Healthcare recruitment strategies offer a host of benefits to hospitals and other healthcare employers, as well as to candidates in the industry. When healthcare talent acquisition teams create and execute effective strategies, they can better control hiring costs, reduce candidate ghosting, enhance the candidate experience, and even improve hiring outcomes. Despite being crucial to success, healthcare recruitment strategies don’t often get the attention they deserve. Instead, advice on the web often centers around individual tactics and practices, without embracing the larger context of a well-designed strategy.
Based on countless conversations with our healthcare clients, here is a look at the most effective healthcare recruitment strategies that employers should consider adopting or expanding this year, in order to better compete for top talent while controlling costs and meeting hiring benchmarks.
Best Healthcare Recruitment Strategies for 2023
The best healthcare recruiting strategies that every healthcare TA leader should consider include:
- Virtual Recruiting Strategy
- Full Funnel Strategy
- One and Done Hiring Event Strategy
- High Volume Strategy
- Diversified Sourcing Strategy
Virtual Recruiting Strategy for Healthcare
Virtual recruiting tools aren’t just about hosting online job fairs. To get the best ROI, healthcare TA teams need a well-designed virtual recruiting strategy that supports every stage of the candidate journey.
Adopting a sourcing and virtual recruiting event strategy is a great way to maximize the benefits of virtual tools. This strategy works by using virtual events in a series, mixing up event types and areas of focus, and promoting your virtual hiring events on diversified job boards to expand your reach. (More on diversified sourcing below.)
Full Funnel Strategy for Healthcare Recruiting
Encouraging engagement at the top of the funnel helps improve engagement throughout all the subsequent phases of hiring. Many employers are still losing the chance to engage with talented candidates by driving job ad traffic to cold, boring application forms. And then the TA teams wonder why they’re not talking to enough great candidates. You can address this pain point head-on by offering opportunities for candidates to engage with a recruiter before they apply during a virtual event, virtual “recruiter office hours” or even with a recruiting chatbot.
Paying close attention to the middle of the funnel is where healthcare TA teams can really stand out, by providing more communication about interview feedback, candidate status, and next steps. Creating templates for communication with candidates at every stage of their journey helps save time while ensuring the candidate experience consistent and fair.
Understanding how and when to leverage technology can also help you deliver a better candidate experience throughout the journey.
One & Done Hiring Event Strategy for Healthcare
Speeding up the hiring process is a key advantage in a tight talent market—because it shows candidates you’re serious, that you value their time, and that you’re as excited about getting them to work as they are. Many of our clients are using one-and-done hiring events to move candidates more quickly through the funnel improve engagement, reduce candidate ghosting, and hire more top quality candidates. These events work by condensing the steps of the recruiting process into a week—or sometimes less. While sourcing and attraction still require some additional time, once a candidate has joined a one-and-done event, your team can screen and prequalify them, hand them off to a hiring manager for an interview, and the hiring manager can make a conditional job offer the same or next day.
High-Volume Healthcare Recruiting Strategy
Whether you’re hiring many people for the same job title or you’re overwhelmed with applicants for a small number of openings, high volume hiring has unique challenges and requirements above and beyond your typical recruiting strategy. That’s why you need a specific strategy for high volume hiring.
A successful high volume recruiting strategy for healthcare begins like you might expect: with an honest and holistic assessment of your needs, goals, and challenges. Because virtual recruiting offers boosts in speed and efficiency without sacrificing the candidate experience, it’s a perfect fit for high volume situations. Add to that the scalability and cost control benefits, and healthcare TA teams with high volume recruiting needs can’t afford to miss out on this powerful advantage.
Diversified Sourcing Strategy for Healthcare Recruiting
Recruiting in a tight talent market means employers need to use more proactive and diversified sourcing. The same five talent sources that worked pre-pandemic may not be enough now, and the more you can branch out, the better your chances at finding the right people for your open positions.
It’s common in the TA playbook to prioritize applications in the sourcing budget, but that’s a short-sighted move at this point. Healthcare employers need to source candidates to (virtual and in-person) hiring events, too. As we mentioned earlier, this shift helps create more opportunities for engagement earlier in the recruiting process—which gives recruiters a chance to talk to candidates and answer the questions that might otherwise prompt them to abandon the process.
Hosting informational virtual recruiting events is an effective way to help candidates learn about your organization and available positions, and even chat with a recruiter for a pre-screening interview. These events are great for getting candidates into your talent community so you can work on cultivating relationships.
Proven Strategies for Healthcare Recruitment
Recruiting in healthcare continues to be challenging for many hospitals and healthcare organizations. Updating your TA playbook to include a full suite of tech-enhanced recruiting strategies can quite literally change the game. With a strategic approach to healthcare recruitment, your team can maximize today’s available technology, deliver a stellar candidate experience, control costs, and hit—or even exceed—your hiring goals.
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