COVID changed the landscape for healthcare recruiters forever. Faced with burnout, high demand, and fewer students seeking healthcare careers, the stakes have never been higher for healthcare organizations. The data backs up these students: a recent survey conducted by the American Medical Association indicates that 52% of respondents are experiencing a great deal of stress.
Candidate experience is critical to help healthcare employers stand out, land, and retain healthcare talent in 2022. Organizations that invest in creating positive and memorable experiences are poised for success. A negative candidate experience can not only hurt your ability to recruit healthcare talent now but can have a dramatic impact on your talent funnel in the long run.
Here are three reasons why healthcare candidate experience needs to be a priority for your organization right now:
A study by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this year projected that more than 275,000 additional nurses are needed from 2020 to 2030. And many healthcare employers are already short staffed. With distorted patient-to-nurse ratios and high wait times even in life-threatening situations, healthcare staffing shortage is a rapidly growing concern.
Let’s look at it from the candidates’ perspective. They’re on the job (almost) round the clock and get off their shift at odd hours. Naturally, candidates have little or no time to engage with recruiters during normal working hours. In fact, according to Sense research, 30-40% apply to jobs after working hours. As for the recruiters, it’s impossible to always be available to answer candidate questions.
That’s where a flexible candidate experience can be a differentiating factor. Recruiting automation platforms deploy AI to ensure that recruiters can engage these candidates instantly, capture their information, pre-screen them, and schedule an interview - all within a few minutes and on their mobile devices.
This year so far, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that more than 2.5 million healthcare workers have quit their jobs, making up an average of 2.5% of the healthcare workforce each month.
Let that sink in: over 2% of our nation’s healthcare workforce is quitting every month!
Retaining well-trained candidates is crucial in times of talent shortage and candidate experience plays a pivotal role. One of the ways to deliver a great candidate experience is to create personalized onboarding programs. A well-thought-out onboarding program not only sets appropriate candidate expectations but has also been proven to improve retention rates.
That said, crafting and delivering personalized onboarding journeys for hundreds of candidates is not an easy feat for already overwhelmed HR teams. So how can you deliver great onboarding experiences at scale?
Automation allows you to deploy pre-crafted messages as part of cross-channel journeys that engage your talent with the right messages at the right times. Automation can scale beyond onboarding, to personalized birthday and work anniversary wishes and much more. Little things go a long way in making employees feel valued.
With more openings than ever and stiffer competition, attracting new healthcare talent has become increasingly expensive. ATS data isn’t always updated and healthcare recruitment teams have to turn to job boards to source candidates. On average it costs about $4,000 to acquire a candidate.
But if your database is up-to-date — and your recruiters have confidence that it’s a valuable source — you can tap into a network of talent you’ve already paid for,
pre-screened, or even hired previously. However, the thousands of candidates in your database are constantly changing jobs, skills, phone numbers, and email addresses. Automation is a powerful way to keep up with such an ever-evolving talent pool and maintain an updated ATS.
The impact of automation on cost per hire is something we’ve seen firsthand. In fact, our customers have observed a 30% reduction in cost per hire.
Based on the information above, we can certainly say what healthcare candidates don’t want to experience:
❌ Long and time-consuming application forms
❌ Interview calls during working hours
❌ Inconvenient modes of communication
While we have an idea of the things that healthcare candidates won't tolerate in candidate experiences, it may be challenging to strategize and implement the processes that deliver a strong candidate experience.
We'll dig into this in more detail in a future post, but here are three quick-hit tips that can help:
✅ Automate screening and interview scheduling for qualified candidates
✅ Reach more candidates through 1:1 texts and custom broadcasts
✅ Keep your ATS database updated with the latest candidate information
Whether you are hiring pharmacists, nurses, or healthcare technicians, delivering a personalized experience that shows how much you value people is critical. Sense empowers healthcare businesses to deliver a white-glove experience — while accelerating hiring, boosting efficiency, and reducing costs.
In fact, one of our healthcare customers recently 7x’ed their new hires by leveraging recruiting automation. Want to give Sense a spin? Get in touch with us!
