5 Tips for Successful Healthcare Recruitment

Effective recruitment is essential to the success of any organization, but the healthcare sector faces distinct hiring obstacles. If you manage recruitment for hospitals, medical offices, clinics, urgent care facilities, nursing homes, surgery centers, or dental facilities, you know firsthand the complex details that contribute to a recruitment strategy that works. Capturing and nurturing candidates — who often work irregular hours — is a challenge in itself.

The process becomes even more complicated when teams need to create different approaches for recruiting high-volume, frontline clinical support staff and critical patient-facing roles that are in high demand.

Financial and staffing disruptions to the healthcare industry and significant swings in patient demand that started during the pandemic have yet to completely resolve, and the prevalent talent shortage lingers. The continuing increase in mergers and acquisitions also lead to changes in staffing needs, overlapping HR tools, process changes, and outdated HR software.

Despite these difficulties, implementing reliable strategies for attracting, finding, interviewing, and hiring healthcare professionals in this digital age can help you develop a recruitment strategy that streamlines the process for your candidates and your organization.

What's Inside:

5 Tips for Recruiting Healthcare Staff
How Can Software Help With Healthcare Recruiting?
Streamline Your Healthcare Recruitment Strategy with Phenom

5 Tips for Recruiting Healthcare Staff

With healthcare employment expected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations between now and 2032, it’s important to make creating an effective recruitment strategy a priority. Here are five helpful tips for attracting top healthcare staff:

1. Write and Post Job Ads Strategically

An effective recruitment strategy starts with creating clear, detailed job descriptions that provide accurate descriptions of each role’s responsibilities and requirements. Leveraging generative AI can help accelerate the creation of job descriptions.

Additionally, some HR technology platforms provide built-in GenAI capabilities that can automatically craft job descriptions within seconds, using the context of your organization to power it. This means you and your recruiting team can spend less time writing and crafting the perfect prompts — and more time strategically promoting the job and building relationships with best-fit candidates.

When writing and posting a compelling job description for a role in a competitive market, you also need to ensure that your job postings match what candidates are searching for so they can easily be found in search results. Search engine optimization (SEO) can help your job listings and career sites rank highly on search engines, and implementing it is easier than you might think. Here are a couple of suggestions to help you optimize your job descriptions:

Most job seekers search by job title, so keep your title straightforward and consistent with the language candidates use.
Using eye-catching or creative titles may be memorable, but it won’t add any additional benefits in search ranking or online visibility.
Watch out for abbreviations that can confuse job seekers or have lower search volumes than the full title of the role. For example, Registered Nurse instead of RN, and specify Physicians Assistant instead of PA.
Use relevant keywords, and pay attention to poor formatting and misspellings that can negatively impact how your job posting ranks.

But no matter how strong your job descriptions are, they won’t get you results without targeted placement and promotions. By getting your open positions in front of the right candidates, you can lay the groundwork for a successful campaign.

To widen your reach, consider posting your ads on healthcare-specific job boards and leveraging partnerships with educational institutions and professional organizations. These channels can connect you with motivated and qualified healthcare candidates who are actively seeking employment, increasing your likelihood of finding the ideal fit for each position. Some advanced HR tools also allow you to guide candidates to recruitment pages that streamline application processes, particularly for high-volume roles.

Promoting your jobs to potential candidates within your talent community is another essential tactic for spreading the word. The right candidate relationship management (CRM) software can be especially helpful for identifying, engaging, and communicating with the right prospects.

2. Offer Competitive Salaries and Benefits

Compensation packages are a crucial component of recruitment strategies, and candidates are looking for more than just a desirable base salary and basic health insurance. In fact, 4 out of 5 employers who offer supplemental benefits say they help with recruitment. Throughout your recruiting process, and especially in your job descriptions, consider emphasizing the benefits your organization provides — such as opportunities for career pathing and development, flexible scheduling, wellness programs, or tuition reimbursement — which can set you apart from other employers.

By conducting regular market research and staying informed about industry standards, you can determine the benefits your ideal candidates consider most important. If you use HR software that allows you to create, share, and evaluate employee surveys efficiently, consider asking your current team and employees their thoughts about the organization’s benefits package. Once you’ve collected survey data, you can use it to decide which benefits to highlight on job descriptions — or even introduce to the organization in the future.

3. Focus on Outreach to Boost Your Employer Brand

Enhancing your employer brand through proactive outreach is a powerful strategy in healthcare recruitment. Actively engaging with potential candidates allows you to familiarize them with your organization. It also enables you to nurture a talent pipeline you can access to identify suitable candidates as positions become available. A CRM can be helpful for creating and maintaining these pipelines as well.

Outreach initiatives like sending emails and/or SMS messages, hosting open houses, participating in healthcare career fairs, and maintaining an active presence on social media platforms can significantly amplify your employer brand. This continuous engagement ensures your organization remains top of mind for healthcare staff considering their next career move. Increasing your brand visibility and interacting with potential candidates also gives you the opportunity to gain insight into their backgrounds and interests before the interview process.

4. Evaluate Candidates’ Skills During the Interview Process

The interview process is your opportunity to explore a candidate’s qualifications, going beyond what’s on their resume. In healthcare recruitment, it’s essential to assess both hard skills, such as licensing, clinical competencies and technical knowledge, and soft skills like communication, critical thinking, and empathy. Incorporating scenario-based patient outcome questions and role-playing exercises can provide insights into how candidates would handle real-world situations they might encounter in their roles.

Evaluating these skills ensures you’re not hiring candidates not only for their technical ability, but also for their ability to thrive in your organization’s specific healthcare environment. While this is essential for identifying and hiring the right candidates, the evaluation process can easily become long and tedious for both your recruiting team and candidates without specialized technology.

Leveraging AI-powered tools that drive screening, assessments, job matching, and communication in the recruitment process can make it easier and more efficient to assess candidates’ skills and qualifications. Using this insight, you can engage and hire the high quality and quantity of healthcare staff you need to provide improved patient outcomes and meet organizational goals.

5. Invest in a Recruiting Platform That Offers AI and Automation Technology

Technology plays an integral role in developing, implementing, and maintaining an effective recruitment strategy. The right solution for your organization is one that’s designed to solve challenges in healthcare recruitment and aligns with your specific needs and goals. An AI-powered option that enables organizations to automate manual, time-consuming tasks is ideal because it can accommodate complex hiring processes that traditionally require an excess of critical resources — most notably, time and money.

Using technology with AI and automation like hyper-personalized career sites, conversational chatbots for instant engagement, and automated interview scheduling can streamline the application process, making it more efficient for both recruiters and candidates.

This technology can help job candidates in the medical field find jobs, ask questions, apply, answer assessments, and even schedule interviews all on any device, and at any time of the day — when it’s easiest for them. Some medical professionals this can benefit include:

Registered Nurse (RN)
Nurse Practitioner (NP)
Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA)
Physical Therapist (PT)
Respiratory Therapist (RRT)
Radiation Therapist (RTT)
Medical Assistant (MA)
Medical Laboratory Assistant (MLA)
Medical Record Technician (MRT)
Phlebotomist
Dental Assistant (DA)
Dental Hygienist (RDH/LDH)
Home-Health Aide (HHA)

These types of medical talent often work long hours and shifts outside of regular business hours, when recruiters are usually working. To capture and nurture healthcare workers 24 hours a day, you need to have always-on recruiting experience that works when recruiters are off the clock. The right solution also enables you to recruit, interview, and hire outside of your physical region so you can target healthcare talent who would be willing to move to take a new role.

AI-driven analytics can also provide valuable insights into your recruitment strategy, helping you understand what works and where improvements can be made. By automating routine tasks, your recruitment team can focus on the nuanced aspects of hiring that require a human touch, especially for roles that are critical and in high demand.

Discover the impact of AI on your recruiting efforts. Learn how AI and automation are critical elements of an effective and engaging recruitment strategy. Read the Guide

How Can Software Help With Healthcare Recruiting?

AI and automation make recruitment processes more efficient and effective by streamlining recruitment workflows, from the initial job posting to the final hiring decision. When you’re creating a healthcare recruitment strategy, look for a recruitment solution with these capabilities:

Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) tools to build, engage, and track talent pipelines
Enhance productivity with AI using features like dynamic lists, actionable insights, and fit scoring
Hyper-personalized and easy-to-customize career site that can drive your unique brand and culture and increase application rates with custom job matching
Automated screening of applicants to quickly identify the most qualified candidates
AI-driven candidate engagement tools like career site chatbots and AI scheduling tools provide a personalized experience for job seekers on multiple messaging platforms and any device
Efficient management of the recruitment pipeline, reducing time-to-hire, and improving the candidate experience
AI and automation that engages with job seekers around the clock, extending your reach beyond your traditional office hours and your local region
Optimized administrative procedures that free up recruiters, enabling them to dedicate their efforts towards more strategic dimensions of talent acquisition
Automated, personalized updates that keep candidates engaged
Advanced analytics and reporting for data-driven decision-making

Relying on advanced technology to simplify recruitment workflows can help your team improve their ability to attract, hire, and retain the best candidates. By leveraging AI and automation to secure top talent, you can help your organization optimize patient outcomes, increase growth, and boost revenue.

Streamline Your Healthcare Recruitment Strategy with Phenom

Strategic job ad placement and promotions, competitive compensation packages, outreach efforts, and skills evaluations are critical components of an effective recruitment strategy because they address the distinct challenges of recruiting in healthcare.

The importance of these factors underscores the need for a comprehensive approach to identifying and hiring candidates for healthcare roles — a process that can quickly become too complex to manage efficiently without effective resources. And this is what makes advanced AI-powered technology an essential element of a successful recruitment strategy.

Phenom for Healthcare simplifies the complexity of healthcare recruitment by harnessing the power of AI and automation. This solution is intricately designed to enhance the talent acquisition process for healthcare organizations, making it easier to attract, engage, and retain the best candidates.

By prioritizing the recruitment experience and leveraging innovative technology, Phenom helps healthcare organizations overcome common recruitment challenges and ensures they’re equipped to meet the industry’s evolving demands.

Learn more about how Phenom for Healthcare can help you optimize your healthcare recruitment strategy or request a demo to schedule your intelligent talent experience.

Bill Venteicher