Everyday, the lives and well-being of people are affected, and we often see a lot of critical consequences. Healthcare facilities and organizations have emphasized the importance of people and have professed the mantra of patient-centered care.
If you're one of those healthcare organizations, it's time to think about what investment you're making to find and hire the best people to provide the right care that they deserve. In most cases, talent acquisition is a mere subset of HR, but quite honestly, recruiting is a marketing and sales function that should be more closely aligned with the marketing department.
To be very effective, you need to remain relevant and provide the best possible candidate experience, acquiring talent requires professional recruiters equipped with the best automation tools in the industry.
If you're serious about your people, don't compromise the opportunity and the ability to hire the best people possible, as opposed to the available people. Make talent acquisition your organization's corporate competitive advantage.
And being competitive means you stay ahead of the competition. It’s time to accelerate the means by which you do your healthcare recruitment.
5 Actionable Tips for Accelerating Healthcare Recruitment
The nursing shortage is the most publicized shortage in the healthcare industry. In addition, healthcare jobs are number 12 of the 20 quickest growing occupations in the US. Because of this, healthcare's recruiting teams are facing a unique challenge.
They are responsible for recruiting two completely different types of roles, two of which are difficult to fill for two totally different reasons.
- Unspecialized roles: These are difficult to fill because it's a low-wage opportunity, abundant, and job-seekers have plenty of other options. Jobs that are in this include health aides, physical therapist aides, plus other relatively low wage positions with low barriers to entry.
- Highly specialized roles: The roles comprise physicians, nurses, physical therapists, plus other well-paid highly specialized positions. These are difficult to fill up because few people with the necessary skills, education, and certifications to complete the job.
Let's look at a couple of ways that you can accelerate your healthcare recruitment for both low and high specialty roles.
#1 Think About Using Untapped Channels
One way to fill rapidly growing and hard-to-fill roles is to think creatively about channels that you haven't tapped yet. For filling out both specialized and unspecialized roles, it can be a good idea to take a look at job boards and post about your organization's staffing needs.
Sites like Locum Tenens is a good place to start. And for highly specialized roles, you can:
- Host a professional seminar: Work with other healthcare associations and professionals to organize a public seminar. Make sure you actively recruit in a frequent manner, and interact and engage with attendees.
- Check-up on runner-up candidates: Candidates who make it to the final step of the hiring process, but weren't ultimately hired yesterday can be great today. It's a goldmine of these specialized candidates.
- Look outside of the typical professionals: International healthcare workers, traveling workers, and recently retired workers can all potentially relocate or reverse retirement to come and work full-time for you.
For unspecialized roles, remember that you're in competition with every other locally high-volume employer. So any tactic that an employer implements in retail and other service industries can be applicable here:
- Do a public job fair: Lots of service employees might not realize the full range of options available to them in the healthcare industry. You can host a public job fair to showcase the variety of opportunities that you've got available.
- Partner up with a volunteer group: The members of volunteer groups like making an impact. You can try partnering with a local volunteer group to remind people of the life-changing impact that they can make as a home health aide or physical therapist aide.
And lastly, make sure you leverage referrals. Referrals are a top source of high-quality hires in not just healthcare professions.
They're useful for all job types, and not just those with high-degree specializations. Lots of employees do enjoy working with friends, and they also help improve employee retention.
You need a structured and robust referral program that can build a strong pipeline of very qualified candidates.
#2 Do Some Autopilot Sourcing
According to the Healthcare Recruiting Network (HRN), 90% of healthcare candidates say that the employer brand is a critical recruiting resource. Setting your hospital apart from other healthcare professionals is critical for reaching talent that's hard to hire.
By building a compelling employer brand, you can more efficiently generate interest from candidates with no manual outreach required.
Hospitals are allocating more resources toward passive candidate recruiting. So how exactly do you stay ahead of your competition?
- Dedicate budget for employer branding: Only 43% of healthcare providers have a dedicated budget to address the needs of their employer brand. Giving budget for branding initiatives ensures that they get priority and won't be pushed back to next year.
- Note what your competitors are doing: No, you wouldn't want to put budget behind employer branding only to find out that the local competitor is doing the same thing. So do a competitive employer brand audit that can give you insight into what other providers are doing so you can find a way to set your organization apart.
- Assign someone to do your branding: It's very tempting to delegate new employer branding responsibilities to the already existing recruiting team. But you need to keep in mind that candidates do research on employers before they go onboard.
Employers and employees alike are actively searching for better opportunities. That's a large portion of the workforce who would inevitably land on your career site. A compelling employer brand can effectively automate how you attract job seekers -- specialized and unspecialized alike -- into your pipeline.
#3 Permit Flexibility of the Hiring Process
A lot of healthcare schedules are very hectic…
To schedule a phone screening, you'll need to align your schedules to the schedule of the candidates who are probably employed elsewhere. Make sure scheduling conflicts won't keep your organization from hiring the best healthcare workers.
Provide a way for candidates to engage with you after hours and when they're off work. You can even do recorded video interviews. This way hiring managers can review candidates' recorded responses at their leisure and still focus on giving patients high-quality care.
This way, they're empowered to bring in the best-fit candidates for onsite interviews while making recruitment decisions. In the meantime, your competitors are still doing phone screenings. In addition, video interviews can help you focus on the best candidates while giving them a high-touch experience.
#4 Ask the Right Questions to Examine Soft Skills
In the healthcare industry, soft skills are critical. So when you're interviewing, make use of behavioral and scenario questions in order to get an accurate assessment of soft skills. You need to ask:
- Scenario questions: Ask candidates what kind of actions they take when they're confronted with a hypothetical scenario.
- Behavioral questions: In this one, candidates are asked to relate past experiences along with on-the-job behaviors.
You can even use these kinds of strong question types during an on-demand interview to gauge skills that matter at the start of the hiring process. Plus, you can fast-track the best candidates.
#5 Get the Most From Group and Team Interviews
Syncing a hiring manager's schedules with already employed candidates is time-consuming and difficult. This is especially true for a lot of healthcare professionals. Here's how to get the most out of group interview panels and teams:
- Automate your scheduling: You can set up a hiring event through automated scheduling software, so candidates can pick times that work best for them to interview. This takes a lot of stress off from the scheduling that your recruitment team needs to do, plus eliminates candidate phone tag.
- Structure your interview questions: A structured set of interview questions do a greater job of predicting future success. Plus, it's more fair to candidates. Give every new candidate an opportunity to answer the same questions. If they've completed a structured on-demand video interview, make sure you expand on the questions that they've already answered.
- Form a diverse interview panel: A diverse team (made of different genders, ethnicity, and age) creates a better and less-biased decision than a homogeneous team. You can also ensure that great talent won't go unnoticed.
As time goes by, healthcare recruitment will only become more competitive than the first time. The demand for all professionals' skill levels increases.
Hopefully, these 5 recruiting tips can help you ensure a healthy pipeline of highly qualified healthcare candidates, so you'll be able to deliver the highest quality care for all of your patients.