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We’re not going to sugar-coat it. Things are rough right now in the healthcare hiring landscape.
The healthcare industry has always been a challenging place to recruit talent, but the past few years have taken those challenges to a whole new level. Between the pandemic, staffing shortages, and the competitive nature of healthcare recruitment, it's no wonder that many people just like you feel like they're struggling to keep their heads above water.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
In this guide, we're going to explore practical strategies for going from surviving to thriving in healthcare recruiting.
It’s no secret that staffing shortages have been an issue for a long time now. And in an industry where people's health and lives are at stake, these shortages can have serious consequences. As healthcare providers struggle to find enough qualified personnel, recruiters are in a fierce competition for talent.
But how can you stand out among the crowd, particularly when Gen Z-ers are dropping out of healthcare faster than any other age group?
You need to differentiate your organization.
Building a strong employer brand is crucial to convey a positive image and attract candidates. In fact, a LinkedIn study shows that having a stellar employer brand could bring 50% more qualified candidates to your doorstep, and reduce your turnover by 28%.
To strengthen your brand, you could highlight employee engagement programs, advocate for an attractive work-life balance, and make sure you’re active on social media promoting what it’s like to work at your organization.
Go beyond basic compensation packages and prioritize wellness programs and other attractive incentives that make workers feel valued. By putting an emphasis on incentives and benefits, you encourage your workers to take care of themselves, thereby reducing stress levels and creating a healthy work environment.
If you’re not on the internet looking for candidates, you’re already behind.
This strategy is especially important for reaching younger generations who are more likely to engage with social media and job board postings than traditional (read: outdated) channels. Make sure to meet your candidate pool where they are.
Healthcare workers want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and the constantly changing landscape of the industry. However, the cost of professional development often falls to the workers themselves unless you're offering continuing education and certification programs that are subsidized.
Offering these types of programs shows your employees that you're invested in their careers-long term, and will make you seem more attractive as an employer.
Most existing hiring processes are clunky, drawn-out, and frustrating. If yours is too, trust us— you’re not alone.
Often woefully overlooked as an important issue, lengthy recruitment cycles put additional strain on resources, and make you less likely to hire the best candidates. Take Saint Agnes for example, who was able to make significantly more qualified hires by saving 80% of their time previously spent on just phone screens.
Ergo, traditional hiring processes are no longer sufficient. So let’s look at how you can remain competitive, level-up your workflows, and ultimately deliver high-quality patient care as a result.
One solution to the issues that come with traditional processes is automating certain aspects of the recruitment cycle. In doing so, you can create a much faster, more efficient, and more reliable process.
Automated systems can provide customized alerts and reminders, screen resumes, score assessments, and provide easy-to-use dashboards that enable recruiters to track candidates seamlessly.
Additionally, automation takes the burden of menial, repetitive tasks off healthcare teams, so they can focus on what really matters — patient care.
Right now if we were to ask you how long it takes to move one of your candidates from application to completed phone screen, what would you say?
(We wouldn’t be surprised if you’re reading this right now and thinking, “What magical fairylands are you living in where people have clear access to this type of granular data?”) One of the major benefits of an automated system is being able to see these types of insights. An automated system keeps track of all your data, and recruiters can pull reports and analytics to deliver insights around hiring metrics.
This enables you to adjust your recruitment strategy, improve your process workflow, and make informed decisions to ensure you meet (or—gasp!—exceed) your goals.
There’s nothing quite like bad communication to slow down a process. But by using an integrated communication tool for recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers, all parties can easily stay aware of where they are in the hiring process, what the next steps will be, and who needs to be involved. This reduces the risk of delays caused by miscommunication and unconnected departments.
By not implementing solutions to these issues, it’s costing you — big time. Beyond the resource drains we’ve already mentioned, the cost of open roles remaining unfilled for long swaths of time is more significant than many organizations realize. [Link to ROI Calculator or insert image] And it can quickly add up to massive amounts of dollars down the drain.
Filling gaps with agency workers may seem like a quick fix, but it can end up being an unsustainable and expensive approach. In some cases, healthcare systems may even find themselves paying more for agency workers than they would for permanent staff.
The high cost of agency workers can also have negative effects on patient care, as they may not be familiar with the hospital’s protocols or culture. Additionally, they may not have the time or resources to develop strong relationships with the patients, which can adversely affect the quality of care.
Cutting down on bottlenecks such as long initial screening delays can compound into huge time and money savings. Streamlining the hiring process and investing in HR technology can help healthcare systems reduce the time and cost associated with screening candidates. By identifying and eliminating this type of unnecessary fluff, healthcare systems have the opportunity to save significantly.
Some solutions may have been a good option in the past, but these days it simply isn’t going to work for the speed at which you need to hire.
For example, candidates are far less likely to participate in the hiring process when asked to take video interviews, because they’re cumbersome and require much more effort to complete. Additionally, they introduce the potential for visual bias, and they aren’t accessible to candidates who lack high-speed internet or a picture-perfect background.
It might be hard to admit, but maintaining the status quo will be detrimental to you in the long run. While it may seem like making changes to your hiring process is a daunting task, the cost of inaction will be much greater.
To add insult to injury, you’ll find yourself losing top candidates to competitors who have streamlined recruitment processes in place.
AI is the buzzword of the moment (and sorry if you’re tired of talking about it, we get it).
But with all of the concerns around AI taking over hiring decisions, it’s understandable that there’s some hesitation around its implementation. So it’s critical to understand how it may be impacting your life now, or five years from now.
We’ll be the first to admit there are both major positives and major negatives to AI, so let’s examine how you can best use it to your advantage to gain the competitive edge.
One of the top benefits of AI is being able to offload the most tedious aspects of recruiting. From initial candidate screening to scheduling interviews, AI-powered recruiting software can turn those headaches into your secret weapon. You can leverage AI to screen resumes infinitely faster than you manually could, and it can search for candidates with specific skills and experience relevant to your specific roles.
And as we mentioned earlier, this speediness will also help you improve your candidate experience.
One of the main concerns with implementing AI in hiring is the potential for bias in algorithm decision-making. This is a completely valid fear. However, AI can also help mitigate bias in recruitment by providing objective assessments based on data and qualifications rather than factors such as age, gender, or ethnicity.
AI-powered software can also analyze job descriptions and offer suggestions for more inclusive language, which can improve a job posting's suitability and attract a more diverse pool of candidates. Just be sure that you are careful to only use AI to augment your own decision making—don’t allow it to make hiring decisions on its own.
(And don’t just take our word for it: 71% of American workers oppose using AI to make final hiring decisions.)
AI can also help healthcare organizations mitigate the risk of errors in the recruitment process. By automating some of the repetitive and data-heavy recruitment tasks, the chances of human errors are reduced. This can help ensure that the right candidates are selected for the right roles, and nobody accidentally slips through the cracks.
Congrats on making it this far! Now buckle up, because we’re about to blow your mind with some statistics. Qualifi is an automated screening platform that healthcare recruiters use every day to solve some of the challenges we’ve been discussing. And the results speak for themselves:
With Qualifi, healthcare recruiters can complete their first round of interviews with candidates in under three hours on average. You heard that right. Your candidates could be going from application to completed screening in less than three hours.
There's no need to schedule and conduct individual interviews for each candidate, saving you time and resources and cutting days off your time-to-hire. Plus, the candidates’ responses are recorded and transcribed for you to review in minutes, not days.
Then you can easily send those transcriptions of your best candidates to your hiring managers, who can review the candidate’s exact answers themselves—no intermediary paraphrasing or frantic note-taking required.
Almost half (43%) of Qualifi interviews are completed outside of traditional working hours.
For you, that means no more phone screens from the dinner table, and no more missing out on a candidate because they work a different shift than you do.
By giving candidates the availability to complete their interviews whenever works best for them, recruiters promote a more comfortable and flexible candidate experience, and can interview a broader pool of applicants. This in turn promotes higher candidate engagement, and means no more wasting time on interview no-shows. [Link to G2 Review]
99% of candidates rate their experience using Qualifi as positive.
You might be skeptical of that number, but we triple-checked. It’s a whopping 99% for our healthcare customers.
Qualifi's software is designed with candidate experience in mind. Our solution doesn’t require candidates to download anything at all or create any type of account. They can simply apply and interview right from their phone or computer. Candidates can also answer the interview questions in their own time and at their own pace, without feeling rushed.
Challenges undoubtedly exist within the healthcare recruitment landscape, but with the right strategies, you can overcome them and emerge stronger. By implementing the knowledge and solutions in this guide, you’ll soon be able to attract and retain the best healthcare talent on the market.
Remember, you don’t have to just survive. And we can’t wait to see you thrive.
