In recent times, technological demands continue to impact the healthcare industry with rapidly changing mobile technology, health applications and requirements to record all electronic data. The industry is shifting towards a candidate-centric economy. The employment rate, in this growing healthcare industry, is projected to grow up to 19% till 2024 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, much faster than the average for all occupations, adding about 2.3 million new jobs. For recruiters, recruiting healthcare staff is a grueling task, as the staff should have the ability to follow and implement safe and ethical practices with the highest level of technical competency. The problems of team building and culture fit are still on the rise. Human Resource managers face many challenges. Some of these challenges are:

1) Scarcity of Workforce - 

The first and foremost challenge faced by the healthcare industry is a lack of talent. In the healthcare industry, there is a dearth of talent and skilled workforce. According to 2015 Healthcare Recruiting Trends Survey, by 2020 U.S. will face a serious shortage of both primary care and specialist physicians to care for an aging and growing population. This imminent crisis has spurred public and private sector health care leaders to advocate for serious and creative solutions to attract and retain the skilled workforce in the healthcare industry.

Cure – Attract more candidates so that you will have a strong talent pipeline, establish employer brand, advertise more about your company, rather than your available job position. Find potential candidates through online hiring software or any candidate sourcing websites. You may onboard foreign staff to build up your talent pipeline. Read more about tripling your talent acquisition capability.

2) The Great Debate of Education Vs Experience -

Often employers face this challenge as whom they should hire? A candidate with 15 years of experience and bachelor’s degree or a candidate with 2 years of experience and a master’s degree. A candidate with master’s degree may look like the full package, but it’s the experience that’s helpful to be successful at a position.

Cure – Especially when hiring doctors, recruiters need to look for candidates’ skills and how many years of practice he/she has done. Every job position is unique and requires a special skill set, you need to find a balance between the two. Everybody wants the academically talented candidate; however, you have to think about your job position before you hire the candidate. Read this article before you hire.

3) The Time Struggle -

Time constraint is a major challenge in the recruitment of the healthcare staff, as they are always on the clock. According to a survey conducted by healthcarepeople.com, location (72%) of the workplace is the secondary priority of healthcare staff. So how do you overcome these problems?

Cure – For recruiting doctors the first thing you have to consider is that he/she is a doctor, not a candidate. You have to respect their busy schedule. You can set up a video call interview if they don’t have time. Find places where you can meet them, places like coffee shops, gas stations etc collect their information and write it down.

4) Slow and Complicated Hiring Process-

The long and tedious process of onboarding new healthcare staff is another of the many challenges recruiters face. The steps involve pre-qualification, detailed applications, competency testing, followed by long interviews, behavior based scenarios, skills laboratory exam and background checks. The healthcare staff has to be well regulated with ethics and skills but this is a very long procedure that exhausts a candidate’s hope of getting the job.

Cure – To start with, you can hire staff that is interested in working with you; hire candidates who have right Culture-Fit. Cut down the hiring process by using online hiring solutions. This way you will save valuable time and all you have to do is just provide your job description and you will receive recommended qualified candidates, instantly. Hire team players, let them interview other candidates. Interview smartly, create a short and robust recruiting process, hire staff that is eager to learn.

5) Inability to Offer Competitive Salary-

In dynamic competitive healthcare industry the employer who offers more salary mostly wins the talent, as a result the companies who are unable to offer competitive salary misses this opportunity.

Cure– Healthcare companies that can’t offer cutthroat packages, they can offer other benefits such as career growth, flexible working hours, and a supporting work environment for candidates. If you can’t offer the candidate a high salary, offer them benefits. In today’s competitive world there are no guarantees of the employee loyalty, not even the high salary.

Final thoughts-

Recruiting a healthcare professional may sound easy on paper but in reality, it’s much more difficult. The talent pipeline is shrinking due to attrition rates reaching new heights, inability to find the right-fit candidates and inability to offer the competitive salary package. The cost of a poor hire in the healthcare industry is amiss, as poor employee behavior will affect hospitals reputation and it is also proportional to a patient’s care. In order to dominate the recruiting market in the healthcare industry, employers need to stay ahead of the competition and use creative ways to attract talent. There are multiple online recruitment tools you can try that will keep your talent pipeline enriched. Don’t wait for your next year’s budget plans to start planning on competitive talent advantage, start today. Online talent acquisition platform such as instaTalent powered by IBM Watson TM can recommend you best-fit candidates, instantly. It’s economical solution is targeted especially for the needs of the healthcare industry. instaTalent leverages the latest technologies like cognitive computing, big data analytics, taxonomies and graph algorithms to find out the best-fit candidates.