Challenges of Employee Recruitment & Retention

Challenges of Employee Recruitment & Retention

Deborah Montebello

HCA 459- Senior Project

Professor Reboli

[ June 16, 2011 ]

Challenges of Employee Recruitment & Retention

As a health care administrator, it is essential to understand the trends in the nursing workforce that can affect retention and recruitment of employees’. There is greater responsibility and accountability on the manager to retain their employees. The manager needs to analyze candidates to ensure appropriate hiring decisions are made by using behavioral assessments. These tools can provide managers with useful information. A tool used is a personality test (Collins, 2007).

Trends in the nursing workforce show that the nursing workforce has grown larger, is more diverse, better educated, and older. Some facts about the nursing workforce are:

Overall size of the nursing workforce: the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) estimated that the nation has 3.06 million registered nurses. This is a 5.3 increase from the last survey done by HRSA in 2004. The health care sector continued to grow, and in June 2010, 9,000 new jobs were added, which is 18,000 jobs per month. The ratio of nurses to patients in 2008 was 854 nurses for 100, 00 people. This does vary from region to region. In Utah there are fewer registered nurses per persons, 598 per 100,000 and the District of Columbia having the most, 1,868 per 100,000. As this relates regionally, New England has the most nurses per 100,000 people than any other region with 1,130. Depending on where one lives, this can have a positive or negative impact on recruiting employees (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation).

Research has suggested that the United States will face a nursing shortage of 250,000 nurses by the year 2025. This will place an increase need for health care on the aging Baby Boomers. There are still a great number of nurses working; 84.4% are still in practice with 63.2% working full time.

The nursing...