The healthcare worker shortage isn’t projected to be remedied any time soon.
In fact, experts estimate that there will be a shortage of 3.2 million lower-wage healthcare workers by 2026. This nursing shortage is a long-time issue that touches on every aspect of healthcare, but is critically felt at post-acute care facilities.
Registered nurses are difficult to recruit and retain, but their presence is becoming even more vital with proposed federal legislation. Certified nursing assistants are also hard to come by as more and more younger workers choose to enter professional fields other than healthcare.
Over the years, innovation has led to technology being more of an asset to healthcare workers, enabling teams to synchronize care and keep them motivated. Read on to learn more about how your post-acute care facility can harness modern technology and software to source the talent you need.
How to use technology to counter the healthcare worker shortage
There are a variety of ways that you can use technology to find — and maybe even create — the talent your facility needs during this nursing shortage. Below, we’ve outlined three ways that you can tap into the healthcare talent pool and source the workers you need.
Improve your communication methods with top talent
The ongoing nursing shortage is pushing recruiters everywhere to search for ways to speed up their hiring process — and for good reason. Hireology data revealed that 57% of healthcare job seekers accept the first job offer they receive, making it important to stay top of mind for top candidates.
Instead of hoping that your subject line catches a candidate’s attention, your facility should use SMS texting in your recruiting efforts. The same survey from earlier also found that 91% of job seekers would be able to communicate with recruiters via text if it would speed up the hiring process. With modern HR technology, the texts you send to candidates are stored in the same place as your other candidate communications so you can stay organized. Your team can now skip the rounds of phone tag trying to get the candidate on the phone when you can send a text and wait for a reply. Texts can be used throughout the hiring process to keep candidates engaged and less likely to accept offers from other facilities.
Establish communication campaigns with former employees
The healthcare worker shortage is expected to continue for quite some time, meaning that despite ongoing additions to the workforce there simply won’t be enough employees to fill every open position. To assist in easing this burden, your post-acute care facility will need to get creative when it comes to your recruiting efforts — and one of the best ways to do this is by creating campaigns to keep in contact with former employees should they want to return.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen the prevalence of boomerang employees making headlines in the hiring communities. These are employees who, after leaving one company to pursue an opportunity elsewhere, want to come back to their original employer after realizing that the grass wasn’t all that green on the other side. Let’s not forget that one of the primary motivators for this ongoing nursing shortage is due to these qualified workers leaving the healthcare industry and following opportunities in other sectors; ones that, perhaps, are not as idyllic as they thought they would be.
With automated candidate communications, you can create campaigns that will regularly send text messages and emails to previous employees to notify them of your open roles, new people policies, and other recruitment tactics. This tactic employs the use of technology to tap into a passive pipeline of talent that you already know has the skills you need while saving your hiring team’s time for other relationship building and retention driving endeavors.
Enhance recruiting productivity
In the healthcare space, technology has traditionally been used to enhance patient care rather than managing talent resources but there is ample opportunity for technology to enhance recruiting, hiring, and employee management. Modern applicant tracking systems (ATS) have introduced innovations that can streamline tedious and time consuming tasks for your hiring team so that they can focus on identifying and hiring better talent faster.
There now exists a hiring landscape where your team is able to identify top talent, assess basic competency, and arrange an interview with candidates — all before ever directly interacting with an applicant. Here’s a few ways you could automate your hiring process:
- Application submittal: Your facility automatically sends an email to candidates acknowledging that their application was successfully received with automated candidate communication, along with an invitation to take a pre-screen survey and an overview of next steps in your process
- Document collection: Instead of waiting for new hire’s first day, you can collect necessary documents ahead of time to get them caring for patients faster, give them more time for hands-on training, and bond with their new coworkers
- Interview scheduling: If an applicant passes your pre-screening protocol, then you can invite them to select the best time for an interview based on your hiring team’s synced calendars without the back and forth
That’s the first three steps of the hiring process, totally in the candidate’s hands. This practice allows your hiring team time to thoroughly review applications as they come in so they can feel confident in their hiring decisions. The healthcare worker shortage means that your post-acute care facility needs to find ways to quickly identify top talent and move them through your hiring process if you don’t want to lose them to your competitors — and automating steps can significantly cut your time to hire.
Takeaways
Great strides have been made, both in healthcare and hiring technology. As the nursing shortage continues, it will become even more important for facilities to utilize modern software to move qualified candidates quickly and efficiently through their hiring process. To learn more about how you can hire better healthcare talent faster with confidence in the Hireology platform, schedule a demo today!
