It’s tough out there for talent acquisition teams across all industries. However, healthcare recruiters are facing particularly difficult challenges to attract and hire talent beginning with severe and persistent clinical worker shortages. In nursing alone, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be around 200,000 openings for registered nurses every year until 2030. With 55% of frontline healthcare workers experiencing extreme burnout as a direct result of the pandemic, many of them have unfortunately left the profession. Add in outdated—if not downright archaic—recruiting software, and the immense pressures hospitals, health systems and senior care providers continue to face, and it becomes immediately clear why healthcare recruiters need every advantage they can get.
We can all agree that in order to attract and hire more talent, there needs to be better talent engagement throughout the entire hiring lifecycle. Yet, when grappling with limited resources, it’s often difficult to know where to begin. There are three strategies that healthcare recruiters should focus on first as they work to modernize their function to deliver engagement and experiences that will be loved by recruiters and every type of hire.
1.) Create a dynamic, personalized career website experience.
There are many reasons why making the career website a primary focus makes sense, including the fact that it remains an ultimate candidate destination and the primary hub for communicating an organization’s employer brand. Further, research from Health eCareers confirms that most in the healthcare industry continue to lag behind in this area, with just 15% of recruiters and hiring managers indicating that they “have a comprehensive career portal where candidates can learn why they should work for the healthcare organization.”
This offers a tremendous opportunity to gain an edge over the competition by ensuring that one’s career website offers a super-personalized talent experience through automated job recommendations, unique paths for talent personas (especially clinical professionals), quality fit scores, scheduling automation and even chatbots.
2.) Build and maintain robust talent pools.
Highly engaged talent pools play an essential role in converting leads into applicants, applicants into candidates and candidates into hires through customized nurture campaigns, landing pages and targeted messages. Success is highly dependent on managing leads by a primary area of interest with the ability to further segment and target accordingly—this is especially relevant in healthcare given the specialized nature of the workforce. When you think about it, the job attributes that matter most to a pediatric nurse will differ from those of a nurse anesthetist. The right Talent CRM software should also be able to support the ability to set up pre-defined, rules-based journeys for segmented talent pool leads, whether they are new to the organization, previously considered or even silver medalists. It’s time for healthcare recruiters to eliminate worries about continually creating outreach campaigns on an ad hoc basis when there’s a few minutes to spare. Instead, let smart automation manage ongoing candidate engagement.
3.) Use AI and automation for talent matching and delivery to fuel pipelines.
The stark reality is that, for most healthcare searches, the talent pool that results from active job seekers doesn’t generate the candidate pipelines that are needed to attract and hire the best talent. As such, there is a continual need to proactively source healthcare talent to identify top candidates with a precise skill set that includes certifications, clinical expertise and specialized training.
Sourcing at this detail and volume takes up an incredible amount of a recruiter’s time—time that could be better spent engaging and nurturing candidates through high-value conversations. Artificial intelligence has made incredible inroads across all aspects of sourcing, furthering an organization’s ability to identify and capture talent—both internally and externally—to fill pipelines with in-demand talent. Healthcare recruiters can leverage AI-driven automated talent matching and delivery solutions, allowing machines to search for talent in their vast database against specific job criteria, automatically providing relevant matches while eliminating low-value task work.
An investment in enterprise recruiting technology will pay for itself.
With tight budgets, many healthcare TA teams believe that investments in the technology and tools they need to be more effective isn’t possible, but these same organizations continue to spend a significant amount of money on expensive and underperforming tactics vs. strategy. An investment in smarter and more efficient technology, particularly the tools to engage and nurture candidates while bringing efficiency to the recruiting process, will improve healthcare recruiter efficiency and effectiveness. Organizations will be able to reduce their time to fill averages and achieve additional savings through the reduction of costs associated with staff vacancies—just the sort of critical outcomes that demonstrate the value talent acquisition offers.