Hiring for healthcare is tough — with projections saying the current worker shortage is not temporary. It’s here to stay for the next ten years.
You need employees with the right skills, qualifications, and experience in your practice, and finding that isn’t easy.
Even if you solve the pressing problem of where and how to find these employees, how do you reel in that talent so they choose you over your competitors?
While better pay and benefits come to mind, finding and holding on to the right talent is much more complicated. Simply put, you need:
- A repeatable system that brings in relevant talent
- Core insights to hone that system to be even better
- For recruiting to not become a full-time job for you so that you can focus on your primary profession
This article explains how to build this system and offers ten tried-and-tested recruitment strategies for healthcare hiring. Let’s get started.
10 effective healthcare hiring strategies
1. Hire more employees temporarily
While you might try to get all of it right when hiring healthcare workers for your business, you’ll only know if they’re any good when they start working for you.
Hiring temporarily is the answer here. It’s a way for both you and the hire to understand if the job (and the company) is the right fit. It’s also a great way to test the extent of their skills and what kind of work they are best suited for.
The one aspect holding you back with this tactic, however, is that you will miss out on the talent firmly looking for long-term, stable employment immediately.
2. Introduce shadow days
Which is where shadow days come in. Shadow days offer the same experience for both you and the potential hire, only for a shorter period. They get a realistic idea of the workload, and you get a fair preview of whether they’d be a long-term fit for the company.
3. Broaden your hiring sources
You need to cover more ground to increase the number of suitable applicants for your healthcare business. Increase the number of channels and methods you use to identify candidates in the following ways:
- Use industry-specific job platforms like HealthcareJobsite.com. This way, you can review applicants and view basic CVs, and the applications will be more relevant than if you’d used a more generic platform.
- Target industry-specific career fairs to attract those interested in a healthcare career. For instance, if you need many new nurses, attending a nursing career fair is a good opportunity to meet potential candidates.
- Partner with educational establishments. Kickstart internship programs and reach out to schools and colleges providing healthcare programs. Students need experience and a better understanding of the prospects a career in healthcare offers. If one of the students combines good performance with a cultural fit for your organization, hire them full-time upon graduation.
4. Publicize what working with you is like
Hiring top talent in healthcare is often about showing what makes you different from others. Share authentic, behind-the-scenes content that shows the company culture and values or presents the employees. This could involve writing blogs or showcasing more of your brand on social media. According to a survey by SHRM, 83% of healthcare businesses now do this.
Talk about how you hire, what you offer, and what the workday looks like for different employees. Given how cold and impersonal the medical world can sometimes seem, this strategy helps you gain employees and the trust of future clientele. You simply become more approachable.
5. Invest in an Applicant Tracking System
If your hiring process is disjointed, it will be difficult to give candidates a great experience or even use the insights garnered from your data to your favor.
Let’s show you how Kula ATS can help:
- The all-in-one hiring automation platform allows you to quickly post available jobs on a variety of websites by easily integrating with relevant job boards and automating job postings. Automating outsourcing is essential in the healthcare sector, where there are only so many top-tier candidates accessible.
- When candidates submit applications, Kula ATS’s resume parsing features store and go through them based on your criteria, giving you a shortlist without the manual tedium of trying to tell from one look-alike resume to the next.
- Worried about missing crucial applicant information in the chaos of it all? Trust Kula ATS and let it take care of things for you.
- Kula ATS simplifies candidate conversations with its generative AI features. It gives every outreach message and continuing conversation plenty of context without taking up your whole day.
- Engaging prospects is exhausting, and hundreds of them? Kula ATS also handles engagement messages, application confirmation, and interview intimations.
- Kula ATS offers sophisticated reporting and analytics tools that track the source of hire, time to hire, or candidate conversion rates. If you’ve had immense success with this current hiring cycle, Kula ATS helps you track vital information (like the job boards that brought in the most relevant candidates) so creating a similar formula for success is that much easier. Assess which parts of your recruitment process work best and which need additional work.
- Kula ATS can easily integrate with your HRIS to ensure the information is securely shared and your organization’s employee records are always up-to-date.
The time and money saved by Kula ATS can be spent developing other parts of your healthcare organization, including patient service and employee investment.
6. Use automation to review job applications
Because healthcare roles tend to receive many applications, going through every one of them manually can be impractical and ineffective.
Kula ATS comes with advanced search and filter functions, enabling you to look for specific skills, experiences, and qualifications pertinent to your industry. D’you want candidates with experience in pediatrics, emergency medicine, or oncology? Maybe you’re looking for certifications like BLS or ACLS, or want to look up certain state certifications. You’ll save yourself the time that it takes to do this manually by running automated searches and applying filters on Kula.
We also kick things up a notch with our one-way interviewing feature. Here’s how to make the best of it:
- Invite your candidates to submit a video interview that answers a list of questions provided to them.
- Go through them at your convenience and skip the hassle of having to schedule and show up for in-person interviews.
It’s that simple.
7. Work on your employer brand
Your brand should reflect your unique value proposition. Branded career pages and event materials point out your commitment to patient care, employee well-being, and diversity and inclusion. But curating these as a healthcare business with no writers or web designers at your beck and call is time-consuming.
Kula ATS’s out-of-box career page builder takes care of this for you. You can publish all sorts of career and event pages with our tool in a matter of days, which usually takes even full-blown marketing teams much longer.
8. Be specific but realistic in your job descriptions
Although it is important to be specific in your job descriptions and provide detailed role requirements and responsibilities, reel it in with the number of criteria your applicants have to meet.
High standards (that are not necessary to meet) can discourage potential applicants or lead to an unsuccessful hire. Always list must-have skills and qualifications in a job posting and reserve a section for the “nice-to-have” qualifications.
Tip: Use inclusive language and emphasize that all candidates will receive equal consideration for the job. Many skip out on applying because they assume a company will favor some over others.
9. Highlight the perks of working with you
In addition to competitive compensation, healthcare candidates are often attracted to organizations that offer compelling benefits and perks.
- Showcase advantages ranging from flexible scheduling and generous paid time off to professional development opportunities or student loan repayment assistance.
- In an industry known for burnout, if you offer reasonable working hours, this is a significant perk you can list.
- If your organization boasts an especially positive work culture or state-of-the-art facilities, be sure to spotlight those selling points as well.
10. Build a referral system
Most businesses introduce the idea of referrals, but how many actively work on implementing it?
Your existing employees could prove to be your most valuable source of high-quality candidate leads:
- Encourage your current employees to spread the word about open positions and recommend excellent coworkers.
- Incentivize the process by offering bonuses or other rewards for hires that come through the system you put in place.
Tip: You can manage and track the entire process more effectively by setting up a formal staffing system in Kula ATS. Gameify the system, because referring employees is not a mandatory work responsibility, and it could do with the additional push.
Simplify recruitment in healthcare with Kula ATS
Healthcare recruitment is a challenging field to navigate so you need an integrated approach of the right tools and best practices.
Diversify your sources, automate what you can, and work on your employer brand to attract the best talent in the long term.
And, at the heart of all these strategies, there is Kula ATS.
Kula ATS offers automated job posting, candidate management, and communication features in addition to filters and integrations specifically built for healthcare.
The time when proper hiring was a nice addition shoehorned into the budget is over; in the modern healthcare environment, a well-thought-out hiring strategy is critical to success.
Kula ATS will equip you with all the tools needed to navigate the challenges of hiring in healthcare and build a team that will drive your organization forward.
