If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager for a health care organization, you already know the challenges of health care recruiting.
Between the high turnover rates, lack of available candidates, and long times to fill vacancies, health care recruiting is becoming an increasingly competitive sector.
If you need to ramp up your hiring efforts, it’s time to brush up on the best health care recruiting strategies. Follow these tips to stay ahead of the latest challenges of health care recruiting.
Related: Five Key Wellness Hiring Tips
How to Recruit Health care Workers
Many healthcare roles are among the fastest-growing occupations in the country, with nurse practitioners in the number four spot.
Because of this rapid growth, healthcare recruiters are facing some unique challenges and must recruit people for various types of roles, from nurses and doctors to specialists and receptionists.
- High-specialized roles (nurses, doctors, physicians, etc.) are challenging to fill because there are few people with the necessary skills and education that aren’t already working.
- Unspecialized roles (health aides, front desk staff, etc.) are also challenging to fill, even if they have a lower barrier to entry. These types of roles are abundant, providing job seekers with many options,
Whichever role you’re currently hiring for, your recruiting strategies must stand out if you want to succeed.
Invest in Automated Recruiting Software
Healthcare recruiters can use recruiting software like applicant tracking systems to automate their repetitive tasks, freeing up time to focus on other health care recruiting initiatives like outreach, sourcing, and training programs.
Automated recruiting software, along with solutions like AI chatbots, allow recruiters to automate a broad range of everyday tasks, like:
- Filter resumes
- Test and assess skills
- Schedule interviews
- Search candidates on job boards
- Candidate outreach
- Manage onboarding paperwork
Many applicant tracking systems also allow you to set up a referral system to involve your current employees in the recruitment and hiring process; this makes finding passive candidates much easier.
Assess a Candidate’s Soft Skills
Soft skills (communication, problem-solving, teamwork, etc.) are crucial in the healthcare industry. Many of the best health care professionals thrive in their roles due to having exceptional soft skills alongside their medical knowledge.
Working under pressure while maintaining effective communication and listening skills is critical—before interviewing candidates, you should prepare appropriate questions to ensure they have the traits your organization needs. Using psychometric assessment tools prior to the interview can also help before inviting them to an in-person interview.
There are two types of questions you can use to assess soft skills in potential candidates:
- Behavioral questions—You should ask candidates questions that relate to their past experiences working in healthcare, like how they handle high-pressure situations and resolve conflicts.
- Scenario questions—You should also ask them questions about how they would approach hypothetical scenarios, like when a patient gets angry about their treatment or a coworker asks them to do something they’re unsure about doing.
Related: Embracing Lifecycle Health
Post Your Job Ads on Mainstream and Niche Job Boards
Writing stronger job descriptions and posting them to the right sites is essential for health care recruiters. If your job descriptions aren’t attracting the talent you want, it might be time to take a new approach.
Use highly-targeted job descriptions that are clearly worded and highlight the best aspects of your organization to optimize your recruiting strategy and help grow your applicant pool.
In addition, there are two different places you should be posting your healthcare jobs:
- Mainstream job boards—Every recruiter knows the mainstream job boards—Indeed, LinkedIn, Careerjet, etc.—and there’s nothing wrong with posting there. In fact, you should; however, these sites should not be the only place you post your healthcare jobs.
- Niche job boards—After posting to the mainstream job boards, you also want to look into healthcare-focused sites for more targeted outreach. For example, you can post your job listings to platforms like Health eCareers, Health Career Center, Medzilla, etc.
Team up with a Professional Health care Recruiter to Find “Passive” Candidates
While job boards can be effective in attracting healthcare professionals actively looking for jobs, posts on job boards touch only the tip of the iceberg of available and qualified candidates.
Professional health care recruiters like MindBody Talent invest heavily in tools and resources to find the best qualified candidates regardless of whether they are actively looking for a job or not. Over 65% of MindBody Talent’s most successful placements are with “passive” candidates — people who are currently employed and not looking for other jobs. Job boards are not effective in finding these kinds of candidates because they don’t see the job postings.
Another reason to utilize the skills of a professional recruiter is that they invest time, energy, and ingenuity to find the best possible candidates wherever they are on their career journeys. Their detective work allows them to use their sales and marketing skills to grab the attention of active or passive candidates Even someone who loves their current job are enticed into considering opportunities to elevate their career.
In the care of Functional or Integrative Medicine, that might mean the opportunity to transition out of conventional medicine into a better path to patient health and wellness.
That’s the beauty of teaming with a professional recruiter who understands your niche of healthcare.
Offer Competitive Compensation and Benefits
Healthcare recruiting is extremely competitive—offering attractive salaries and benefits is crucial to attracting the best talent.
There are multiple ways to offer competitive salaries and benefits to your candidates. For example:
- You can use automated salary tools to calculate the median wages based on factors like job titles and geographic areas. In addition, the BLS records average salaries for various healthcare roles that you can use to gauge an appropriate compensation range.
- Next, there are the standard benefits that many healthcare organizations offer, including:
- Health, vision, life, dental, and malpractice insurance
- Retirement benefits
- Signing and retention bonuses
- Tuition reimbursement and incentives for continuing education
- Sabbaticals and PTO for education, volunteer, or research work
- Maternity and paternity leave
- Finally, there are some additional benefits that your organization might want to consider offering to attract people with high levels of experience for critical positions. These benefits include:
- Paying for relocation and setup costs
- Assistance with daycare
- Student loan forgiveness
- Assistance with spousal employment
- Low-interest home loans
Related: How We’re Fueling the Wellness Revolution
Recruit the Best Candidates for Your Health care Organization
Healthcare recruiting will only get more competitive—the demand for professionals of all skill levels continues to increase.
At MindBody Talent, we network with the best practices and practitioners in the health care field across North America so that healthcare recruiters like you can find the right candidates more easily.
No matter what roles you need to fill, we can help you find the talent who can bring the ideas, specialties, and creativity that your organization needs.
Ready to join the wellness revolution and start recruiting better candidates? Start here and reach out to our healthcare recruitment experts today.
