Demand for behavioral healthcare rose in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and when confronted with impossible workloads, burnout, and low salaries, many practitioners left the field.
As demand for mental health services remains high, recruiters across the industry have faced challenges hiring these practitioners. It’s an issue Adam Juran, a strategic talent partner at NYC-based telepsychiatry group Rivia Mind, has faced. In his role, Juran handles “a lot of things talent management,” including hiring, learning and development, and focusing on talent strategy.
He cited difficulty recruiting for clinical roles including social workers, nurse practitioners, and psychiatrists. He also noted issues around compensation as healthcare roles saw skyrocketing salaries and bonuses because of the pandemic and increased expectations around pay transparency.
“We have to separate what’s important at [the] company versus what’s important in the market, and what the market’s feeling,” he told HR Brew. “I would say, from an HR stance, really the glaring topic is compensation and pay transparency.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?
I curated our hiring materials from essentially scratch to create a comprehensive knowledge-sharing and effective hiring journey.
When I came into this company…I was like, we need an ATS…So, I advocated for Greenhouse, implemented [it] within my first month and a half or so at the company, and was able to structure standardized interview processes, interview questions, as well as my favorite thing that I get complimented on [by] candidates, [which] is that I send out, usually prior to my first meeting with them, what I call “benefits at a glance.” This is a document that outlines every single benefit that is applicable to that employment type. I also add the premiums of our insurances because we understand everyone’s benefit needs and what they value in their total comp assessment is unique to that person. We’d rather be transparent from the beginning and respectful of individuals’ needs and preferences prior to going through the interview processes, than for them to get to an offer and say, “This is not something that’s going to work for me and my family.”
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
That all I do is interview people. I look at talent from prior to them knowing about us to when they’ve left our company. Employee engagement and employee satisfaction experience is a major part. But what’s unique with this role is that not everything is measurable and quantifiable and has a KPI, a lot of it is about working with people’s emotions and their perception of something. For example, their onboarding experience: What is it that we’re sharing with them? At what sequence are we sharing certain information? How does it impact and make them feel overwhelmed, versus [being] a foundational building block of material that they need? I also develop a lot of surveys to learn more about our people, whether it’s on recognition, D&I, their onboarding experience, any feedback.
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What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
Talent being more transparent and honest with what they are looking for due to a change in mindset since the pandemic and people wanting to pursue valuable and aligned endeavors. The candidate has a better appreciation for who we are, and they feel more respected, and it builds the rapport and the trust versus feeling blindsided later on.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
Compensation, because it seems so volatile right now.
The healthcare sector is a unique landscape because of the impacts from Covid…Clinical roles saw so many postings and opportunities during Covid where they were trying to get anyone because it was onsite, and people did not want to go onsite. They had to incentivize with sign-on bonuses, increasing pay, better benefits, all of that stuff. What tends to happen is that clinical roles are more favored than the operational support roles, and there could be a concern amongst companies on how they are equitably supporting [both groups].
Then there’s the compliance and policies and regulations coming out [such as] pay transparency…What [employees] see is: Here’s a range I value and feel that myself should be at the highest part of said range, not taking into consideration how a business looks at it with compensable factors, [like] the location of an individual, skill sets, years of experience…the thing that talent in the market is struggling with is understanding the difference between compensation and total compensation, because total comp is not always a monetary paycheck. Every pay cycle, it includes so, so much more that they aren’t always factoring in as well.