Hiring for Healthcare Companies: A Guide
This guide is for the person at a healthcare company who has a commercial or technical role to fill and is weighing where to fill it. It covers the kinds of company the word healthcare hides, which roles are filled with people outside the U.S., the three ways of getting the work done and what each costs, the one decision healthcare adds to every brief, and where briefs usually stall. Outsorcy recruits and employs people in Kosovo for roles like these, so the examples are ours.
Which kind of healthcare company you are
Four kinds of company hire under the healthcare heading, and the brief looks different for each. Knowing which one you are settles who the hire will be talking to and whether the role will ever reach patient records.
| Company type | Who buys from you | What the brief has to settle |
|---|---|---|
| Digital health and health-tech | Benefits and total-rewards leaders at self-funded employers; product and population-health teams at health plans; the brokers who advise employers | The plan-year calendar: outreach lands earlier than the open-enrollment window it is aimed at |
| Devices and diagnostics | The clinician who would use the product, the procurement team that prices it, and often a value analysis committee on its own schedule | Which procedures and which sites the rep targets, and who on your team takes the clinical conversation |
| Clinics and healthcare services | Patients, referrers and payers | Who reviews content before it is published, and whether the role is patient-facing |
| Companies that sell to healthcare | Hospitals, plans and providers, buying billing, staffing, consulting or software | A longer sales cycle and a buyer who asks about data early |
Which roles healthcare companies fill abroad
The roles that travel are the commercial and technical ones.
- Sales development. Reps prospect into health plans, employers, brokers or hospital departments and book meetings for the account executives.
- Marketing. Marketers build campaigns and content inside the company's review process.
- Customer support. Support hires answer the product, employer and provider queues, with clinical questions routed to qualified staff.
- Engineering. Engineers join a product team and work in its repositories under its own leads.
- Finance and operations. Finance people run the ledger and the close; operations people run the processes the company has written down.
Clinical roles stay where the license is. Anything that requires a medical, nursing or allied-health registration is hired in the country where the care is delivered, and a staffing partner recruiting in Kosovo will say so on the first call.
At Outsorcy the healthcare work has been sales development for Wondr Health and Virta Health, both digital health companies selling to employers and health plans. Catapult Health, whose employer clients get at-home testing with video consultations from licensed providers, hires through Outsorcy as well.
Three ways to get the work done
A healthcare company with an open commercial or technical role has three arrangements to choose from. The differences are in who employs the person, who directs the work, and what the invoice buys.
Hire in the United States
You recruit, employ and manage the person yourself. The work, the systems and the direction are all yours, and so is the full cost of a U.S. salary, benefits, equipment and the recruiting time. For roles where the person has to be in the room, this is the arrangement.
Buy the function from an agency or a managed service
You sign with a firm that does the work with its own staff, on its own platform, under its own supervisors, and reports the output to you: meetings booked, tickets closed, claims processed. Healthcare BPO and healthcare call center outsourcing are this arrangement. The invoice is for volume.
Hire through a staffing partner
You send a brief. The partner recruits against it, you interview the shortlist and choose, and the partner becomes the legal employer and runs payroll and compliance in its own country. The person works in your systems, on your licenses, under your manager, and the invoice is a monthly fee for the role. This is what Outsorcy does for healthcare companies, with recruiting mainly in Kosovo and the employment contract there.
| Hire in the U.S. | Agency or managed service | Hire through a partner | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who employs the person | You | The vendor | The partner, in its own country |
| Who directs the work | Your manager | The vendor's supervisor | Your manager |
| Whose systems | Yours | Usually the vendor's | Yours, on your licenses |
| What the invoice buys | Salary, benefits, equipment | Volume: meetings, tickets, claims | A monthly fee for the role |
| At the end | The person and the process stay | The process and what was learned stay with the vendor | The person leaves; the process and the systems stay with you |
The second and third arrangements are often confused because both are called outsourcing. The question that separates them is whether you want a result delivered to you or a person on your team.
What it costs
A U.S. hire costs what the market pays for the role, plus benefits and the time to recruit. An agency prices its output, and a monthly retainer for outbound or support is typical. A hire through Outsorcy has one fee structure for every role:
- Onboarding fee. One-time, per hire. Covers the equipment, bought to your spec.
- Monthly fee. Quoted per role once the brief has been read, invoiced monthly.
- Replacement. If the hire is wrong for the job, the next search costs nothing.
How long it takes
Recruiting in the U.S. runs to weeks or months depending on the role and the market. An agency can start once the contract is signed and its team is briefed. Through Outsorcy, a first shortlist reaches you within days of the brief, and most of the variation after that is how quickly your side schedules the interviews.
The decision healthcare adds to the brief
Every healthcare brief has to answer one question the rest of B2B rarely asks: what systems and what data will this person reach?
- Roles that work with business contacts. A sales development rep calls benefits directors, plan executives and procurement staff. A marketer works with the claims library and the review queue. A support hire on the employer or product queue works from macros and account records. None of that is a patient record.
- Roles that may reach patient records. A provider-facing support queue, or an engineering role on a clinical data pipeline. Here the boundary is agreed with the client before recruiting starts, the access is granted from the client's side on the client's own controls, and the role goes through the client's own security review.
Deciding this first changes who is worth shortlisting and what the interview should test. Deciding it after the offer is where healthcare briefs lose the most time.
Where healthcare briefs stall
Four things account for most of the delay we see between a healthcare company deciding to hire and the person starting.
- The buyer is treated as one persona. A benefits director at a self-funded employer, a population-health lead at a health plan and a broker advising twenty employers buy the same product for different reasons on different calendars. A brief that names one title produces a list built for one title.
- The review cycle is left out of the plan. Marketing and content at a healthcare company pass through legal, regulatory or clinical review, and a marketer's first weeks are spent learning what that reviewer asks for. A brief that budgets for the campaign and forgets the queue sets a deadline the queue will move.
- An outcome is expected from a hire. An agency sells meetings; a hire sells a person's time and skill. A company that wants a meeting count in the agreement wants an agency, and it is quicker to say so than to brief a hire and measure them against a contract they were never under.
- Nobody owns the person day to day. A hire through a staffing partner is employed by the partner and directed by the client's manager. If that manager has not been named before the start date, the first weeks go to finding one.
Interviewing for a healthcare role
You take the interviews, so the useful checks are the ones only you can run.
| Role | The check |
|---|---|
| Sales development | Have the candidate make a cold call in the interview, into a benefits director who says next year's package is already decided. |
| Marketing | Give them a paragraph of your copy and one real restriction from your reviewers, and read what comes back. |
| Customer support | Give them an angry ticket and five minutes, then a question that drifts toward clinical advice, and watch how cleanly they route it. |
| Engineering | A small change in a repository like yours tells you more than an algorithm round, and a pull request to review shows how they disagree in writing. |
| Every role | Agree the hours before the offer. The Kosovo working day sits six hours ahead of U.S. Eastern and overlaps the European one, and the agreed hours go into the employment contract. |
Frequently asked questions
Can a hire outside the U.S. work with patient data?
Most commercial roles never reach it; the rep, the marketer and the employer-queue support hire work with business contacts and account records. Where a role would reach patient records, the scope is agreed with the client before the brief is written, the access is granted on the client's own controls, and the role goes through the client's own security review.
Is this the same as healthcare BPO?
Healthcare BPO is a managed service: a vendor's staff on the vendor's platform, and the vendor delivers an output such as processed claims or handled calls. A hire through a staffing partner is one person recruited for your company, employed by the partner, working in your systems under your manager. Billing, coding and claims processing are bought from a BPO provider; a sales development rep or a support hire for your own team is recruited.
What about time zones?
Kosovo keeps Central European Time, six hours ahead of U.S. Eastern and nine ahead of Pacific. A hire covering a U.S. territory works a Pristina afternoon and evening; a European client usually keeps its own local hours. The working day is agreed per hire and written into the employment contract.
Can we start with one person?
Yes, and most accounts do. A second or third hire goes through the same brief, shortlist and interview on the same terms.
What happens if the hire is wrong?
Outsorcy runs the search again at no charge and you pick from a new list. A first shortlist that misses is handled the same way.
Have a healthcare role to fill?
Send the role, the systems the person will work in and the manager they will report to. A shortlist from Kosovo follows within days.
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