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4 Common Healthcare Recruiting Challenges You Need to Avoid

Written by: Alex Brown
Published on: Jan 10, 2022
Category:

common mistakes

As the search for healthcare talent intensifies, hiring managers and recruiters face the daunting task of replenishing open roles with fewer qualified candidates.

Here are common recruiting challenges that healthcare recruiters experience and how medical staffing pros can overcome them to fill open positions with the right candidates.

Leading Healthcare Recruiting Challenges

1. Inadequate Engagement with Passive Job Seekers

Studies have shown that 73% of potential candidates across industries are passive job seekers, while an even higher 87% are open to new job opportunities. Yet some recruiters don’t focus on these potential matches. 

Although they may not be actively exploring, candidates in this population likely have skills or experience that are perfect matches for an open position. Ignoring or inadequately recruiting these qualified candidates can extend the hiring window and may lead to poorly matched hires.

Solution: Use tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter to source passive candidates who fit your profile. Many tools allow you to filter queries by skills, experience, and so on. Then automate your outreach and stay in touch. You can also actively source candidates within the same healthcare organization who may be open to new “native” opportunities.

2. Ineffective Validation Process

The process of validating skills, work history, credentials and so forth can be a laborious task that staffing managers would prefer to avoid. And it shows in the numbers: 51% of hiring managers admit they don’t complete a full background check. 

But it takes only a single missed red flag or omission from a CV to sabotage a new hire. In some cases, the consequences to the organization can be significant – poor patient care, additional hiring and training costs, and more.

A 2017 survey of U.S. human resources managers revealed that nearly three-quarters admitted to hiring the wrong person for a job. Whether the reason is skills not matching candidates’ claims or lying about achievements, making a bad hire because of poor validation is costly.

Solution: Ensure that your candidate intake process includes documented confirmation of completed background checks, so the risk of missing any obvious issues is avoided.

3. Poor Candidate Experience

The candidate experience can be the biggest hurdle for healthcare staffers to overcome. It has been defined as “how candidates feel about your company once they experience your hiring process.” A candidate’s experience is a combination of employer branding, candidate selection (best match), and recruitment activities. If they have a bad experience, they’re less likely to accept even an attractive offer. On the other hand, a positive candidate experience improves your chances of making the hire. 

Solution: Offering a great experience is a multi-phase project starting with building a great healthcare employer brand. From there, the focus should be on making the recruitment process frictionless, supportive, and respectful. And it will always be good practice to get feedback from candidates.

4. Not Publishing to Specialty Job Boards

It’s understandable that healthcare recruiters seek a wide reach when posting job openings. Building a candidate pool requires a lot of impressions. But while generic job boards like Indeed and Monster provide broad reach, posting with a more targeted approach can yield better results. 

Industry-specific job boards will typically have close relationships with hiring organizations due to their specialized appeal. For organizations seeking highly desired candidates with harder-to-find skills, niche sites are often the preferred choice by those HCPs. And specialty sites routinely offer industry-specific career guidance not found on generic sites. 

Solution: Source your candidates through healthcare job boards, such as myHealthTalent, that target HCPs in nearly any specialty. They offer a refined outreach channel where passive and active job seekers go for healthcare-specific opportunities.