Employment opportunities in the healthcare field are booming, and they are predicted to grow even faster in the future. According to the New York Times, health care jobs are expected to grow by more than 15%, a rate that is much faster than the average job growth rate of 4%. This number includes not only doctors and nurses but all kinds of healthcare positions such as health aides and support staff.
While there are more job openings than ever before, there is also a shortage of people who are willing and/or able to fill those positions. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) notes that as the U.S. population continues to grow and the average age of that population increases, more and more healthcare workers are going to be necessary to meet demand.
This combination of a large supply of open positions and a relatively shallow pool of qualified candidates puts a lot of pressure on HR professionals in the healthcare industry. Quite often, HR departments are inundated with applications for open positions, and the time required to sort through these applications can be overwhelming.
One solution is to integrate skills testing into your company’s ATS software. You can administer assessments like basic administrative skills tests as part of the application process to screen out applicants that do not meet the basic skills required for the position. By automating this process, you can eliminate a great deal of wasted time and effort and make the hiring process faster and more effective.
How Basic Administrative Skills Testing Works
Adding pre-employment assessments to your application process is a simple, effective way to improve and streamline your hiring process. With eSkill’s Talent Assessment PlatformTM, you can seamlessly incorporate skills tests into your application process. With a library of more than 800 pre-prepared tests, you can easily choose tests that are closely aligned with your hiring needs. You also have the option to create your own customized tests.
Use the eSkill Author to choose questions from one or more tests in the eSkill Test Library. You can combine subject and job-related questions into a single test that effectively assesses candidates for all your job roles. You can also add your own content, including video questions, which allow applicants to record their answers to specific questions.
For healthcare support workers, basic administrative skills tests offer HR professionals the ability to assess the key skills that applicants will need in their new positions. There is a wide range of skills tests that are available to skills such as data entry, typing, basic computer skills, and customer service abilities. Each can be tailored to meet your specific needs.
Once applicants have completed the test, you can examine their answers in-depth to see which questions they missed and which ones they got right. This can help you identify candidates that may not have scored as highly overall, but who have a mastery of more complex concepts.
Other Healthcare Skills Tests
In addition to administrative tests, there are several healthcare skills tests that can be used to assess an applicant’s Job Fit for specific support roles. For instance, if you are hiring an employee to handle medical billing, you can require them to take the medical billing skills test to directly assess their abilities. You may also include questions from the medical coding skills test since billing frequently relies on these codes.
Other useful healthcare skills tests include medical terminology, typing, and transcription tests, all of which tend to overlap across multiple different job titles. For any test you choose, you can also create simulations where candidates are asked to perform tasks as they would in a real-life job setting. These let you not only check their answers but also see how they performed the work and how quickly.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to hiring healthcare support staff, HR professionals need to ensure they make the right hires. This is especially important given the lack of qualified candidates compared to the ever-increasing number of open healthcare support positions. Making a bad hire can hurt your productivity and have a negative impact on overall patient healthcare outcomes.
Using tools like basic administrative skills tests can help you minimize bad hires, reduce hiring costs and improve time-to-hire. Many companies have saved up to 70% on hiring costs reduced time-to-hire by nearly 60% by integrating skills testing into their hiring process. And skills tests make it more likely that you will avoid hiring the wrong person which helps both your organization and your patients.
Request a demo to learn how basic administrative and healthcare skills tests can help you find the best candidates to fill your healthcare support jobs.
Sign up for our newsletter
