To say that health care has undergone some fundamental changes over the past several years would be putting it lightly. Between the stress of COVID-19 and the emergence of new remote work and remote care innovations, health care technology has evolved in leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, burnout in this field is also at an all-time high with Healthcare IT News reporting that it has risen to impact 62.8% of physicians last year.
This has driven numerous changes in health care employment, giving rise to trends that redefined health care recruitment this year—and will continue to do so throughout 2023.
Data-Driven Hiring
In 2023, data will be a cornerstone of engagement, not just in health care, but across every sector. Driven simultaneously by automation and globalization, health organizations will expand their hiring pools while also rethinking talent acquisition and onboarding. To that end, human resource professionals working in health care will leverage analytics in a few notable ways:
- Flagging and addressing bottlenecks throughout the hiring process.
- Identifying potential skill gaps within their organizations.
- Brainstorming ways to increase retention and job satisfaction.
- Empowering employees at hospitals and other care organizations to discuss their thoughts and concerns with leadership.
Putting Empathy First
It’s no secret that people are exhausted, and health care professionals most of all. The pandemic stretched our national health care system nearly to its breaking point, reports Forbes Magazine. That would be stressful enough on its own, but per The LA Times, doctors and nurses have also had to deal with irritable patients, long hours, and perpetually understaffed facilities.
Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in people leaving the health care sector in droves, with The Atlantic noting that one in five health care workers had left their job since the pandemic began. The world was already facing a physician shortage before COVID-19. Now, notes the American Medical Association, it has the potential to grow exponentially worse.
New entrants into the health care sector are well aware of these unfortunate facts. They understand that health care is currently a job seeker’s market, and none of them will waste even a second on an employer they feel doesn’t understand or care about them. Now more than ever, there needs to be a human side to health care recruitment.
In 2023, health care organizations that are capable of injecting that humanity into their hiring, onboarding, and employee management will find it far easier to attract and retain talent than those that continue operating as though it’s still business as usual—it really all comes down to communicating with your candidates, telling them what to expect and actively guiding them through the process.
The Importance of Candidate Experience
It’s not just empathy that will be necessary to the recruitment process in 2023; candidate relationship management will be every bit as critical, as health care recruitment and health care marketing have increasingly begun to overlap. Health care recruiters must therefore take a data-driven approach to talent acquisition, leveraging analytics to identify and eliminate bottlenecks throughout the entire process.
This applies not just to recruitment, but to every facet of your organization; HR must work with other departments to overhaul health care technology and workflows, or even the best recruitment and onboarding strategies won’t be enough.
“From service workers and lab technicians to paramedics, virtually every health care role is in demand, and existing teams are stressed, overworked and falling victim to burnout around the clock,” explains Tabitha Lieberman, President of EHR and Healthcare Applications at Brightwork Health IT. “While policymakers and industry leaders are working hard to attract, train and retain the talent needed to fill staffing shortfalls, recruitment can only do so much to stem the tide. If health care processes and workflows continue to make it hard for professionals to do their jobs, burned-out staff will keep walking away from the industry, and staffing’s revolving door will just keep spinning.”
Nurses, physicians, and specialists know that they are in short supply and high demand. They know that even if you don’t hire them, someone else eventually will. If your organization does not have a seamless, consistent, and streamlined candidate experience, many of them might look to other employers before even making it to your interview phase.
Make sure your hiring process only includes as many steps as absolutely necessary, and avoid overdoing it with automation during candidate screening—and again, communicate.
Building Pipelines for the Long Term
To cope with the growing dearth of qualified applicants, health care organizations have to rethink their approach to recruitment in 2023. They must look beyond their usual hiring pools and reconsider their standard hiring practices. They must expand their scope and rework their hiring requirements.
Multiple hiring pools will be a must. We advise health care organizations to seek talent from multiple sources when trying to fill a position, including, but not limited to:
- Career fairs.
- Residency programs.
- Online job boards.
- Healthcare conferences and events.
- Internal hiring.
- Headhunting agencies.
- Social media recruiting.
Tailored Messaging
Similar to how a positive candidate experience will be fully non-negotiable in 2023, tailored messaging is also a must. Healthcare recruiters must work to craft specific messages for different employee groups while also demonstrating an understanding of what each of those groups actually wants. They will need to use that understanding to devise a strong employee value proposition.
Again, most of the candidates being targeted by health care recruiting efforts in the coming years know they are in high demand. You aren’t just assessing them as an employee; they’re also assessing you as an employer, and if, as part of that assessment, they conclude that you either don’t understand them or don’t care about them, nothing else about your recruitment process matters and your efforts will ultimately fall flat.
Conclusion
The past several years have been a time of immense difficulty and intense change for the health care sector. We’ve seen a fundamental shift in the way care is delivered, while at the same time witnessing considerable disruption in health care hiring and recruitment. Even though things have stabilized somewhat in the past year, there’s the enduring concern that this might simply be the eye of the storm, which is doubtless driving down recruitment numbers.
Those candidates who have opted to continue to pursue health care careers understand that they’re in short supply and high demand. The onus is on health care organizations to prove that they are worthwhile employers, and on health care HR departments to make candidates feel appreciated, valued, and understood at every stage of the recruitment process and beyond. Above all, that’s the driving factor in each and every major trend in health care recruitment.
This will continue to be the case throughout 2023 and into the following years.
Ensure your healthcare recruitment efforts meet with success in the new year with SocialTalent’s Recruiting Training.
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