Features and Benefits
Jeremy Shapiro Interview
Health Care Leaders
Case
Studies
A dose of
reality
If e-recruiting is a drug, explains iQ guru Jeremy Shapiro, it has to
be administered in measured doses.
With the new release of Hodes iQ set to sail, and mounting interest from
the health care community in e-recruiting, Jeremy Shapiro's adrenaline
is pumping. Shapiro, who along with partner Dwaine Maltais runs the development
of iQ, sat down with hodes.com in his New York office to discuss what's
up, what's new, and what's wrong with online recruiting.
Q. You've been making a push for health care. Why?
J. Well, to be accurate, we haven't made a push. Hospitals are making
a push, and we're listening to them to make our software better.
Q. Ok. So why are hospitals calling?
J. They don't have the resources to get the talent they need. I
think, recently, we've seen a surge of interest because of word
of mouth. iQ's been out there for a while and picked up steam. People
have heard about us.
Q. What have they heard?
J. That iQ is easy to use, has some good features. Inexpensive. That kind
of stuff.
Q. What are they looking for the most?
J. Nurses! [Laughs] It's tough out there. Seriously, the issue that
most of them face is lack of infrastructure: it starts with money, and
then shows up in other places. Not enough recruiters, low-visibility,
no brand, no database. It spirals out.
Q. Short of finding nurses, how can you help?
J. Well, we don't solve all their problems, keep that in mind. But
what iQ can do is make life easier for them.
My analogy is the operating room. You're not going to reduce the
need to get people into the operating room. But what you can do is make
the room as efficient as possible so people get out faster. Even though
you spent money up-front to improve your output, the end result saves
you time, which saves you money.
If recruiters find the software easy to use and quick-they gain
some time. If resumes are online and organized, they can contact a radiologist
two days before the competition. These incremental gains add up to huge
savings in a year.
Q. Can you give us an example where iQ saves time?
J. The new release includes a "resume remote." It sits
on your desktop and lets recruiters isolate and create resume stacks
that
they can review and comment on without having to click between lists.
Now, that may not sound very impressive until you factor in how much
window clicking a recruiter does. They can literally save about 30 percent
of their time with this new feature-not to mention stop carpal tunnel
syndrome.
Q. I read something about "layered sourcing." What's
that?
J. Well, I can't tell you yet. It's hush-hush until the release
in August. But what I can say is that we've added about six or seven
new features that shave huge amounts of time off the process. The new
app is faster, easier and more precise.
Q. What else?
J. Personally, I'm pretty excited that you can now run your external
career site, your Intranet, and an ERP site into iQ. We're finally
at the point where it doesn't matter if you're casting a net
inside or outside the company.
Employee mobility within multi-facility companies really helps with retention.
It's always been a Bernard Hodes Group philosophy that the better
we can help retention, the better off our clients are.
Q. Let's change topics. I recently heard you on a health
care seminar talk about the "software panacea".
J. I was saying that software doesn't fix everything. Actually,
when it's doing its best, it solves only a few things-but
really well.
Here's my big picture: solving this talent crunch has to be on
multiple fronts. If there's one thing I've learned from Karen
[Hart-Bernard Hodes Group SVP, Health Care Division] it's
that there's no magic. No one thing will do it. It's strategy,
marketing, sourcing, optimizing process, and, yes, technology like iQ.
But they've got to be working together.
If you asked me what the biggest feature of iQ is, I'd say it's
the people behind it. The Bernard Hodes Group strategists, marketers,
consultants, creatives, and technologists who look at the hospital and
figure out how to tweak things and make them better. As I've worked
with them and our clients, I've come to realize that iQ is only
part of the solution. An important part-don't get me wrong but only
one part.
My operating room analogy? You can't just drop a computer in there
and shut the door and expect things to get better. It's process
that needs to be re-aligned. Technology like iQ can support that change,
but it can't be that change.
Q. So how does a hospital start to fix things? You make it sound
like iQ isn't the first place to start.
J. Depends on the hospital. Some know exactly what they want,
and we're here to make sure we're on their shopping list.
But others may want to talk to a local account team and figure out what's
the best way to start. It's not that they can't use iQ, but
the account folks will probably have smart ideas on how to hook it up
to all their other activities to get the most out of it.
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