The Healthcare Talent Shortage: Part 3 - Tips to Succeed with Recruiting

Oct 18, 2022

Healthcare recruiters currently face a plethora of challenges: the provider shortage, tight recruitment budgets, provider retention, and lack of reliable resources While working in an ever-evolving industry, it’s helpful to regularly assess your recruiting strategy in order to set yourself up for success. With over 15 years of healthcare hiring experience, we’ve put together the top five ways you can step up your game.

1. Prioritize Your Openings

If you’re hiring for more than one position, you need to prioritize your time and effort accordingly. Which opening is costing your facility the most in terms of patient care? The answer may not be as obvious as you think.

Consider which positions have an impact on how many patients can be seen in a day. You may have openings for one family medicine physician and two RNs. It might be easy to assume you should focus on the physician opening. However, do your current physicians have enough RNs to support the current patient load? If not, another physician may not be the top priority. Ultimately, you’ll need to fill all three openings. But understanding priority based on current patient load can help you set realistic goals and work through your hiring to-do list.

2. Sell Yourself

Compare your current job description to those for other, similar facilities. Do they look really familiar? Does your competitor’s description stand out against yours? While you don’t have control over the salary, schedule, and location for each opening, you do have control over the way you talk about your company. Inline created this branding exercise to help facilities write attention-grabbing, unique job descriptions. Take a few minutes to go through it with your team.

3. Audit Your Process

Self-critique is never easy, but it’s the most effective way to improve. One of the biggest mistakes recruiters make is not communicating promptly with candidates. Look through a few of your most recent candidates. How much time passed between correspondences? Ideally, a candidate won’t go more than 24 hours without hearing a response back from you. Then, during the interview process, you should send updates every three to five days to avoid losing the candidate to another facility. Remember: candidates are in high demand everywhere. Odds are, if you want to hire them, so does someone else.

4. Use Job Staffing Companies That Make Sense for Your Needs

How do you currently use staffing companies to find providers? Recruiting firms aren’t one-size-fits-all. If you have 5+ positions to fill per year, does it make sense to pay a placement fee for every hire? On the other hand, you may not be able to pay for recruiting services before making a hire. Consider which takes precedence in your recruiting budget: overall cost or risk mitigation? Whichever applies to your search, know that you have options and should choose a staffing company accordingly.

5. Take Advantage of No-Risk Help

Many medical job recruiters already have a few staffing companies that they work with. As a result, they’re hesitant to add another to their roster. While cost can be a roadblock, there’s no reason not to work with a platform that only charges after you make a hire. In fact, Inline now offers On-Demand hiring and can begin aiding in your search within a few days.

Incorporate these tips into your recruiting strategy and you’ll soon find your process becoming more efficient and effective. To learn more about all of the ways you can find and retain more healthcare talent, click here.

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