Cloud computing can be used to link existing recruitment and retention-related processes and systems with other aspects of the business, according to Don Fulford, recruitment & retention manager at Auckland District Health Board.
“At the moment, our systems don’t talk to each other that well,” Fulford said at an Oracle event in Auckland today.
“Better integration, without reinventing the wheel – that is something that has come out of the sessions today. You don’t necessarily have to throw away everything that you have got. There are systems that can connect what you already have and also add other solutions onto [existing systems].”
Auckland DHB has been running the Oracle Taleo Cloud Service for recruitment and retention management for over five years. One of the greatest benefits of it is that it’s a fully outsourced solution, Fulford says.
“It’s somebody else’s problem to look after it, manage it and do all the upgrades. It’s easy from that perspective,” he says.
Auckland DHB was one of the first DHBs to start using Taleo, he says. Waitemata and Counties Manukau DHBs also signed up to it and now the three have a joint database, “which is fantastic”, he says. About eight DHBs in the North Island are now using Taleo, he says.
Social media is also a trend Fulford and his team have been discussing at length – “how can we use that full social opportunity?”
He says the DHB is in the category of “slower adopters”. “If you have a high social interaction, to do it properly you have got to be on the ball all the time. The challenge for DHBs is just finding the resource to have that responsiveness. At the moment, we push out to social but we are not offering the same level of immediate response.”
Also part of the story is that the clinical side – the clinicians, doctors and nurses – have traditionally not been particularly interactive with social media, he says.
“On the other hand, there are now many younger nurses coming through that are quite active in the social space, so it’s a changing landscape.”