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Recruiting and Hiring in Healthcare Industry: Challenges and How-to’s

Recruiting and hiring in Healthcare industry has become a hot topic for many recruiters. Recruiters and HR managers are struggling on a daily basis to recruit highly-qualified healthcare professionals all over the world. Likely, many healthcare organizations have realized the importance of this problem. They have started using some innovative solutions in order to improve hiring inthe healthcare industry.

Changes in Healthcare Industry

Healthcare industry is one of the biggest service industries in the world, and its growth won’t stop any times soon. Consequently, recruiting and hiring in healthcare industry has been experience big changes in recruiting.

Ongoing changes and advancements in the world of healthcare, have resulted in a complete transformation of how the industry works, operates, treats its customers, hires and manages people. All the technological changes and demands continue to have a big impact on the healthcare industry.

Evolvement of mobile technology, health applications and electronic medical records have not only resulted in the consumer-centric economy, but also the candidate-centric economy.

Hiring in Healthcare Industry

With the changes in technology, demand for new and more advanced skills has also increased. To be able to keep up with the new trends and make the patients happy, highly-qualified healthcare professionals are also needed.

The employment rate, in this growing healthcare industry, is projected to grow up to 19% till 2024 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, much faster than the average for all occupations, adding about 2.3 million new jobs.

For recruiters and talent acquisition professionals, healthcare recruiting and hiring is an extremely difficult task.

Today’s healthcare professionals should have the ability to follow and implement safe and ethical practices with the highest level of technical competency. In addition, the problems of team building and culture fit are still on the rise. Human Resource managers face many challenges when it comes to healthcare recruiting and hiring.

Healthcare Recruiting and Hiring Challenges

The good news is that people have started realizing the seriousness of these problems of healthcare recruiting and hiring, and they are now coming up with some innovative healthcare recruitment strategies.

Many big healthcare players have started using recruiting software and technology to help them find qualified job candidates, attract them and hire.

Lack of Talent

Undoubtedly, the biggest and most challenging problems when in healthcare recruiting and hiring is the lack of talented people. Healthcare industry has been missing skilled and highly-qualified candidates for years now, and the problem continues to increase.

According to 2015 Healthcare Recruiting Trends Survey, by 2020 U.S. will face a serious shortage of both primary care and specialist physicians to care for an aging and growing population.

This alarming crisis has encouraged public and private sector health care leaders to advocate for serious and creative healthcare recruitment strategies to attract and retain the skilled workforce in the healthcare industry.

Recruiting Software as a healthcare recruiting and hiring solution

Recruiting software, which may include both applicant tracking system and recruitment marketing platforms, offer solutions many healthcare recruiters appreciate when looking for highly-skilled healthcare professionals and hiring in the healthcare industry.

If you want to learn more about all the features of a recruitment tool, check out our checklist of features every modern Recruitment Software should have.

Some of the most valuable solutions for healthcare recruiting and hiring include:

Building a strong Employer Brand

Recruitment marketing platforms offer great solutions for building a stronger employer brand. Having a reputation of a desirable employer to work for makes it much easier to attract qualified healthcare professionals when hiring in healthcare industry.

importance of employer branding

Here are a few ideas you can incorporate into your healthcare recruitment strategies!

For example, ask your current employees to share their positive stories about working at your hospital or clinic. Ask them to write about you on Glassdoor and other company review sites.

Share your success stories with the public and show people about your company culture and values. Healthcare industry always has some great stories about saving and delivering new lives…tell the world about them!

Noel Cocca, one of our favorite HR influencers, wrote an interesting post about how to cure challenges in healthcare recruitment. His main point was about being different and delivering a different experience when it comes to healthcare recruitment strategies.

The best approach is often featuring real stories from real professionals making a real difference. For example, telling about a previous hire who joined an employer out of medical school used their passion for robotics to create a solution for microsurgery that just got patented, or an RN who’s pursuing her passion for travel in a role which requires working in many markets and not having to pull swing shifts in the same hospital day after day.”

Social Media Recruiting and Hiring in Healthcare industry

Social media can be a particularly effective tool in healthcare recruiting because of the demanding nature of healthcare jobs. Many health job seekers work long unpredictable hours and struggle to find time to research companies that are hiring, let alone submit applications. By utilizing social media in their recruitment strategies, healthcare organizations can meet job seekers on the platforms that they are already using during their limited free time, creating more chances for engagement than ever before.

Posting Jobs on job boards is not enough. Millennials are all over social media, so to be able to reach out to them, you need to get social as well. In addition to attracting, it has been getting harder and harder to retain Millennials in the workplace and reduce turnover.

With a recruitment marketing tool, you can connect your career page directly do your facebook job tab. This is a great way to get in front of the social media users with your new job opening when hiring in healthcare industry.

In addition, many companies have started using paid job ads to promote job openings in healthcare recruitment. This way, you can promote your job opening only to your targeted audience when you’re hiring in healthcare industry.

My favorite platform for social recruiting is definitively Instagram. Many companies have started using Instagram for healthcare hiring and recruiting, and they have seen success. This is a different and fun way of healthcare recruitment that many passive and active candidates have noticed.

Read more about how social recruiting can be used in healthcare recruiting and hiring.

Healthcare recruiting and hiring via Instagram

Instagram is a wonderful platform to find creative talent when healthcare recruiting and hiring. Here are steps on how to find talent on Instagram when recruiting and hiring in healthcare industry:

  • Get a cool visual of your team, as Instagram doesn’t allow any links in the image caption.
  • Have a contest/Challenge them, where you promote a custom made hashtag and giving them an action to do. For example tag-to-win, comment-to-win or photo challenges.
  • Make the contest related to the job position. For example, if you are looking for physician assistants use #physicianassistant hashtag and tell them to upload their best work on Instagram and tag your company.
  • Make specific rules.
  • If you find any Instagramers interesting you can directly send them DM(Direct Message) and invite them for an interview.

This is an example of how Novartis does it…

Healthcare recruiting and hiring using referrals

If you are trying to recruit in healthcare, and not using referrals, you are missing out! Referrals are known to be one of the best if not the best source of new hires.

According to CareerBuilder research

63% of healthcare companies use referrals for recruiting.

However,

Majority of them don’t offer any type of a referral incentive.

Recruitment marketing and CRM platforms are a great way to build a good referral program in which referral requests and campaigns can be automated and more streamlined. Healthcare providers are often surrounded by other healthcare professionals, and by not asking them for a help you may be missing some high-quality job candidates. That being said, the reasons why you should use employee referral programs for hiring in healthcare industry are significant.

Candidate Engagement and Experience in healthcare recruitment

When demand for certain skills is high, and candidates have multiple options to choose from, creating a unique candidate experience is a huge competitive advantage when it comes to hiring in healthcare industry.

importance of positive candidate experience

What do I mean by that?

Building strong relationships with both passive and active candidates before you even have an opening is necessary for hard-to-fill roles such as the ones in the healthcare industry.

That being said, communicating with potential candidates beforehand, providing useful information and being responsive is a necessary part of healthcare recruitment strategies.

A recruitment marketing software enables you to make personalize email drip campaigns to engage candidates for your talent pool. This way, you are building your relationship with them, making it easier to convert them into applicants once you have hiring needs.

Career Site optimized for healthcare recruitment

I am shocked that there are healthcare providers that still not putting enough time towards their career site optimization. By doing this, they could get more job applicants straight through the career site.

Your career site is a reflection of your culture, and in healthcare, it is extremely important to communicate your values, mission and vision. To be able to attract highly qualified healthcare professionals, your career site needs to be optimized to target your candidate personas that guide your healthcare recruitment strategies.

Get our free guide for optimizing your career site!

Recruitment marketing software offers some great solutions for healthcare recruiting and hiring. Firstly, list your job openings with very specific and SEO friendly job descriptions. Secondly, share your employee’s’ testimonials. Introduce your team, and tell the world about your success stories.

We have seen from our existing clients that a little bit more effort out into a career site can result in a significant increase in high-quality job applicants and the overall success of your healthcare recruitment efforts.

In addition, don’t make your application form long and boring…

According to research, application form abandon rate on a desktop is 90%, and on mobile 95%.”

Need help with healthcare recruitment?
If you want to learn more about the best healthcare recruitment strategies and how exactly can our recruitment software TalentLyft help you improve your healthcare recruiting process, make sure to book a quick call with one of our product specialists!

Let’s meet

See TalentLyft in action

Applicant Tracking, Recruitment Marketing, Sourcing and Talent CRM software are powerful alone, but unstoppable when used together!


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