Finding and retaining skilled talent, and developing robust healthcare recruitment strategies, are ongoing challenges in healthcare organizations today. Recent Employ research reveals that 43% of clinical healthcare recruiters and 50% of non-clinical recruiters are encountering an increase in their hiring volume when compared to the previous year.
At the same time, 54% of clinical healthcare recruiters and 73% of non-clinical recruiters are experiencing increased levels of job-related stress, which is no surprise
Scaling healthcare organizations face tremendous financial pressures to compete with larger health systems. Labor shortages, demands for higher salaries, high levels of turnover, and manual processes slow down the recruitment process and directly impact hiring and retention effectiveness.
And challenges will only intensify in coming years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the healthcare and social assistance sector is anticipated to generate 2.1 million new jobs, or around 45% of all new projected job gains from 2022 and 2032. This growth represents an incredible opportunity, but it must be met with strategic investment and prioritization for those organizations who are competing with larger health systems for talent.
Staying adaptable and optimizing healthcare recruitment strategies is essential. To meet many of these challenges head-on, leading healthcare recruiting teams focus on specific strategies that set their organization apart. Below are six ways that your healthcare hiring team can elevate your healthcare recruitment strategies:
#1: Showcase Your Employer Brand
While building an employer brand takes time, one key element to focus on right away is your career site. It’s often the first place healthcare candidates go to learn about your organization — and first impressions matter. Leverage branded career site pages with dynamic functionality to target each unique audience, while blending seamlessly with your primary website’s look and feel.
Use engaging content like behind-the-scenes videos, employee testimonials, and visual graphics to present your healthcare organization in the best possible light. Remember, a strong employer brand is essential for attracting skilled healthcare workers and reducing turnover.
#2: Develop a Proprietary Talent Pipeline
Sourcing candidates for every open healthcare role can be overwhelming — and expensive. Instead, focus on building a proprietary talent database, so you can control — and own — your talent data.
Recruitment marketing capabilities allow you to build your own talent pool using both internal and external sources, including your existing CRM database. It can also help you identify which sources are most effective at delivering high-quality candidates.
Having a talent database at your fingertips can speed up the hiring process significantly.
With the right technology, you can create a proprietary database that centralizes candidate information, making it easier to identify and match qualified candidates to specific job openings.
Advanced search functions and filtering capabilities help refine your search and speed up candidate placement. Plus, having a comprehensive database allows for more targeted, personalized communication with potential healthcare candidates.
#3: Automate to Streamline Processes
Healthcare candidates today have high expectations for the candidate experience. That’s why scalable healthcare recruitment software, like Lever, uses automation to streamline tedious, manual tasks so you can focus on the more human elements of recruiting. Streamlining the hiring process lets you connect with skilled healthcare candidates faster, smarter, and more confidently.
Automation alleviates the most tedious aspects of the hiring process, including candidate sourcing, resume screening, interview scheduling, and sending follow-up emails. Implementing automation tools not only saves time, but also minimizes human errors and improves the candidate experience.
Here are just a few ways automation can improve the hiring experience for healthcare recruiting teams:
- Automate candidate sourcing: A comprehensive recruitment marketing platform can initiate outbound candidate searches and automatically invite qualified candidates to apply. This centralized, automated sourcing ensures a robust pipeline of candidates for every open job without relying on manual sourcing by your recruiters.
- Reach healthcare candidates where they are: In today’s world, candidates are never far from their phones. Get more out of the mobile channel with intelligent texting and automation — including a text-based application process, automated text bots to answer common questions, and more.
- Make scheduling a breeze: Scheduling interviews can be a headache, but it doesn’t have to be. With automated smart scheduling, you can easily propose interview times based on interviewer availability, automatically book the meeting when the candidate responds, and communicate schedule changes if needed.
#4: Enrich the Candidate Experience
The candidate experience plays a major role in attracting and retaining talented healthcare workers. From the first contact until the offer letter is signed — and beyond — the candidate experience can be the difference between getting the hires you want and watching them slip away.
In today’s fast-paced world, that means making things as easy as possible for healthcare applicants, keeping the process moving, being responsive to candidate needs, and delivering a personalized experience through custom, relevant communications.
The right healthcare recruitment software can help you create an unforgettable candidate experience by combining ATS capabilities, intelligent messaging, and more.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Start at the beginning: You can’t improve the candidate experience until you understand it. That means mapping every step of the candidate journey to understand what great looks like. How long does each phase usually take? Where do bottlenecks usually occur? From there, you can take steps to eliminate roadblocks and simplify the process from start to finish.
- Use automation to keep things moving: Employ research shows that a lack of employer responsiveness is the top factor in a negative candidate experience in healthcare. Smart use of automation can address this problem by streamlining manual processes. Automated text bots can also be used to answer common questions — anytime, day or night.
- Keep communication open: Develop stronger relationships with healthcare candidates by delivering engaging content that will nurture them throughout the recruitment process. Automated text and email campaigns can deliver timely information about perks, benefits, onboarding, and more.
#5: Optimize the Onboarding Process
Onboarding is a key healthcare recruitment strategy that can significantly impact recruiting efforts. Implementing digital onboarding solutions, such as eLearning platforms and virtual orientations, can acclimate new hires to your organization more rapidly and efficiently. These efforts not only increase employee engagement, but also contribute to long-term retention.
If you want the best healthcare workers to stick around — especially in today’s competitive environment — a good onboarding process is critical to helping them acclimate to the company, their team, and their responsibilities.
- Make it personal: While some elements may be universal, like the benefits presentation and a welcome meeting with the new team, the overall onboarding experience should feel personalized. A robust solution lets you coordinate onboarding activities with custom workflows based on department, position, location, and more. It also gives new employees full transparency into their onboarding tasks and other value-added information about the company and culture.
- Measure your progress: In order to understand the effectiveness of your onboarding program, you need to measure it. Track employee progress through onboarding tasks. Analyze whether your company is retaining new hires and how long it takes to reach full productivity. A robust technology solution makes it possible to identify any additional training needs or added attention.
#6: Track, Analyze, and Refine
The healthcare industry is all about numbers — and that includes the hiring process. But simply collecting data isn’t enough. You need real insights from your recruiting data, and you need a way to communicate those insights to the right people quickly and easily.
A recruiting dashboard, like Lever Visual Insights, can help by giving you a high-level snapshot of your top metrics in a user-friendly visual format. From there, you can gain insights to help you refine your processes over time.
- Prioritize your metrics: For most healthcare professionals, time-to-fill and bottleneck analysis provide the most value for optimizing the recruiting process. For example, are there certain hiring managers who are consistently slow to review resumes or submit feedback? Should certain departmental roles in your health system be prioritized? Questions like these are easy to answer when you have up-to-date metrics at your fingertips.
- Customize as needed: Lots of people need insights from recruiting data, but they don’t all require the same level of detail. Recruiters need to see open requisitions, applicant counts, and hiring cycle progress — with the ability to drill into candidate profiles and resumes. Execs, on the other hand, want high-level visibility into things like time-to-fill and budget status.
By harnessing data analytics tools to monitor vital KPIs — like time to fill, cost per hire, and candidate quality — you can pinpoint areas for growth.
A data-driven approach allows you to refine your healthcare recruitment strategies, screening processes, and branding initiatives, culminating in a more robust talent acquisition strategy.
Get Started Optimizing Healthcare Recruitment
Amidst the complexities of modern healthcare recruitment, connecting with skilled workers remains paramount for growing health systems. To thrive in this competitive climate, leading healthcare teams must embrace solid healthcare recruitment strategies, enrich candidate experiences, and better convert candidates into applicants.
A scalable recruiting software platform like Lever can make all the difference in empowering healthcare recruiters to attract and engage the candidates of tomorrow. Get started today.
