only until the housing market improves, but probably somewhat past that point, until the candidate pool becomes comfortable that the real estate market has returned to a decently robust state. Keep in mind that relocation and all it entails - house purchase, sale, new schools, family tastes and proximity considerations, always play a large part in these decisions. The challenges are simply magnified by the current housing market situation.

What-not-to-do-7-ways-to-ruin-your-resume

Pretty good advice:

what-not-to-do-7-ways-to-ruin-your-resume

Hiring Has Begun

I'd say the recession is over. Not for everyone, yet. But hiring has definitely surged the past few weeks. We've seen a ton of new requirements coming in, and conversations with other firms, recruiters, etc. reveal the same.

We've been pounding on doors for about 15 months and now we're starting to get a steady stream of clients calling us for help. Amazing how quickly things change.

More on REC's

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2010/04/26/bise0428.htm

Another article questioning the ability of REC's to deliver.

Like DOQIT 6 or so years ago, these organizations are not likely to be able to deliver more than some generalized information sharing and dissemenation such as group seminars for physicians on some basics of system selection and implementation, FAQ's, criteria for decision making, etc.

Actual implementation help will have to come from vendors, 3rd party consultancies or direct hire personnel on the part of the physicians. Under DOQIT, the QIO groups typically hired between 5 and 20 people to cover an entire state. One large implementation could require that many people alone: a project manager, nurse informaticists for work flow, report writers, dba's, network specialist, application analysts. While some of these roles might be combined, a multi-site implementation might require multiple people in some of these roles at different sites. 3-10 people or more for one implementation of a physician group with 3 sites and 40 docs would not be out of line.

ARRA, HITECH, ONC, REC's, Meaningful Use, etc.

I'm a regular and enthusiastic reader of Anthony Guerra's http://healthsystemcio.com/

Parodoxically (as a recruiter) I tend to support his view that this program is going to be a huge waste of money, in my view, pretty much all of it.

Number one, I'm not a fan of government involvement in a lot of things, in general. I've not noticed many government programs that serve their usefulness and disappear; rather they take on permanence, and grow, each year. Witness Social Security, Medicare, etc.

Two, this country's political system has developed in such a way... the special interests... that it seems like everyone gets what they want, if they push hard enough, but no one is accountable for the... grand view, shall we call it. Everyone pays lip service to budgetary accountability, but every time we turn around, there's another war that needs to be fought, another urgent program that needs to be funded, all too worthy to ignore. And simultaneously, we've elevated number manipulations to an art form, so that we can always rationalize borrowing more (just up the tax revenue projections, or underestimate the costs), if that doesn't work, back end the bill to our kids and grandkids (you know you don't pay for your social security right? the next generation does). Increasingly, we've decided that they will pay for everything else too. Remember the Bush tax cuts? Based on government revenue projections? Those projections were ridiculous even then (plausible deniability has stretched the concept of plausible... to implausible). BTW, how did those projections pan out?

Third, to take just piece of the ONC monies, the educational programs... Just heard part of the podcast with Bill Hersh of OHSU. I'm a big believer in education. Education is always beneficial. But the newly trained workforce won't be ready in time to meet the MU dates. The training programs won't be in place, and if they are they'll be rushed, and not of the quality they could be. Even if they were well executed, my clients have emphasized repeatedly over the years that they need experienced resources. Someone right out of a 6-12 month training program will be of negligable benefit to a complex system implementation. Maybe as a better trained user? I suppose, but that's after they're up and running and stable. To help implement? not really.

And why are we creating REC's in the first place? To take business from the multitude of 3rd party firms that have been gasping for business the last 18 months while the economy and the uncertainty surrounding the cumbersome legislation ground everything to a halt?

I suspect this is all going to be good for HIT recruiting, and I will be an indirect beneficiary. It's not all bad. But spending a large amount of money in a hurry, through the government, is guaranteed to be hugely wasteful.

4? of 10?

Market appears to be improving. Hiring managers are a bit out of touch and still moving slowly, lacking urgency, because they still think 'candidates are plentiful'.

Which is true, though irrelevant. Great candidates are no longer plentiful; the A players, some of whom were on the bench last year, are mostly gone. Those that are left are generally those not wanting to travel or relocate, or who are still holding out for compensation on par with levels before the slowdown. Rates and salaries are down, but will slowly start moving back up. With REC's starting to open their doors and compete for talent, the trend will only accelerate.

There are still plenty of average resources looking, and a few A players who either have not realized they need to make adjustments to their parameters, or are in a position where they don't have to.

Meds, CPOE, Pharmacy, etc talent is getting pretty hot, and in short supply.