In past posts I have made reference to some of the many articles that continually publicize the shortages that currently exist and will continue to exist in finding and hiring specialized skills in the Healthcare IT / Informatics market.
When people begin looking for new positions, they evaluate six main areas when deciding if a job is best for them. Clearly, each of these areas has a different level of importance for each person. Every organization in the marketplace must decide what they can and want to offer prospective candidates and make necessary adjustments to make these positions within their organizations as appealing as possible. These six different areas are:
Challenge
Location
Advancement
Money
People
Security
For a more elaborate description of each category, take a moment to view an early post.
However, there are two major factors in the marketplace today that are making it more difficult for organizations to attract people. The first of the two categories that is dramatically affected is…..
Challenge
There are many candidates who thrive on challenge. This is one of the biggest motivators for a certain category of people. You can tell who these people are very easily by looking at their resumes. These are the people who love to participate in a major implementation or upgrade and, once the project is complete, are looking for the next challenge. If their current organization doesn’t have a new project lined up, and your organization does, then your organization has a good chance of attracting that person. However, in today’s marketplace, even though your organization is going through a new install or major upgrade to qualify for Meaningful Use, guess what…so is everyone else. So, unfortunately, because of all of the activity in the marketplace, your organization’s big project may not provide the same level of attraction today than it did a year or two ago.
The second category is…
Location
Because of the limited number of Healthcare IT / Informatics people in any one geographical area (that are within daily commute distance) many organizations find it necessary to relocate new employees for many positions that require unique skill sets. If your organization was located in an area that was considered by many people to be desirable, then you had an edge when competing with other organizations for “hard to find” candidates. A March 8 CBS News article (link) stated that up to 23% of people have mortgages that are more than their house can be sold for today. It does not appear that this mortgage issue will get solved in the short term. Because of this, organizations that are used to having to find people from outside of their area are going to be dealing with smaller and smaller pools of people.
These two issues alone have heavily reduced the number of people who will consider a job change at this time. This is only putting more pressure on organizations to look outside of the box in figuring out ways to be attractive to potential job seekers.
