Hiring continues to be incredibly difficult for healthcare professionals. As the labor market for most healthcare jobs including nursing continues to be highly competitive. This unfortunate trend is only expected to get worse. The US is projected to lose 6.5 million professionals over the next five years. To be replaced by only 1.9 million workers. This shortage is exacerbating across the world, with nursing shortages increasing across Europe and other developed nations. This talent squeeze has reduced hiring performance to some of the lowest levels in history. In some cases, the average healthcare position receives fewer than 30 applications and takes longer to fill. To address this organizations are looking for ways to improve healthcare recruiting success.
This shortage costs hospitals and healthcare organizations substantial money, time, and effort. It also shows up in key recruiting metrics including higher agency and ad spend and significant levels of no-hire requisitions. Moreover, these shortages cost the healthcare system millions of dollars every year and may even deteriorate patient care.
As the healthcare labor market continues to be incredibly tight and we await public action to fundamentally change the tide, there is hope. Adopting 7 simple things that healthcare organizations can do to substantially improve their recruiting outcomes securing healthcare recruiting success today and well into the future.
Tip 1: Convert job descriptions to job ads
A job description isn’t a job ad. Conflating the two can be disastrous for your hiring. As we explain in The Difference Between a Job Description and a Job Posting, the language in a job description is for internal use, whereas the language used in a job post is crafted for external use. This distinction is critical as the language you use has an outsized impact on the efficiency, inclusivity, and efficacy of your hiring process.
We’ve all seen them. Job posts with more than 1,000 words that list every single duty and responsibility. Accuracy and compliance are important but brevity and clarity are critical. Job ads should describe the role, the organization, and other key things like benefits and a diversity statement. Job ads should be short, readable, inviting, and inclusive.
Using Datapeople, hiring teams can convert your internal job descriptions to external job postings within minutes. Accessible from wherever your team works, directly from the platform or within your ATS using our Datapeople Anywhere browser overlay.
Tip 2: Optimize job titles
The job post title comprises arguably the most important words in your job post. They control how the search engines index and present your job. They also dictate how potential candidates feel about their fit and interest before reading the post. So your job titles must be optimized for humans and machines.
Candidates search for positions that match their specific areas of expertise. They make clear distinctions in ways you may not anticipate; thus your titles must be specific and concise. So while there may be an increasingly complex world of medical degrees and jobs, for clarity we recommend you limit your job titles to between four and six words.
To maximize reach, avoid mistakes that can prevent search engines from displaying your ad or candidates from applying to them. These include proofreading titles to avoid typos, titles that are too long, and titles that contain locations or other non-standard information, including internal levels, that are meaningless to external candidates.
Simply put, a title can make or break your ad, which can make or break your recruiting effort. Stand out in positive ways by comparing your job post to similar jobs directly in Datapeople’s Smart Editor.
Tip 3: Calibrate (compensation) to the market
Candidates in today’s market expect to learn about compensation much earlier in their candidacy. And in many regions, you are legally required to provide it.
For tight labor markets, like Medical talent, the most successful companies go beyond calibration of and transparent sharing of pay. They focus on key motivators like sign-on bonuses and other benefits that have been proven to sway talent. Just keep in mind that the “market” for these components tends to move quickly. Stay on top of trends by embracing the wisdom within your entire hiring team. Win more talent by harnessing the potential of up-to-date job and location-specific intelligence, embedded directly into the Datapeople Smart Editor.
Tip 4: Take advantage of syndication
To source more qualified and diverse candidate pools, it’s important to not only look at your job descriptions but also how you reach candidates. This may sound obvious, but if your post isn’t seen by your target talent, it won’t matter how well-calibrated the content is to the market. Thankfully, most ATSs can make quick work of posting to multiple job boards. Just remember, if you’re in a specialized talent market such as Medical, you may need to post beyond the ATS defaults to ensure your post is seen by those you most highly prize.
If you have flexibility in location, it is best to create unique job posts for each location. While it may be tempting to open a single job with multiple locations, these less precise posts often perform significantly worse and can become a compliance nightmare due to location-specific regulations. With a single post per location, you will also be more attuned to location-specific nuances that impact your velocity and the ultimate success of your hire.
Finally, ensure you measure the impact of your efforts with near real-time insights provided by something like Datapeople Insights. Identifying effective sources, from those that are not, will save time and money.
Tip 5: Avoid compliance nightmares
There are many reasons to deploy standards. Consistency enables your hiring team to measure and improve your job posts. It also ensures that you can provide a uniform user experience to job seekers that improves your employer brand. But in industries or job locations where regulations are present, standards provide a direct means to avoid compliance nightmares. That’s why we called 2024 the year to focus on hiring compliance.
Most job posts are written by multiple writers and from multiple locations. This openness makes consistency a challenge for any hiring team. That’s especially true when individual hiring managers or recruiters edit content that should be identical across all posts, like the company description, or location-specific requirements such as the pay statement. Companies who have embraced hiring compliance, know that training and coaching alone can’t do it. Thus they’ve turned to a solution like Datapeople’s job description templates enable recruiting teams to maintain structure in the job creation process and ensure that all job post content is compliant, consistent, and on-brand.
To monitor compliance at scale across all open requisitions, the most sophisticated recruiting platforms offer accessible compliance-oriented reporting. Datapeople’s actionable Compliance Report is one of a dozen-plus powerful reports within Datapeople Insights. This report provides your teams with a real-time snapshot of requisitions that may be out of compliance and places actions to take a mere click away to reduce your risk exposure.
Tip 6: Optimize recruiting marketing strategies
In today’s recruiting landscape with its labor market tightness, competition for talent is fierce, and recruiting teams are asked to do more with less. Talent teams need to move with unprecedented speed, bring precision to the hiring process, and easily understand their recruiting data to see what’s working and what isn’t to achieve their hiring goals.
Success requires more than just asking the right questions. Most teams ask the right questions, however they are unequipped to answer due to limited data tracking and accessibility within their ATS. The most successful teams recognize the limitations of ATS-sourced data and seek out a comprehensive end-to-end workflow platform. A platform like Datapeople will fill in the gaps, making data-driven insights and smart actions an effortless part of their successful hiring processes.
Tip 7: Pay attention to key metrics
In the fast-paced and competitive world of talent acquisition, measuring and understanding the implications of your metrics can put you ahead. Whereas blindness to key metrics may place you at a significant disadvantage. With no shortage of interesting and relevant metrics, it can be easy to become overwhelmed or distracted. Narrow your focus to only those that are critical to assess performance and inform smart continuous investment in improving outcomes.
Offer acceptance rate
Offer acceptance rate, or OAR, measures how successful your team is at turning job offers into actual hires. Simply put, it’s the number of hires made divided by the total number of job offers extended.
Time to hire
Time to hire, not to be confused with the also important time to fill, is the measure of how quickly (now-hired) candidates move through your hiring funnel, from the day they apply to the day they’re officially hired. In other words, it’s the time from when someone applies to when they accept your offer.
Pass-through rate
When talking about the pass-through rate, you may be referring to the pass-through rate by stage (e.g., screening, assessment, offer) or the overall pass-through rate of your entire hiring process. Each tells you something different, and both are important for understanding how well you’re attracting, prosecuting, and treating qualified candidates.
Pass-through rate by demographic
Pass-through rate by demographic is the rate at which candidates from a specific background move through the hiring process. It’s determined using the same calculation as the general pass-through rate (advanced or hired candidates divided by total resolved candidates), but only including data from candidates of one particular population.
Job noncompliance rate
Job non-compliance rate is simply the percentage of your published jobs that don’t comply with regulations, such as pay transparency laws. The math for this one is easy – if your non-compliance rate is anything higher than 0%, your company faces both reputational and legal (and therefore financial) risk.
In addition to the point-in-time metrics, you and your teams must capture and understand how your performance is relative to your historic achievement (or lack thereof) and competitive benchmarks.
Establishing how and why performance is relatively stronger, or weaker, will provide a blueprint to perpetuate or prosecute deviations.
Healthcare recruiting success with Datapeople
Mental Health Partners (MHP) is a federally designated, non-profit community health center with over 400 employees and 60 years of service in Boulder, Colorado. MHP runs 20+ programs serving 21,000+ people every year across 11 locations.
MJP turned to Datapeople to improve healthcare recruiting success. Our joint plan was to improve response to recent shifts in job seeker expectations, refine employer brand messaging, increase qualified and diverse candidate pools, and improve key recruiting metrics such as time to fill and time to hire as they face unprecedented challenges in the local and national labor market.
Better job ads = better results
Senior Recruiter Jon Drogheo points to MHP’s improved job ads as the reason behind these improved recruiting metrics:
- Lower time to fill (from 30-45 days down to about 20 days)
- Lower time to hire (from 100-140 days down to about 75 days)
- A 2.5% increase in hires from underrepresented groups
- A 2% increase in both Black and Latinx applicants
- Larger qualified candidate pools
- Clearer, improved messaging in both job ads and job descriptions
- Buy-in from leadership, thanks to the ability to show data impact
With Datapeople, I could show that our past job ads didn’t connect with everyone. Consequently, we hired candidates who looked like the people who wrote those job ads. Now we have the data to show that we’re moving the needle towards being more inclusive.
Jon Drogheo, Senior Recruiter @ Mental Health Partners
Improved candidate experience
Jon and the others at MHP are working hard to show job seekers who Mental Health Partners is and the culture the organization lives by. That effort starts with the job ad at the top of the hiring funnel, and Datapeople is helping them active healthcare recruiting success.
As a matter of practice, Jon asks candidates during phone screens why they applied. These days (i.e., since implementing Datapeople), many say “the job spoke to me” or “this is who I am, what I’m looking for” and similar sentiments. That’s what healthcare recruiting success looks like!
Datapeople as a champion for healthcare recruiting success
In addition to our partnership with Mental Health Partners, Datapeople is honored to support many other healthcare leaders. In one of our long-time partners, we are proud to have supported a comprehensive transformation of their recruiting process and outcome achievement.
- Better job ads! 720% increase in high-scoring jobs in Datapeople
- An engaged team! 32K+ revisions made on over 1,800 jobs in Datapeople
- More effective processes! 28% increase in Offer Acceptance Rate / 39% Decrease in Offer Stage Drop-offs
- More diverse applicant pools! 88% increase in Applications from Female Candidates
- More qualified applicants! 9.9% Increase in Inbound Hires
Learn more about our healthcare success plan by requesting a demo from one of our industry experts.