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Healthcare recruiters have it tough, perhaps even more so than other industries. Between healthcare burnout, pandemics, the rise of telehealth, and an aging population, recruiters have many challenges that are constantly flying at their faces.
The challenges of healthcare hiring are precisely why we put together this ebook. We found that many of our healthcare customers were facing unique problems in their hiring cycles, one of the main ones being the interview process, but more on that later. In this ebook, you will find recruitment strategies specifically for healthcare recruiters.
Across nearly every industry and every size company — recruiters have the weight of every department on their backs. Every part of the business is counting on you to find the right candidate with ample experience. Whether you are a recruiting team of one or part of a large hiring crew, this ebook can help you zone in on your strategies and find what can be improved.
Recruiters face dozens of challenges daily, but deciding which ones to tackle is one of the hardest. At Qualifi, we spend most of our time talking to recruiters, researching, and learning about the most significant challenges they face daily. We found three common obstacles that recruiters often don’t notice immediately, but can be the silent assassins.
These three challenges address issues like overworked recruiters to effective talent assessment and candidate sourcing. Here is a quick walkthrough of how each one can impact recruiters and how to fix it.
The time it takes to hire a candidate, varies depending on many factors; everything from the size of your team, the number of interviews you can conduct in a week, how fast you can collaborate with hiring managers, and more.
However, a 2016 Society for Human Resource Management study found that it takes 42 days to hire a new employee on average. Glassdoor backed up this finding and noted that interviewing can take as much as three weeks. Our findings suggest that interviewing takes roughly seven days to schedule and conduct. When interviewing takes between one and three weeks, your time to hire is far too long. Interviewing is the biggest bottleneck for recruiters.
To find top talent and stop a financial hemorrhage, businesses must prioritize their thoughtfulness and flexibility in their hiring practices. However, this prioritization should not translate into extending your time-to-hire. The most qualified candidates are only available for around 10 days before committing to another position. Every day a position sits open, your organization loses a lot of money. According to SHRM, an open role costs an average of $4,129.
Shortening your time-to-hire is the best way to keep your organization from hemorrhaging money without knowing it. Finding the bottlenecks that waste time or where applicants fall off is vital.
As the hiring market gets more competitive, recruiters' workdays are busier, and more recruiters are experiencing burnout. Psychology Today characterized burnout as “exhaustion, depression, and cynicism” over a long period. The World Health Organization (WHO) has said that cases of workplace burnout could need medical attention. The WHO has named workplace burnout an “occupational phenomenon.”
Employees in every industry feel overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated. When people lose passion for their job, they quit. This level of burnout is especially prevalent in recruiters, who said their stress levels increased to 61% after the pandemic. Even 19% said that they experienced a dramatic increase in stress.
Recruiters can have a very emotional role with candidates, especially healthcare recruiters. Burnout is no stranger in the healthcare community. Forbes reported that a new survey revealed that 47% of U.S. healthcare workers plan to leave their positions by 2025. The New York Times reported on a Mayo Clinic study that showed “63% of physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, an increase from 44% in 2017 and 46% in 2011. Only 30% felt satisfied with their work-life balance.”
Burnout in the healthcare industry is rampant among workers and recruiters. So how can you get ahead of healthcare recruiter burnout?
Recruiters work to create a positive work environment for their organizations. They create and monitor multiple job postings, source quality candidates, schedule and conduct interviews, and collaborate with hiring managers throughout the entire hiring pipeline. According to the Undercover Recruiter, conducting consistent phone interviews means recruiters spend 78,352 minutes on the phone yearly. These long hours on the phone conducting one-on-one interviews can fill a recruiter's day with monotony, diminishing their passion and contributing to burnout.
Recruiters often conduct phone interviews, which take the longest time out of any step in the hiring process. If a phone screening process takes too long, a company could lose up to 89% of its potential candidates. Traditional phone screenings add at least a week to the hiring process. Without phone screenings taking up an entire week, recruiters could have less stressful and more productive workdays.
That is why companies are looking toward automated interviews. Many virtual hiring platforms provide one-way phone interviews or one-way video interviews. These tools allow recruiters to conduct asynchronous interviews, where recruiters can record their questions on their own time, and candidates can answer when it is best for them.
Recruiters shape the future of an organization during the hiring process. They are the first touchpoint that an applicant has with the brand, and how you communicate will dictate what they expect after being hired. This makes hiring the perfect time to use your brand voice. Give candidates a better idea of what it may be like working for your company with strong branding.
There are many ways to improve your branding during the hiring process. Things like consistent language across job postings, communication systems with applicants, and setting clear expectations are all parts of your employer brand that go beyond logos or email signatures.
Go the extra mile by sharing your brand voice through your interview questions by:
Brand voice is quintessential for clear communication; so is your company style guide. Your style guide should show the best words to use (and words you should avoid) to set clear expectations for your candidates. Your style guide can also help you decide if your voice should be more lively and approachable or authoritative to show you are an expert in your field.
How you communicate to your candidates will show the human aspects of your organization. You can highlight your company culture to entice candidates to work for you. You can also take the chance to open up more communication. Open up the floor to any feedback, questions, or concerns. As you respond to these comments, you can provide candidates with more clarification on your company’s tone and style.
Employees appreciate an organization that frequently communicates, sets clear expectations, and isn't afraid to grow. You can build and show your positive work environment by encouraging candidate participation.
Hourly workers make up more than half of today’s workforce — and are likely many of the healthcare roles you need to fill. Hourly workers also present a different set of unique challenges to recruiters than salaried workers.
According to the Workforce Institute, hourly employees have turnover rates ranging from 70-120% per year in most industries. As such, these positions can prove challenging to keep filled.
However, there is a solution. Using effective and efficient hiring practices allows companies to acquire the best talent to fill their positions quickly and make a better candidate experience, hopefully improving retention rates.
When you’re looking to hire hourly workers, it’s necessary to have an efficient hiring process to provide your company with a fully-staffed team. It doesn’t matter if this is for temporary roles or filling general service positions; An effectively streamlined hiring process is essential.
Industries that hire hourly candidates often face a high churn rate. To counter this, you need to expand your candidate pipeline. High-volume hiring allows your recruiters to quickly fill vacant positions as they open with a ready pool of candidates. Consequently, this requires you to improve your candidate attraction.
Industries like healthcare have seen an increased demand for new talent but severe talent shortages. A healthcare recruiter is likely under even more pressure than recruiters for other industries because they need to quickly and effectively get the best candidates through the hiring process as efficiently as possible or risk losing them to competing healthcare providers.
Hiring managers are your greatest asset to stay ahead of your company’s needs. To fully understand the position you need to fill and have an efficient interview experience, you will need to optimize your intake meetings. Intake meetings are meetings between a recruiter and a hiring manager to discuss the hiring process and keep both parties aligned to the same goal. Consistent and effective intake meetings allow the chance to discuss position requirements, candidate profiles, and job titles.
At this stage, it’s smart for hiring managers to create a hiring calendar. This will help identify when you need to hire multiple, or even hundreds of people at once. A hiring calendar can include which temp schedules are ending, busy seasons for your business and other key points to help you stay on top of your hiring necessities.
The healthcare recruitment process is often too long and not engaging enough to keep candidates from opting to go with whichever company gets back to them first. Because of this, you must utilize healthcare recruitment strategies that streamline and modernize your recruiting process and keep your candidates engaged throughout the entire process. In other words, if you want candidates to choose your healthcare facility over another, you need to show them that you are not only respectful of their time but that you value them and their experience. Healthcare recruiters should aim to set a good first impression of your organization with a short and sweet recruiting process.
Using an automated interviewing process that allows you to easily record interview responses, highlight keywords, and skills, and communicate effectively with your hiring managers can be an excellent way to improve the hiring process and support your recruiters.
Qualifi is a platform that allows you to easily record your interview questions, form a script, and send out asynchronous phone interview invitations to hundreds of candidates at once. This means that your recruiting team no longer has to spend hours of their time scheduling and conducting interviews. They can instead focus on putting their healthcare recruiter skills to good use by focusing on reviewing interview responses and getting back to candidates quickly.
Qualifi integrates seamlessly with your existing tech stack, working alongside other applicant tracking and candidate relationship management systems. Get started today.
