It’s no secret that the NHS faces a huge recruitment headache. As the fifth largest employer in the world, approximately 1.7 million people (almost 5% of the UK’s workforce!) collect their pay cheques from the National Health Service.
Ignoring the political debate over streamlining operations and the threat of widespread cuts for a moment, it’s staggering to consider the strategic, logistical and practical challenge of putting in place a recruitment plan to safeguard the future of the Health Service. Sourcing highly specialised skills in scarce supply, unenviable pressures, relatively unattractive wages in comparison to the private sector – the NHS faces challenges common to commercial industries, but on a vastly larger scale. In the face of such difficulties, recruiting today poses a challenge (as demonstrated by recent news that one in three north Wales hospital jobs are vacant), never mind ensuring the talent pipeline provides enough doctors, nurses, administrative staff and the many other roles needed to keep the NHS running.
The NHS’s HR functions have hit the headlines this year after the ‘Francis Report’, following which the director of the NHS Employers organisation Dean Royles called the recruitment headache facing the NHS no less than “the world’s largest organisational development challenge”.
The NHS Future Forum believes it has an innovative solution, and it’s one the wider business world can potentially learn from. They called for a sourcing strategy based not only on skills, but also “value-based recruitment based on the NHS Constitution”. NHS representatives already visit schoolchildren in a national programme to inspire careers in the Health Service and encourage more towards a graduate path in medical sciences, but perhaps they should be focussing equally on identifying values as a key skill?
It’s no doubt more difficult to teach values such as compassion and care than it is to train in specific skills sets, so an ethos of recruiting for values then bolstering clinical training could raise the standard of care (and the pool of candidates available to the NHS) significantly.
This notion of prioritising personality over industry experience calls to mind an earlier blog on the IT industry’s own candidate sourcing obstacles. There, we wrote about the increasing need to focus on social rather than exclusively technical skills when evaluating IT graduates.
If the NHS, with its massive scale, can keep values at the core of its recruitment strategy over the coming years, it will no doubt inspire others to do the same, providing the shot in the arm the UK’s niche sectors need in their own search for specialist talent.
