Healthcare organizations use a variety of methods to attract new hires. The advantage of job sculpting is that managers develop a specialized professional plan for each candidate. The plan will contain goals that coincide with a candidate’s interests. To deal with the shortage of nurses, healthcare organizations employ such strategies as student recruitment, introducing advanced training, identifying the attractive benefits, and applying for governmental funding of nursing education. Student employment and identifying the benefits are weaker strategies compared to the other ones.
Job sculpting is a process, during which an employer or a manager tailors a job profile specifically for a particular talented professional they are willing to hire. An employer or a manager attempts to understand a professional’s needs and requirements to the working environment and to find out what would be the conditions, in which the talent will work in full force. When managers use job sculpting to retain a nurse, it means that a candidate will get an individualized version of a professional development plan, based on their needs. In this case, the professional goals stated in the plan will coincide with a candidate’s life interests (Kuykendall, Marshburn, Poston, & Mears, 2014, p. 547).
The nursing shortage is becoming a more and more serious problem for healthcare organizations. Among the reasons for the shortage are the advancing aging of the labor force and the low level of unemployment. Traditional strategies are becoming useless in such a situation. The four strategies, which healthcare organizations use to resolve nursing shortages, are the following. First, recruiting more students. Students are easier to recruit, plus they are mostly young, so this strategy allows to stop the aging of the workforce. Second, identifying what benefits are likely to attract nurses to a particular working place and translating those benefits into reality. Third, reintroducing training for nurses in critical care, neonatal, and operational rooms. Such an opportunity attracts nurses, who seek career development. Fourth, a long-term strategy, not directly linked to the work of HR departments, but a far more efficient one: to reach out to federal and state authorities and to make them fund nursing educational institutions. This action would increase the number of students, thus creating a demand for vacancies (Hussain, Rivers, Glover, & Fottler, 2012, p. 42-43).
Unfortunately, some of the strategies employed by healthcare organizations are less successful than the other ones. For instance, student recruitment, despite its benefits, is currently not successful for a single reason: nowadays, it is hard to get into nursing schools, and the number of students is rather low. However, by adopting the above-mentioned long-term strategy (applying for governmental help), healthcare organizations can expand the number of students with the help of state and federal governments, and then student recruitment will make sense. Additionally, while finding out what benefits would attract future employees, companies usually hold surveys among their present employees. Considering the aging of the workforce, such an approach can make the strategy weak since what is a benefit to elder employees, who participate in your survey, may be of no interest to younger nurses, whom you are planning to hire.
To conclude, a manager’s use of job sculpting means that a candidate will get an individualized professional plan. The strategies that healthcare organizations use to resolve nursing shortages include student recruitment, identifying the benefits for future hires, introducing new training, and applying for governmental help. Of them, student recruitment and identifying the benefits are the least successful.
References
Hussain, A., Rivers, P.A., Glover, S.H., & Fottler, M.D. (2012). Strategies for dealing with future shortages in the nursing workforce: A review. Health Services Management Research, 25(1), 41-47. Web.
Kuykendall, J.W., Marshburn, D.M., Poston, C.W., & Mears, A. (2014). Experienced nurses’ level of engagement: Priority areas for nurse executives. Journal of Nursing Administration, 44(10), 546-551. Web.