A new year brings new budgets and new challenges. For recruitment, market conditions may make maintaining headcount and expanding staffing numbers even more difficult. As healthcare facilities look to the coming hiring cycles, resolve to make some adjustments in the way you recruit to optimize your time and efforts.
Enhance candidate experience
Attracting talent to your institution has never been more difficult. With skills and talent gaps across the healthcare industry, recruiters are challenged to tap into the best and the brightest. A poor candidate experience could be deterring top job seekers. Resolve to walk through your application process to assure every step is easy, welcoming, and promotes your facility.
Rethink prerequisites
Are existing job requirements netting results? Credentials may be non-negotiable, but are you asking for a level of experience that may be too high in today’s market? Three to five years’ experience may be your standard job description line item, but could one to three suffice? Work with your management team to make sure all the requirements you list are absolutely necessary, or consider if they’re simply reducing the candidate pool.
Boost your brand
Along with a strong, positive candidate experience, your recruitment brand speaks volumes about what it’s like to work for your institution. Boosting your employer brand may be a function of the marketing department, but tap into their expertise for help boosting your recruitment brand, as well. A good candidate experience helps, but you’ll want to go beyond making sure the application process is seamless. Work with your marketing team to find opportunities to highlight events, awards, employees, and achievements as publicly as possible.
Eye on the Internet
A negative Internet presence is almost certainly costing you candidates. Verify that any online reviews of your facility are positive, and if not, work directly through the platform to try to resolve them. Reach out to negative reviewers, and offer an opportunity to correct whatever problem they encountered. Once resolved, ask them to remove the poor review.
Leverage technology
If you’re not using platforms to prescreen talent, you’re wasting time combing through resumes to find the qualifications you need. There’s even more recruitment tech available to streamline processes and free up recruiters for more important tasks. Chatbots can answer recruitment FAQs, prescreen preliminary questions, and refer job seekers to the appropriate means to apply. Tired of playing phone tag with applicants and managers to set up interviews? Scheduling tech takes that task off your desk. Outsource background checks and credentialing verification, as well. Leveraging tech can free you to work more closely with job seekers, boosting the candidate experience.
Streamline Time to Hire
In a competitive market, time to hire could be the difference between wasting valuable time screening and interviewing candidates that someone else snatches up or putting them on your payroll. Evaluate how long it takes from the first ad placement to the first day on the job to make sure your time to hire is as efficient and fast as possible.
Over-Communicate
With so many jobs and so few job seekers, keeping an open line of communication with every promising candidate is mission-critical. Healthcare facilities, like most industries, are experiencing a new phenomenon: candidate ghosting. Applicants that no-show for interviews, do not respond to messages, miss their first day on the job, or vanish after they start are becoming more common.
One remedy may be continuous communication. Informing a candidate of your hiring timeline and keeping to it is critical. But even if there’s no news, take a few minutes to call, check in, and let the applicants know they’re still in contention and you’re rooting for them. Any relationship you build with job seekers may tip the scales in your favor when they’re juggling multiple offers.
Mine for talent
Your last opening netted several qualified candidates, but only one was selected. For your next opening, these job seekers should be at the top of the list to call. Don’t let the fact that they accepted another offer deter you; some estimates put up to one-third of new hires quitting their job within the first 90 days. If you’ve lost good candidates to another institution, there may be a chance they’re not happy with their choice and are willing to jump ship.
Past applicants who weren’t among those scheduled for an interview may have been close behind those who were. They should also be top of the pile when selecting. Some job seekers may have applied for an opening you don’t think they’re suitable for, but they could be a good fit for something else. In challenging markets, repurposing candidates can be a gold mine of talent.
In an employer market, recruitment is easy, but in today’s candidate market, an impeccable recruitment process is needed to win the war on talent. Resolve to make 2019 a year you focus your recruitment efforts smarter, not harder.
