Why Healthcare Operations Roles Are the Hardest Ones to Fill

Ask a healthcare employer which roles are hardest to fill and most will say
clinical. Ask them which vacancies actually hurt week to week, and the answer is
often somewhere else entirely: the practice manager, the revenue cycle lead, the
operations coordinator holding three clinics together.

These roles are harder to hire for than clinical positions, for reasons that have
nothing to do with the size of the talent pool.

The job title tells you almost nothing

A practice manager at a two-physician clinic and a practice manager at a
twelve-provider multi-site group are not doing the same job. One is hands-on with
scheduling and front desk; the other is managing supervisors, payer contracts and a
budget. Both have the same title on a resume.

This is where healthcare operations hiring goes wrong most often. The job
description gets written from the title rather than from the work, candidates are
screened against the wrong experience, and the person who arrives is either
overwhelmed or bored within a quarter.

Compliance makes a bad hire more expensive than a vacancy

In most functions, a mediocre hire is a drag on productivity. In revenue cycle,
coding or compliance, a mediocre hire creates exposure — denied claims, audit risk,
rework that surfaces months later. That changes the maths. It is genuinely better to
leave a revenue cycle role open for another few weeks than to fill it with someone
who cannot do it.

The instinct under pressure is the opposite, because the vacancy is visible and
the bad hire is not. Yet.

Your best candidates are not reading job boards

People who are good at healthcare operations tend to be employed, busy, and not
actively looking. They are also the least likely group to respond to a generic
outreach message, because they receive a lot of them and most are obviously
untargeted.

Reaching them takes an approach that demonstrates you understand what they
actually do. That is slower than posting a role, and it is the only thing that works
consistently.

What to do differently

• Scope from the work, not the title. Write down what this person
  must own in their first year. Hire against that.
• Decide your non-negotiables before you interview. Payer mix
  experience? Multi-site? EHR? Two or three, not ten.
• Move fast once you are in process. Strong operations candidates
  are usually in more than one conversation.
• Be honest about the mess. Someone joining to fix a backlog would
  rather know now. The ones who are put off by it were going to leave anyway.

None of this is complicated. It is just different from how most clinical hiring
runs, which is why it tends to get skipped.

Hiring for this?

RNG Group places permanent, direct-hire talent across the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest. See how we recruit for healthcare and life sciences, or talk to our recruiting team about the role you are trying to fill.

Filed under: Recruiting