Starting A Healthcare Recruitment Business

Starting A Healthcare Recruitment Business - Background Info:

Healthcare is an extremely fast growing industry, thanks to the aging population and increased life expectancies.

Over the last century, life expectancy has doubled. This leaves a large population of elderly people who need in-home care.

In addition, people who are recovering from illnesses, surgeries, or injuries also want help caring for themselves while in the privacy and comfort of their own homes. It is a good time to consider starting your own home healthcare business.

A health care recruiting business is full of great opportunities for helping people find the right placement in the field of medicine. This job will allow one to find the best of the best and place them where they are best needed based on their individual skills.
Recruiters use networking skills to pair up doctors with firms in their field. Health care recruiting is a way to make sure that job seekers and employers in the medical community find each other.

Most entrepreneurial healthcare recruiters work on a contractual basis for physicians and health care providers such as hospitals, long term health care facilities, and rehab centers. Healthcare recruitment agencies offer programs and services that include coaching, seminars, resume work, job search assistance, networking and newsletters to unemployed RNs, massage therapists, pharmacists, doctors, and other health care service professionals.

Among the challenges of job placement agencies is finding clients who will avail the different human resource services that they offer. It is therefore best that you identify how you are going to have employers and companies avail of your placement agency services. You can, for example, send letters to companies and tell them about the services that you offer.

It is best, however, that you are able to persuade them to avail of your employment recruitment agency services by telling them about the advantages and benefits that they can avail when they take advantage of recruitment agencies.

Employers and companies, for example, will find it cost effective to outsource the screening and interview of applicants for their company. This is for reason that having a specialized recruitment department among many companies can prove to be very prohibitive. Make sure that you also tell prospective clients why you are the best recruitment agency for them.

For example, of your healthcare recruitment agency specializes in recruiting health care workers like nurses and midwives, you are the best staffing agency to handle the human resources need of hospitals and health care institutions.

Starting A Healthcare Recruitment Business - Tasks And Skills Needed:

Business Specific Tasks:

If you are planning to do all the business tasks or hiring or subcontracting tasks, here's a list of tasks that need to be attended to when it comes to the business side of running a health care recruitment business:

Bookkeeping

General Office

Customer Service

Industry Specific Tasks:

Same as above if you plan to do everything yourself or get help, here are some of the tasks necessary to operate a health care recruitment business:

Are compassionate and understanding;

Have excellent communication and administrative skills;

Understand intimately how networking works in the job-search process;

Have some sort of resume writing and job search training; and

Able to connect easily with others for business purposes.

Starting A Healthcare Recruitment Business - Approximate Daily Hours Needed:

General Hours of Operation: - When your business is open - Standard business hours would apply, but a person in this business would need to be constantly on-call, because of the ever-demanding needs of healthcare.

Hours Needed to Prepare - Before Opening and After Hours Activities - On-call duties and general office work, scheduling, appointment-setting.

Number of Employees Needed To Run This Business:

Minimum Number of Employees -During the Start Up Phase: You can start this business yourself on a full-time basis.

Number of Employees - Once Your Business is Up and Running Successfully:

Website maintenance

Record/Bookkeeping

General office

Customer Service

Hire part-time, contracted health-care workers in the beginning to maintain costs. Be aware that all home health-care employees must have a nursing certification.

Skill Requirements for This Business:

Previous nursing or nursing assistance is a huge plus but not required

Ability to be warm and personable

Flexibility in the hours you work

Basic understanding of emergency medical treatments and CPR

Understanding of the nursing and other medical industries

Licenses:

Licensing requirements vary from state to state. Check to make sure that you have the proper requirements and that your area doesn't require you to be a certified nurse to start a home health company.

Also, any employees that you hire need to have thorough background checks. Also, contact private insurance companies to see how you can start accepting their insurance. Contact the state to check on regulations for accepting Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

Obtain the additional license and certification needed to accept Medicare and Medicaid clients. To do this, apply through the State Medicare agency and get a surety bond of $50,000 from an approved surety company. A state representative will inspect your agency to make sure it meets all of the required health and safety standards. You are required to have at least seven clients and three months of operating funds and steady revenue.

Approximate Minimum Start up Cost:

Bare essential: - The startup costs of a business such as healthcare recruitment could be quite small. One would need a standard office, but could feasibly work from the home in the beginning, and would only need a regular office computer.

Minimal exposure - Schreiber says she has found traditional advertising to be ineffective. She instead met with the heads of patient relations and social workers at hospitals to find clients when she was launching her business. So, she had to be able to sell others on her business model. "This business is about relationships—it's not about putting an ad in the paper," Schreiber says (US News).

Necessary Equipment to Run this Business:

Necessary Start-Up Equipment & Supplies:

Computer

Printer

Cell phone

Website

Vehicle

Supplementary Equipment: - Equipment or helpful products that you can acquire to once your business is off and running:

Subscription(s) to medical journals and the latest news in medicine

Monthly Expenses To Consider:

Wages
Phone/cell phone
Internet access
Permits
Advertising/Marketing
Electricity
Water
Supplies

Special Requirements and Considerations For A Healthcare Recruitment Business:

Find out all you can about the trends in the industry. Know your competition, in particular, their strengths and weaknesses. This will help you identify your competitive advantage. In other words, this will help you figure out what you can give your customers that they're not getting from the other businesses. And keep from emulating the competition's strategy. Instead, make the most of your own advantage points.
Perform all necessary criminal and background investigations for each home health care aid that is hired. The DataBase Records website performs instant nationwide criminal searches for as low as $29.
Accept private medical insurance by making sure your agency meets individual insurer requirements. You can get this information by contacting them directly and obtaining a list of those requirements.
Although it helps if the prospective business operator has a background in health care, home health care business operators are not required to be trained formally in areas of health care. There are countless operations manuals and books available which operators may use to gain information about the business. They can also opt to attend intensive training programs where they will experience the business directly. These training programs also offer support after the business has started.
If you've decided this is the entrepreneurial opportunity for you, then you will need to choose a location for your business. It may be possible to operate your home health care recruitment business from your home (depending on your local zoning laws); however, the most professional business would be located in an office. Placing that office in a high traffic area with high visibility will greatly increase your marketability. Another important aspect of location is to place your business in an area that has a large medical-needs population.
Once you've narrowed down your list of locations, check into the competition that is already there. Chances are that if there are five health recruitment agencies already operating in an area, your competition may be too great to overcome. However, that also means that you're on the right track – there wouldn't be so many agencies if there were not enough customers / clients to need them.

Pros And Cons of Opening A Health Care Recruitment Business:

The Pros of Running a Health Care Recruitment Business:

You get to work with other people while being your own boss

You perform a valuable service to the community

There is a good market for your services

Pay is good

You have the option of buying a franchise, which helps with insurance, supplies, licenses, etc.

This job allows for placement of the best individuals in the proper jobs. By placing professionals in the correct areas of the country, and pairing them up with the right healthcare offices, more lives are being saved, which is very rewarding.

The Cons of Running a Health Care Recruitment Business:

Might have long hours

Although much of the business will need to be done online, location will be a key to this business's home office. One will need to settle in an area that has a great number of hospitals, med schools, or both.

For example, the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has a number of hospitals and top-notch universities all within a fifteen mile radius.

A location like this would be ideal for meetings and person-to-person networking. This business owner will need to have exceptional people-skills, and be willing to work long hours because healthcare never sleeps.

This job can be very stressful and difficult to pull off. This pressure to match up doctors with firms can be a major source of tension. The healthcare field is a very rewarding one, but with those rewards, a certain amount of day-to-day stress can be expected.

Type of Customers You Need to Attract:

Start your home health-care business in an area with a growing population of seniors. Check census profiles of different cities for the elderly population, ages 65 and over. Target large cities or cities with large retirement communities.

Health Care Recruitment Business Statistics:

Even with the most recent recession, the demand for qualified health care providers still grew at unprecedented rates - by some accounts, more than 28%. As well, several studies have shown that after a recession, the demand for qualified health care service providers increases even more - and thus a need for recruiters to fill the bill. If helping unemployed people find lucrative job placements is appealing, read on more for information about what's required and whether or not it's a sensible entrepreneurial prospect.

Revenue:

Depending on whether or not the entrepreneur goes at the business completely solo or by partnering with another agency will determine the payment for services. For example:

If working with an agency: Say the person recruited is placed with an annual income of $70,000. Most agencies receive 20% of the total annual income as a fee, therefore the agency would receive $14,000. Commissions are then split usually between the independent health care recruiter(s) - sometimes more than one is involved - so if there were only one recruiter and an agency, the entrepreneur would receive $7,000.

If working solo: If the person recruited is placed with an annual income of $70,000, the independent healthcare recruitment agency would receive $14,000. Of course for most entrepreneurs this second option is the most desirable, but working with an agency assists in lowering costs of doing business, as well as offering immediate access to resources and materials that may take years to build on one's own.

Healthcare Recruitment Business Resources:

Hospital

Industry-Specific Websites:

How to start a Nursing Agency and Medical Staffing Business

AMN Healthcare

Start a Recruiting Business

StaffPointe

Courses:

Home Business Center

My Nursing Degree

Equipment and Supplies:

AllegroMedical

U.S. Medical Supplies

MSD

MSEC

Franchises:

Directory Listings - DMOZ

Associations:

The American Health Quality Association

AHRQ

Books:

How to Start a Nursing Agency Business Guide

Medical Recruiting Firm Business Package

How to start a nursing business and Medical Recruiting Firm Combined in One Package

Software:

Health Care and Nursing Recruiting Firm Software

Medical Recruiting Firm Business Package

Appointmate

Healthware

Other:

How to Start a Health Care Recruitment Business

Medical Recruitment Resources

Businesses To Related to a Healthcare Recruitment Business:

Nursing
Counseling
Hospice care
Teacher
Business Administration
Management