The health insurance industry is constantly evolving with policy changes, cyclical fluctuations, and member demands for plan customization. This fast-paced environment creates unique staffing challenges for health insurance companies, particularly in finding qualified candidates to fill open roles and support seasonal demand.
This article explores five of the most common staffing struggles in the form of paraphrased quotes from our clients. To successfully mitigate these challenges, we’ve included best practices, as well as the benefits of working with a specialized staffing partner like Medix.
Staffing Struggle #1: Trouble Finding Experienced Talent
“It’s difficult for us to find seasoned health insurance professionals, from customer and member service representatives to claims professionals to sales representatives, which makes it challenging for us to provide optimal services to our policyholders and grow our business.”
Best Practice
Build a robust talent pipeline, and stay connected with past candidates and high-performing former employees. Identify promising internal talent and nurture them for future roles.
Partner with Medix
With more than 20 years of medical and health insurance industry experience and a diverse talent pool of 3M+ specialized candidates, unlock a new talent pipeline of rigorously vetted and highly-skilled talent experienced with the complex health insurance landscape.
Staffing Struggle #2: Long Amounts of Time to Fill Open Roles
“Between finding enough candidates, interviewing them, extending offers, onboarding, and everything in between, we often have open roles for months. There’s a massive opportunity cost attached to this. It compromises customer service and day-to-day operations, while also putting added stress on our current staff.”
Best Practice
Implement effective pipelining strategies to have a ready pool of qualified candidates. Consider expanding your search criteria to include candidates with transferable skills or high aptitude for learning and promising potential.
Partner with Medix
Our dedicated and specialized recruitment team understands your market and your business, so we can quickly deliver rigorously vetted and highly-skilled talent experienced with the complex health insurance landscape.
Staffing Struggle #3: Difficulty Matching Hard and Soft Skills to Roles
“It’s easier for us to match hard skills to our openings than it is to match soft skills. It’s just tough to interview a candidate once or twice and pick up on their communication style, problem solving capabilities, and other traits that we need.”
Best Practice
Utilize pre-employment tools that help assess candidates’ personality traits and soft skills. While not perfect, these screening tools can significantly improve your chances of hiring candidates who excel in your work environment.
Partner with Medix
At Medix, we use expert vetting and validation combined with our MyPrint candidate assessment to gauge performance and long-term fit. You need talent who fit dozens of criteria, and our candidate packages that detail hard and soft skills can make the hiring process easier.
Staffing Struggle #4: High Recruiting and Hiring Costs
“We’re experiencing elevated expenses related to sourcing, vetting, and onboarding new hires, which are contributing to financial strain across the organization. It’s not sustainable.”
Best Practice
Continually assess and refine your recruiting and onboarding processes. When it comes to recruiting, invest in the locations and platforms that have proven to yield the best candidates. For onboarding, identify areas for improvement and streamline them based on feedback from new hires and HR personnel.
Partner with Medix
We understand that every dollar matters. From lost productivity to lengthy hiring processes to time spent onboarding new teammates, these recruitment and hiring costs can add up and put your team over budget and under pressure. Partnering with Medix can help significantly reduce these costs.
Staffing Struggle #5: Issues Adapting to Policy Changes and Seasonal Demand
“We deal with lots of policy changes and seasonal variations, including open enrollment. We need to be able to match our staff to the workload more efficiently than we have.”
Best Practice
Augment your workforce with temporary talent. Filling high-volume positions with temporary talent allows you to quickly scale your workforce up or down based on demand. This helps control costs and frees up your full-time staff to focus on higher-level tasks.
Partner with Medix
Flexible staffing and recruitment solutions are our specialty. Medix can support your team as you manage policy changes, enrollment periods, market expansions, network builds, or business growth.
