Whether you’re hiring nurses, CNAs, or in-home caregivers, finding enough quality talent to fill your open roles is tough these days. You simply can’t seem to attract the right applicants and when you do it’s tough to keep them engaged long enough to make it through your hiring process.
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. Ninety-one percent of healthcare recruiters and HR leaders said they’ve been ghosted by a candidate in the last year, according to a recent Hireology survey. And 51% said low talent supply is their number one recruiting and hiring challenge this year.
There’s a few reasons why this struggle is so widespread. First, despite unemployment reaching pre-pandemic levels, there’s still a gap between the number of open roles in the healthcare space and the number of job seekers looking to take those positions. On top of that, many healthcare workers are experiencing burnout and are taking advantage of opportunities to jump industries for lower stress work and benefits like flexibility and career growth.
However, it’s worth noting that in another Hireology survey of healthcare workers and job seekers, 62% said they are extremely loyal to the industry. This means there are opportunities to attract and hire job seekers on the market today — as long as you can meet their needs for work and the job search itself. The key is making some critical adjustments to your healthcare recruiting strategy.
How to level-up your healthcare recruiting efforts today
1. Revamp your job offerings
Job seekers in today’s market have all kinds of options for work. In fact, the number of open jobs across all industries is still about twice as high as the number of active job seekers. This means that healthcare workers may be attracted to opportunities outside of the healthcare space that might be offering coveted benefits like flexibility, career growth, better working culture, and more.
So the key to capturing these applicants is by ensuring that they can enjoy these same benefits at your organization. Revamp your policies to include benefits like schedule flexibility, paid time off, or career growth and development opportunities. In other words, give these job seekers a reason to pick you over employers in other industries that may be looking to entice burnt out healthcare workers.
But you can’t stop at revamping your jobs. You have to make sure you’re getting the word out about these added benefits — whether that’s in your job descriptions, physical advertising and signage, your career site content, or on social media.
Interested in learning more about the preferences and expectations of today’s job seekers? Check out The Great Reassessment today — a Hireology report based on a survey of more than 6,000 job seekers.
When looking to quickly fill critical positions it’s easy to focus on maximizing the amount of applicants you attract. But more often than not, driving more applicants doesn’t always mean you’ll fill your open roles with the right people faster. That’s because quantity does not equal quality. It does you no good to bring in hundreds of applicants if none of them possess the unique qualifications for caregiving roles.
The key to prioritizing quality is focusing on the sourcing channels that are most likely to drive a new hire. This requires looking at historical data to determine where you sourced most of your current employees. According to Hireology data, healthcare employers say they drive the most applicants in terms of volume from general job boards. But when it comes to quality-of-hire, employee referrals typically win out. If this is the case for you, spend your time and energy revamping your employee referral program to start driving more applicants through this channel. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should eliminate your presence on job boards, but you might want to reallocate and optimize your spend.
3. Speed up your hiring process
Most job seekers on the market today are looking to get hired fast, and chances are they’ll take the first job they’re offered. So for you, it’s important to make the necessary changes to reduce time-to-hire. For example, if a quality applicant comes through — mandate faster response times to reduce the chances of ghosting. From there, keep the process moving fast by improving your tooling and tactics. Maybe you use text messaging and automation tools to make it faster to schedule interviews and move through the hiring process steps. Or you might consider condensing your team’s interviews into one or two meetings with the candidate to ensure the process stays under two weeks.
4. Make data-driven decisions
While great recruiting and hiring will always require a human touch and great relationships, smart employers will use data to make decisions about healthcare recruiting. This means relying on gut feeling or simply doing something because that’s how it’s always been done will not generate the results you’re looking for. Your staffing software should have the ability to track what you’re doing, identify what works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments accordingly.
For example, for every source you use to drive applicants you should be tracking the number of applicants, the percentage of those applicants that convert to candidate, and the percentage that convert to an actual hire. From there you can optimize how much you spend on each channel to drive the maximum number of hires. Similarly you should be tracking your hiring process steps to identify where bottlenecks are occurring, where candidates typically drop out, and how you can make adjustments to streamline the entire workflow.
5. Streamline workflows for your team
Speaking of streamlining workflows — when your recruiting and hiring team is forced to complete manual tasks and work across multiple disparate systems not only are they going to be tempted to cut corners, but you’re going to lose out on great talent. Simply put, tedious workflows frustrate your team, slow down the process, and leave candidates feeling disengaged.
The best way to make the hiring process easy for your team (and thus, keep candidates interested in your positions) is with true applicant tracking software built for recruiting and hiring talent in today’s tough market. It may be tempting to want to consolidate vendors and use built-in applicant tracking systems within your payroll or other software provider, but these systems simply aren’t built for the needs of today’s hiring teams. The best applicant tracking systems will include everything you need to recruit and quickly hire talent and they’ll integrate seamlessly with any post-hire tool you use for onboarding, payroll, scheduling and more.
Hiring these days is tough, but it can get easier. Hireology’s intuitive healthcare staffing software is built for the unique needs of healthcare facilities and agencies looking to hire caregiver talent. See Hireology for yourself by taking a virtual tour of our platform today.
