Building an International Partnership Model with recruitment agencies (Healthcare & Resourcing)

Overview

The healthcare sector has been under severe strains for years through underfunding, ageing population, evolving healthcare needs and shortage of healthcare professionals. The NHS alone is short of 50,000 nurses. The current recruitment model is complex with high recruitment costs and is controlled by few approved agencies across the UK. The agencies manage a select number of overseas agents with access to a limited pool of healthcare professionals.

The founder of Endorse has experienced these challenges first hand as a nurse and later as a recruitment consultant within the NHS. Endorse wanted to identify opportunities to disrupt the healthcare recruitment sector and create a difference.

How we did it

With Endorse we identified key principles to design and implement a new International Partnership Model with overseas recruitment partners with the purpose of making a difference. We collaborated with employers, overseas agents, and healthcare candidates to understand their challenges, apply the insights to develop a new business model with lean processes that increase efficiency and stakeholder experience for all involved.

Through a series of collaboration sessions (applying the design sprint approach), we mapped the challenges and turned them into business opportunities. We created a hypothesis to test the demands of the various stakeholders to develop a platform enabling the impacted stakeholders to connect, advertise job openings, gaining advise about working abroad and sort out travel documents. Mapping the customer journey provided a clear focus on impact of challenges and helped define the solution to the business challenge. Ongoing collaboration with impacted stakeholders was introduced to constantly improve the process.

As a result, the new International Partnership Model was based on a key objective: to bring healthcare professionals, recruitment agents and employers together to create a positive experience for all stakeholders impacted. With a clear intention that every experience matters no matter if you are the candidate, agent, or employer. To improve the experience the working model had to be built on collaboration, creating a platform for stakeholders to engage and cater for the requirements of the candidates, agents, and employers equally.

Results

Introducing the platform and a new way to manage the recruitment process, Endorse achieved several benefits for the impacted stakeholders.

The new platform enabled employers to gain direct access to international agents with significant costs savings. An employer could save over 50% per recruited healthcare professional compared to using a local recruitment agency. Furthermore, employers have online access to all registered healthcare professionals and can review their profiles.

International agents gained direct access to employers and now less longer reliant on local recruitment agencies. With full transparency, employers and agents can track the progression from job campaigns, interviewing, candidate selection, paperwork and relocation and onboarding of the candidate.

For healthcare candidates the platform provides an opportunity to search the healthcare job market for relevant overseas opportunities. They have access to “How to guides” and can seek advice from current healthcare professionals who have relocated. The hassle of sorting out all the necessary paperwork to enable the individual to travel and work in the UK has been removed, now managed by Endorse.