Despite the sluggish nature of our economy, the healthcare sector is one that job seekers would be wise to consider in 2013. Last year, this industry added over 300,000 jobs according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Despite the tough trends in the economy, healthcare has continued to show positive figures for the past five years. Recruiters in this industry have more flexibility because there is a continuous supply of jobs.
While healthcare gained about 1.4 million jobs over the past five years, overall there were about 4.6 million jobs lost. It’s no secret that the healthcare industry seems to be recession-proof, but that doesn’t necessarily mean recruiters have it made. With a larger workforce to deal with, recruiters must be smart about their time. The ability to wield tools and invest in technologies to streamline their process is essential in order to manage a workforce that is nearly recession-proof.
In this first of a two-part series, we will talk about healthcare technologies that recruiters need to be using in order to be as efficient as possible in one of the biggest job markets out there.
For recruiters across all industries, mobility is becoming the forefront of recruitment. No longer are job seekers content with applying for jobs on their laptops and desktops; they want to be able to access and apply for jobs on their smart phones and tablets. Text alerts are the future of recruiting, and job-seekers want to be informed when a new position becomes available the moment it becomes available. Mobility is extra important in healthcare because job hours are not your typical 9-to-5. Anything that needs to be filled out, read, or downloaded needs to be optimized for mobile.
If you know anything about Search Engine Optimization, you’ll know that it’s one of the most important tools across the board. Creating specific pages geared toward the many levels of healthcare jobs is important when you’re hiring for specific jobs with even more specific qualifications. You want to make the search process as easy as possible for job seekers, so they find you and not the other guys. When jobs are more defined, those job seekers applying will be more targeted, which will eventually decrease the amount of resumes recruiters will have to shuffle through on a daily basis.
This might seem pretty basic, but investing in an applicant tracking system (ATS) will save recruiters and sourcers an extensive amount of time. In order to maintain large candidate pools, recruiters need to be able to track, qualify, and hire best-fit candidates for each position. To avoid creating a revolving evergreen-type position, recruiters need to qualify each candidate based on the work environment and their individual qualifications. Skills testing will be discussed in Part 2, but as a follow-up for qualifying candidates, this method will help determine the best fit for a desired position. Stay tuned for a more in-depth look into How to Hire & Recruit for Healthcare in the second part of this series. In Part 2 we will take a deeper look into social integration, skills training, and assessment techniques to help create a better system for recruiting in healthcare.
2 Comments
As somebody who is constantly asked for help by the HR department when it comes to hiring somebody, I find this entire recruiting process very frustrating and time consuming. As our HR department is not something we are really proud of, as it’s mainly consisted by some old ladies that are not quite up to speed with the ways things are done these days, I’m trying to give them (and me) a helping hand with finding some new ways to recruit. Thank you for your insights!
Not proud to say this, but even though the medical industry is one of the upmost importance, our HR needs are hard to meet by most of the HR personnel. We need a proper system that can also assess skills and not only soft skills. No matter how smart you are, no HR personnel can actually assess the medical skills of a candidate. So until that happens, we are kinda between a stone and a hard place.