Hiring someone for a job is a simple enough process. Post the position, review applicants, interview, offer, and bring someone on board. At most, this takes a few weeks for the speediest of hirers; a few months for those who delve into every intricacy. This is how hiring works across much of the business world.
Then there are regulated industries where nothing makes hiring easier. If you’re a government agency employee, a defense contractor, or have a job in healthcare or the financial sector, you’re so regulated that the easiest approach to hiring becomes an obstacle course spanning months. The ideal candidate is someone who can not only do the job but also pass background checks, meet clearance needs (if applicable), and align with compliance efforts.
The Clearance Challenge
The biggest deterrent to hiring someone in a regulated industry comes courtesy of the security clearance. Government and defense contracting require security clearances that take anywhere from six months to a year to acquire—unless complications arise and backlogs ensue.
Thus, there’s a catch-22: people need clearances to fulfill positions, but people don’t retain clearances without positions needing clearances. Hire and hope they already have the scant few available clearances (with no one else competing for those same cleared candidates), or hire someone perfect and wait months upon months to find out they indeed can start after all.
Some companies will try to hire someone in an unclassified role while awaiting security clearance; however, this is only effective if unclassified roles exist; for those roles needing immediate access, it is what it is—and time will tell—and hopefully no red flags appear in the background check.
Compliance Paperwork Requirements
The mountains of paperwork required by regulated industries do not help with each new hire. It’s not ordinary employment paperwork needed; it’s employment paperwork on steroids as supporting compliance documentation, credential verification, and records of which procedures were followed or failed along the way.
In healthcare, licensing verification and disciplinary history checks involving training certifications necessitate documentation and information retention. In financial services, employment history cross-checks that meet compliance standards (with regulations guiding government agencies) must all align. The same for government agencies, which have additional prerequisites based on position and agency.
Therefore, organizations consistently working in these industries bring in outside experts who understand the need. A government staffing agency that specializes in regulated industries will know what documentation needs to be secured, from whom, how to legitimately attain it, and how to apply it for future record-keeping efforts, which substantiate compliance.
This is crucial because a lack of documentation or misinformation can provide disqualification from certain candidates or compliance issues down the road. It’s not enough to simply get the documents in hand—it’s about maintaining them in a timely fashion and with proper filing. Regulations require hiring documentation to be kept for years; when auditors come calling, organizations like these need substantiated documentation for each hire through and through to prove fidelity of process.
The Special Skills Requirements
Regulated industries often require specialized people—and they aren’t easy to find. It’s not good enough to be a great engineer—you have to be an exceptional engineer with a current clearance who understands government contracting and has years of experience in certain systems/protocols.
Healthcare has similar challenges—an RN role might necessitate some special certifications and experience with particular patient populations or electronic health record systems. The ideal candidate pool shrinks with every intersecting facet until you feel like you’re finding needles in haystacks instead.
And this complicates the problem with time intersections. Not only do you seek rare intersections of skill sets, but you also cannot just hire until their background check/civilian check/compliance parameters are finished. What begins as a three-month search easily turns into over six months due to these quirks.
Financial Resources Approval Processes
Specific approvals across specific fiscal years (or for those funding regulations) complicate any government agency/regulatory situation further down the line when it comes to hiring timing. You could have the perfect candidate—and even have funding—but without approval channels or in an inappropriate period of the fiscal year, you cannot onboard them.
This means extensive planning needs to happen months prior, so hopeful projections materialize with limited flexibility if alterations need to be made after initial considerations are regulated through budget approvals.
The flexibility many private companies take for granted does not exist here. Contract positions offer more flexibility sometimes, as they’re budgeted differently and less necessitate approval processes than internal staffing; thus, it’s no surprise that contract staffing plays a larger role in regulated industries—there needs to be a release valve when general hiring is too convoluted or time-consuming.
Why Experience Hiring in Regulated Industries is Important
When organizations inexperienced with regulated hiring think it will be like any standardized hiring effort with some cautionary adaptations for professionalism, they’re wrong.Â
Organizations think expedited efforts are commonplace until clearances become convoluted time delays or compliance particulars unknown until it’s too late, since requirements take months themselves.
Companies specializing in regulated industry staffing know these particulars through daily experience—they know which clearances take the longest per agency. They understand documentation requirements across various industries and specialties. They even have access to pools of candidates already cleared who can start immediately (as long as they’re already compliant).
This matters during critical times of accelerated hiring efforts. When agencies realize they’ve been awarded a government contract—and they need staffing—now—or when regulations dictate a healthcare facility needs additional compliance staffing yesterday—working with those who already understand requirements makes all the difference for expedited expectations from rapidly expanding candidate need.
Candidate Experience
And candidates are impacted by these challenges. Anyone who’s ever worked in a regulated industry is an angel—or at least patient—good luck waiting six months for clearance while sandwiched between jobs when nothing else could fill that time frame.
Best candidates will have options; if one job dictates they’re out of commission for six months waiting for clearance while another offers them an immediate start (in this industry or another), many will choose certainty—even if they prefer the other industry’s work.
Thus, this industry fails to attract top-tier talent via the process itself.
This is why leveraging relationships with existing cleared professionals who already know what’s expected in regulated settings makes all the difference—they can move from position to position without lag time because they already have clearances; sure, these professionals are few and far between at first—but after a while, they’re easier to onboard quickly when needs arise.
How It Happens
It’s no standardized approach that makes working with staffing professionals for regulated industries like any normal hiring effort—it requires advanced preparation far ahead; it requires larger candidate pools to be sustained; it requires working with industry-specific insiders who know what’s what; time needs to be allocated for compliance steps that can’t be rushed.
Those who think there’s little difference between standardized hiring efforts and regulated ones will stumble; those who differentiate their approach to understand security clearances, compliance expectations, specialized skills requirements, and approval processes will champion successful teams—they just take more time, forethought, and nuanced expertise to navigate complex pathways.
