Recruiting healthcare talent is more difficult than ever before. Challenges are continuously arising and have resulted in healthcare becoming one of the most demanding sectors to recruit for.
However, innovative staffing firms are converting these challenges into opportunities to secure more placements and increase revenue. In our recent webinar, Sense Co-Founder Pankaj Jindal was joined by Medix Founder, President, and CEO Andrew Limouris and Medix Vice President of Healthcare Valerie Voll to discuss what it takes to overcome the common challenges healthcare recruiters face — and ultimately engage talent and land new clients.
Let’s recap the three main challenges they covered in the webinar and how Medix is facing each one head-on.
The impending healthcare talent shortage has not only been well documented. It’s already starting to come to fruition, leading to extended time to hire and increased recruiting spend for in-demand roles.
By 2025, in the U.S. alone, there will be a shortage of more than 120,000 nursing professionals and 400,000 home health aides. And already, about 200,000 nurses are retiring each year, and that trend is expected to continue over the next decade.
Making matters even more challenging is that simply replacing healthcare professionals exiting the workforce isn’t enough. An influx of new workers is needed to provide care for Baby Boomers — who are the largest generation ever and reaching an age when most will need some sort of medical care.
Medix uses powerful data to create talent profiles for specific positions, and then connects candidates with the right backgrounds to roles they can excel at.
Even more, they provide training for hard-to-fill roles so candidates with the right soft skills can acquire the necessary hard skills to become qualified. They also coach their clients to be flexible on skills that don’t necessarily indicate success, and instead encourage them to focus on the soft skills that make a bigger difference in the role.
The pandemic led to unprecedented turnover in the healthcare industry, as professionals reported high burnout, stress, and other mental health issues. Turnover peaked during last year’s Omicron wave when nearly 1.7 million healthcare professionals left their jobs, accounting for about 3% of the overall healthcare workforce each month.
This challenge has settled down a bit but still persists. As of September 2022, the RN vacancy rate at hospitals is about 17%, according to Nursing Solutions Inc. (NSI).
The team at Medix believes understanding talent profiles and culture fit goes a long way in driving retention and engagement. Focusing on candidate “fit” upfront prevents turnover by connecting employers with people who are truly passionate about their role and believe in their organization’s mission.
They also coach their clients to create a valuable workplace culture because they’ve seen firsthand in their own organization that it prevents employees from getting burnt out or leaving for new opportunities.
Candidate expectations have drastically changed over the past few years, particularly for in-demand professions like nursing, physicians, and other healthcare roles.
Sense surveyed 1,000+ candidates and found that compensation and career advancement opportunities are their top two priorities when considering a new job. Our research aligns with healthcare-specific research which shows that nursing candidates value both those factors, along with positive work conditions, mental health support, flexible scheduling, and relocation options.
Medix leverages Sense and other technology to streamline and simplify the candidate experience. They manage the end-to-end recruitment process digitally, allowing candidates to search for opportunities, submit resumes and other documents, and complete soft skills and behavioral assessments from a centralized platform. They also use Sense to drive an omnichannel communication strategy and engage candidates throughout the talent lifecycle.
By taking an intelligent approach to talent engagement, leading staffing firms like Medix connect great talent with great healthcare organizations. If you want to learn more about how your organization can turn healthcare recruiting challenges into opportunities, watch the webinar on demand.
