Physician recruitment: How to boost candidate engagement levels

 

Candidate engagement is a measurement of how job seekers feel about the hiring process. When engagement levels are low, candidates can disappear from the recruitment pipeline and develop a negative stance toward your employer brand.

So how do physician recruiters keep their candidates engaged without exhausting all of their resources? Once recruiters pinpoint what's causing low levels of engagement, they can take steps to improve the situation. Here are a few examples of best practices:

When you don't hear back, send a follow up email

It happens all the time: recruiters send a cold email to potential candidates and only a handful ever reply. Those unresponsive candidates can seem like a waste of resources to pursue, but recruiters may want to rethink that stance.

In fact, Lever found that sending a second email to unresponsive candidates can yield 71% more responses compared with only sending one. Building a second or third email into your workflow can drastically improve candidate response rates.

Look for ways to shorten your hiring process

According to Spark Hire, 46% of job seekers lose interest in positions they've applied for when they don't hear back from recruiters within two weeks. Considering that physicians are in short supply in the U.S., two weeks is an eternity to physician job seekers. If recruiters wait too long to respond to applications, they risk losing those candidates entirely.

If you're too busy to respond to all emails in a timely manner - there are only so many hours in the day, after all - consider investing in an automated email solution. A simple message saying you're processing the candidate's application could go a long way toward keeping them active and engaged with the process.

Notify all candidates when a position is filled

When you fill a position, you should let everyone who applied for it know that the opportunity is longer available. Failure to do so could leave candidates with a negative impression of your brand. When another opportunity pops up, they may decline to apply for it. So if you want to keep candidates in the pipeline happy, you need to keep them informed.

Now that you know more about what great candidate engagement looks like, it's time to find qualified physician job seekers. Post your next open position on myHealthTalent.com to get started. Once recruiters pinpoint what’s causing low levels of engagement, they can take steps to improve the situation.