Healthcare recruitment has been a wild rollercoaster ride the past year.
In April 2020, over 1 million jobs in healthcare were lost. As many elective surgeries and procedures stopped, top line revenue was heavily impacted. And there was a marked decline in hospital traffic in rural areas as communities sheltered in place. Meanwhile, operating expenses increased due to the need for expensive personal protective equipment (PPE).
Healthcare recruitment ground to a halt as recruitment budgets froze because of the uncertainty of the future. Now, while in a better place than in a year ago, there are still many challenges facing recruiters in the healthcare industry.
Challenges Faced by Recruiters
Recruitment budgets were dramatically reduced in 2021, along with recruitment staff at health organizations. Recruiters are expected to be more fiscally responsible when posting jobs and looking for talent to fill their positions. Along with these financial challenges, the hiring demand and job volume is now at record highs, and the talent shortage in healthcare is greater than ever.
Factors Impacting the Talent Shortage
The Association of Medical Colleges is estimating that there could be a Physician shortage in 2025, upwards of 94,000. By 2030, the shortage will continue to grow in specialties, including emergency medicine, anesthesiology, radiology, and psychiatry.
The shortage is being cause by many factors including:
- Aging Baby Boomer population generating a greater need for care
- Aging workforce retiring and beginning succession planning
- Steady increase in chronic diseases
- Limited new graduates to fill roles
As candidates begin planning to return to work and apply for jobs, their priorities have shifted creating a new set of challenges for employers. Those priorities include relocation, remote work, flexibility, and COVID safety measures.
- Families are moving away from Metropolitan areas and healthcare professionals have the means to make those moves, in many cases with cash reserves.
- Permanent remote work is being offered by competitive employers.
Since January of 2020, there has been an increase of telemedicine jobs by 140%.
3. With flexible schedules already a top priority for millennials, and limited new graduates to fill open roles, will locum tenens continue to trend upward? The trend suggests yes, since April 2020, new locum and per diem jobs have continued to grow.
65% of candidates inquire about accommodations and flexibility for working parents.
4. For professionals providing in-person treatments, candidates are concerned about Covid-19 – 52.4% of candidates inquire about an organizations COVID-19 safety measures.
Healthcare positions take 49 days on average to fill.
Increased Time to Hire
Time to hire is a particularly important KPI (Key Performance Indicator) used by talent acquisition professionals and leaders. Time to hire is the amount of time it takes from when a position is published until it is filled. For recruiters interested in lessening time to hire, research shows one of the top suggestions is investing in an application tracking system (ATS). However, that has not been well received by physicians.
Traditionally, physicians have not liked applying through ATS’s and which is why many organizations still have a physician recruiting page, and factoring in the time it takes to manually review physician resumes increases time to hire.
In addition, there are also necessary but cumbersome background checks, verification and credential screening, GSA searches, Fraud and Abuse Control Information checks, as well as Controlled Substance abuse screenings, on top of the usual criminal and social security screenings.
How do recruiters reach more healthcare candidates?
Candidates can learn about an employer brand in minutes before applying to a job. They can find current employee reviews on Glassdoor, company vision and goals on the organization’s website, and Employee Value Proposition (EVP) in the job description.
To ensure job postings resonate with your candidate audience, you will need to make your organization:
1. Attractive
- Culture and Values
- Mission and Vision
- Perks and Benefits
- Sign-on bonus
- Employer match retirement plan
- Loan payment assistance
- On-call coverage
- Cash bonus
2. Visible
- Seen by the right people, where they spend time online
- Websites and social media
3. Authentic
- Clearly define and validate your organization (EVP)
- Stories, Blogs, videos of existing employee and their experience
Improve recruiting success when you use the YM Careers Network for attracting, branding, and authentically communicating with millions of qualified healthcare professionals about your open roles.
Recruitment Solutions
The network model delivers your jobs to relevant association career centers that you may not even know exist today. Those jobs will be seen by association members you have never reached in the past because the network system uses AI logic to distribute your jobs to the right niche audience.
Once your jobs have reached the right professionals – they can continue to circulate amongst their peers. Healthcare professionals share jobs, once viewed, happily employed professionals may share job opportunities with friends and colleagues looking for new opportunities.
When it comes to qualified candidates, you can reach over 12 million healthcare professionals through the YM Careers Network, a substantial number when you take into consideration all that associations are doing to promote jobs to their passive members and job seekers.
Associations promote jobs to members through their websites, social media, and direct emails. And as a network employer, you will have access to those additional products and offerings such as banner ads in emails, recruiting events and guides, as well as association websites for advertising your open jobs.
Strategize
In this business, success is measured by getting candidates in seats. The best way to do that is to get more open jobs in front of more people!
Partnering with a network specialist to build a calculated recruitment strategy can help your healthcare organization overcome all the unique challenges you face today.
How do they help you? Recently, the specialized YM Careers Network recruitment team recently built a strategy for an employer looking to promote diversity across the organization’s nurse leaders.
The employer and network team met for a planning session to understand the niche elements of the roles and the diverse groups they were trying to reach as well as budget and job volume. The resulting campaign was able to target both niche and diverse candidates at the same time by getting the jobs out in volume – also positioning them as an employer that champions diversity.
Automate
The network team uses technology to automate where jobs are assigned to maximize exposure, using keyword, geography, and position title to determine the most relevant job boards across our network – automatically.
By posting more of your jobs on the YM Careers Network, you get a better overall return on investment by reducing the cost per post and getting better results by leveraging the network model for more than only your hardest to fill jobs.
The YM Careers Network provides access to a variety of healthcare professionals – reaching over 30 areas in healthcare, many of which with more than 20,000 email recipients. When you think about how niche some healthcare vocations are, the ability to email thousands of these niche professionals becomes unbelievably valuable. No other career center provider can reach 65k cardiologists, 29k surgeons, or 5k oncologists, and more specialized professionals through email.
Look forward to performance reports from individual job boards, so you can see how jobs performed on each site. This will help in the future with making decisions around additional products or exploring other options with those associations.
With YM Careers Network you can simplify your payment process with consolidated invoicing on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. Increase talent acquisition efficiency with one point of contact for service, reporting, and recruitment recommendation needs.
