Need to Hire Health Care Workers? Get Back to Basics

A variety of factors have shaped today’s complex and competitive health care labor market. Pandemic-related strain aside, there’s the growing demand for health care services due to the aging population. There's also the shortage of health care workers, especially registered nurses – during the pandemic alone, more than half a million RN jobs have gone vacant, according to federal jobs data.

If you want to beat your competition to the best health care talent, you need to use a combination of recruitment tactics to find, attract and keep them engaged with your company. 

Here are three ways to navigate today’s challenging labor market and make better hires: 

Don’t just post your job – sell your job.

Yes, job postings are an important part of the recruitment mix. But it’s not enough to post a job to check it off your recruitment to-do list. You need to invest the time in writing a compelling post that catches candidates’ attention and convinces them that your organization is better than the competition. 

Also, don’t forget to optimize your advertisement so that it gets ranked high in search engines – and gets noticed more quickly by candidates.  

Rely on your resume database.

All of those resumes sitting in your database come from candidates who have already expressed interest in your company, so they’re more likely to respond to a recruiter – and at a faster rate. By searching your resume database for prospective hires, you can potentially minimize sourcing costs.  

Plus, many databases offer advanced features such as Boolean and semantic search to find the right talent quickly, as well as access to public web profiles, widening your pool of relevant talent. 

Tap into your talent network.

It’s crucial to engage with your talent pool, whether or not they’re ready to apply for an open position. Because once they are ready, you don’t want them to get recruited by another organization right under your nose. That’s why talent networks provide so much value. By continuously delivering new, relevant positions to your candidate pipeline, it ups your chances of getting noticed by high-quality talent and filling your health care positions faster. 

Focus on retention.

For every travel nurse role you can eliminate, you save $152,000 annually on average. Today's employees, particularly in healthcare, value things like flex time, paid leave and other benefits that support work-life balance. Company culture is also a huge factor. Keep your current staff engaged and adequately compensated, and you'll stop the revolving door.

Consider your job board's access to candidates.

What kind of candidate audience and talent network does your job board engage with? If you're looking somewhere that caters to office jobs, you're probably missing millions of qualified health care candidates. Where you post jobs has a significant impact on your cost per hire and time to fill. And it's not just about postings — tools and resources like hiring events, Automated Job Boost and Source and Screen all take your hiring tactics the extra mile — beyond your competition.

While health care workers are especially hard to find these days, searching in new sources and shoring up your strategy will find help you find the talent you need.

Why health care candidates aren't applying.