With the ever-present staffing issues in healthcare, it’s common for healthcare facilities to struggle to find qualified professionals to fill urgent vacancies. Consider a scenario where a hospital has been forced to cancel surgeries because no qualified surgical staff can perform the procedures safely. This unfortunate scenario is all too common today, as many hospitals and surgical centers report staffing shortages that are so dire they threaten patient care.
The good news is that there are strategies to address critical staffing shortages in healthcare, and this guide will provide valuable insights on how to recruit healthcare professionals to achieve your goals. For example, improving healthcare facilities’ credentialing processes can help them tackle staffing shortages.
Azulity’s provider credentialing services can help you achieve your objective of improving your healthcare facility’s recruiting processes. With these services, you can streamline the credentialing process to quickly and easily verify the qualifications of healthcare professionals, helping you tackle those staffing issues in healthcare.
Importance of Recruiting the Right Healthcare Professionals
Impact on Patient Care Quality
Patient care is at the heart of healthcare, and the quality of care is directly linked to the caliber of professionals delivering it. By implementing robust recruitment strategies, healthcare organizations can attract highly skilled professionals, ensure a diverse workforce that reflects the patient population, and bring fresh perspectives and innovative approaches to care. When healthcare facilities prioritize recruitment, they invest in better patient outcomes and satisfaction.
Attracting Top Talent
A healthcare organization’s reputation is closely tied to its ability to attract and retain top talent. Recruitment strategies prioritizing hiring skilled and experienced professionals contribute to a positive reputation within the industry. Word-of-mouth recommendations, positive reviews, and professional accolades all play a role in attracting high-caliber candidates. A strong reputation can also make it easier to recruit for hard-to-fill positions and attract candidates from competitive markets.
Addressing Staff Shortages & Burnout
The healthcare industry is notorious for staff shortages and high burnout rates, particularly in specialized fields such as nursing, radiology, and surgical care. Effective recruitment strategies can mitigate these issues by ensuring adequate staffing levels, reducing the workload on existing staff, and introducing new team members with fresh energy and ideas.
By continuously bringing in new talent, healthcare organizations can create more balanced and sustainable work environments, increase job satisfaction, and reduce turnover. This involves anticipating future staffing needs and seeking qualified candidates before vacancies become critical. Building a pipeline of potential hires and maintaining relationships with educational institutions can help healthcare organizations avoid staffing challenges.
Flexible Staffing Solutions
In addition to traditional recruitment methods, healthcare organizations can benefit from flexible staffing solutions such as temporary staffing, part-time roles, and telehealth positions. Healthcare recruitment strategies incorporating these options can help organizations adapt to fluctuating patient volumes and changing healthcare demands. This flexibility ensures patient care isn’t compromised during peak times or unexpected staff shortages.
Keeping Pace with Technological Advancements
Healthcare technology is advancing at breakneck speed. From AI-assisted diagnostics to telemedicine, the industry requires professionals who aren’t only medically competent and technologically savvy. Recruitment strategies should include assessing candidates’ proficiency with technology and their ability to adapt to new advancements. Furthermore, ongoing training and development programs can help existing staff stay current with the latest technological trends, ensuring the organization remains at the forefront of healthcare innovation.
Embracing Digital Recruitment Tools
As the healthcare industry continually evolves with technological advancements, recruitment strategies must keep pace. Digital recruitment tools, such as applicant tracking systems (ATS), social media platforms, and online job boards, have become integral to modern recruitment processes. These tools streamline the hiring process, making it more efficient and effective. By embracing technology, healthcare organizations can reach a wider pool of candidates and make data-driven hiring decisions.
Cost-Effectiveness & Resource Optimization
While investing in recruitment might seem costly upfront, it’s a strategy that pays dividends in the long run. Effective recruitment can reduce turnover costs, lower training expenses for new hires, and improve operational efficiency. By bringing in the right people, healthcare organizations can optimize resources and reduce the financial burden of constant hiring and training cycles.
Building a Positive Work Culture
Effective recruitment strategies build a positive work culture, which is essential for employee satisfaction and patient care. By hiring individuals who align with the organization’s values and mission, healthcare facilities can create a cohesive and supportive work environment. A positive work culture enhances employee morale and leads to better collaboration, improved patient care, and a lower turnover rate.
Adapting to Changing Healthcare Models
The healthcare industry is shifting toward value-based models, emphasizing preventive care and patient outcomes. This transition requires a workforce that’s adaptable, patient-centered, and focused on holistic health. Effective recruitment strategies help healthcare organizations identify and attract professionals who can thrive in these new care delivery models.
Meeting Regulatory & Compliance Requirements
Healthcare is a highly regulated industry with strict staffing ratios, qualifications, and continuing education requirements. Strategic recruitment ensures healthcare organizations can meet and exceed regulatory standards, maintain proper staffing levels across all departments, and ensure all staff members have the necessary credentials and qualifications. By prioritizing compliance in the recruitment process, healthcare facilities can avoid legal issues and maintain their reputation for quality and safety.
Fostering Innovation & Research
Many healthcare organizations aren’t just care providers but also research and innovation centers. Effective recruitment strategies can attract researchers and academics, professionals passionate about innovation, and individuals with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. By bringing together diverse groups of talented professionals, healthcare organizations can foster environments of continuous learning and advancement, contributing to the overall progress of medical science.
Addressing Specialized Skills Gaps
Healthcare is a field of specialization, and recruitment strategies are crucial in addressing skills gaps in niche areas. Whether it’s finding neurosurgeons for an expanding brain center or genetic counselors for a new personalized medicine program, targeted recruitment efforts ensure healthcare organizations can meet specific needs and expand their service offerings.
Preparing for Future Challenges
The healthcare landscape is constantly evolving, with new challenges emerging regularly. From global pandemics to the rise of chronic diseases, healthcare organizations need to be prepared. Strategic recruitment allows these organizations to build a workforce with diverse skill sets, create adaptable teams that can respond to crises, and develop leadership pipelines for future organizational growth. By thinking ahead in their recruitment efforts, healthcare organizations can position themselves to tackle future challenges head-on.
Related Reading
How to Recruit Healthcare Professionals in 15 Simple Steps
1. Use Azulity for Recruitment Solutions
Azulity specializes in healthcare master data management and provider credentialing services. Their expertise in implementing healthcare data solutions and credentialing across the US aids recruitment efforts considerably. Azulity’s comprehensive platform consistently synchronizes patient, provider, location, and claims data across all systems and departments. This helps organizations eliminate fragmented data systems that can derail healthcare recruitment efforts.
Key features include healthcare MDM, provider MDM, reference data management, credentialing, and provider enrollment. Azulity serves healthcare technology leaders – from CIOs and CDOs to VPs of data platforms and credentialing – helping them eliminate the costly problems of fragmented data systems. Book a call to learn more about our healthcare master data management services today!
2. Leverage Job Boards
Job boards are an excellent healthcare recruitment strategy because they allow management staff to reach a range of candidates. They can advertise their open positions on job boards and monitor how many people apply. Healthcare professionals can also see how many people click on their advertisements, which is useful as it gives them an idea about their brand awareness in the marketplace. If they have questions about applicants or potential employees, job boards allow staff to contact them directly through email or other means.
3. Offer Competitive Compensation and Benefits
Evaluate company benefits and compensation packages to ensure you offer candidates good incentives. Make updates to outdated company policies and draw attention to new benefits that will likely resonate with your audience. The company’s compensation and benefits may be the deciding factor for candidates choosing between your organization and a competitor.
Some common benefits to highlight include flexible work environments, telecommuting policies, career growth and training opportunities, debt relief, financial bonuses, and mentoring sessions. Be sure to capitalize on various types of benefits to capture a wider talent pool.
4. Offer Internships to Students
Internships introduce students to what it’s like to work on the job. They also let them see if they like the work environment and how healthcare organizations operate. Internships can also help recruitment officers identify individuals talented in areas that may not be immediately apparent when interviewing them for full-time roles.
For example, suppose they’re looking for someone with specific medical knowledge or skills but don’t have the budget to hire someone with those qualifications right away. In that case, they can offer students an internship where they receive training on those topics while they work on other projects that do not require that expertise. This way, if they do well during their internship, they can offer students a full-time position.
5. Appeal to Other Brands
Look at other medical or public healthcare branches that relate to your field when seeking qualified candidates. This allows you to widen your talent pool and attract candidates who may not have applied for your job opening. Nurses who previously avoided progressing in their career because of the challenges associated with the healthcare sector may feel more confident applying if your recruitment strategy outlines how your company intends to relieve these challenges and foster a more positive work environment. Consider targeting travel nurses or temporary nurses who may want more permanent work.
6. Develop an Employee Referral Program
The development of a referral program is a good healthcare recruitment strategy because it helps organizations keep their employees happy and attract new hires simultaneously. Employees who feel they’re treated well will more likely refer others to the organization. This means instead of spending money on advertising, they can use this money to provide bonuses and other rewards to employees. This approach also helps attract new hires because it helps them settle into their work faster as they have an ally in their new workplace.
7. Embrace Diversity and Inclusion
Recruiting healthcare professionals from diverse backgrounds is essential to increase creativity and widen your talent pipeline. A diverse workforce allows you to draw from varied perspectives and use insider information to target more diverse patient markets. Promoting diversity in the workplace also fosters a more positive work environment that focuses on collaboration between people. This commitment to inclusivity helps boost staff retention and referral hires, thereby making you spend less on recruitment strategies in the future.
8. Create a Career Page on Your Website
Creating a career page on your website is a good healthcare recruitment strategy. It helps attract and retain top talent by providing employees with the information necessary for applicants to make informed career decisions. It also allows them to see what it’s like to work at the company, which can help you attract more applicants. This is because they can look at photos of the premises to gauge an understanding of practices. Blog posts and newsletters posted regularly can also provide additional insight.
9. Assess Soft Skills
Alongside specialized knowledge and skills, healthcare professionals also require a range of soft skills to ensure they approach patients correctly. Some soft skills essential to look for during the recruitment process include: interpersonal skills, communication skills, teamwork skills, time management skills, adaptive skills, and patience.
Focusing on these skills throughout the recruitment process guarantees that you hire candidates who take a people-centered approach to their work and place a high value on helping patients. Be sure to prepare interview questions that allow candidates to demonstrate these traits. Before the interview, you can use scenario-based questions, evidence-based questions, or psychometric assessment tools.
10. Conduct Interviews Using Technology
There are several reasons why using virtual interviewing tools is a good healthcare recruitment strategy. It allows candidates to experience the new position before accepting any offer, which can help reduce turnover. Also, it saves both time and money for the hiring company as less travel is subsequently required.
Video conferencing allows interviewers to select a time that works best for them, instead of working around travel schedules at different locations. This technology also allows hiring companies to see how applicants present themselves, which helps them determine if a candidate can fit into the corporate culture.
11. Create a Behavioral Health Assessment Routine
A behavioral health assessment allows you to determine the future performance of candidates by using past behaviors or experiences as an indicator. The evaluation involves a series of questions and interviews that help you identify how candidates responded to specific situations in the past.
It provides information on a candidate’s behavioral competencies, traits, and temperament while working in a healthcare setting. Drawing conclusions based on real-life experiences is a good way to determine whether a candidate’s actions or thought process align with the company culture or vision.
12. Build Relationships with International Healthcare Professionals
Building relationships with healthcare professionals from other countries is a good healthcare recruitment strategy because it helps an organization find new talent. Recruitment officers looking for more qualified doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals should go where the best ones are.
Another reason is that it can help a hospital or clinic’s reputation internationally, leading to a better applicant pool. As these employees settle in, they can make suggestions on how to improve a medical practice by recommending lesser-known practices from different cultures and traditions.
13. Refine Your Hiring Process
It’s essential that you update your outreach methods frequently so that you can reach more candidates. Individuals are also less likely to apply for a position if they feel that the practice itself is outdated. Leverage a hiring process that allows you to use modern outreach methods, such as social media and built-in website applications.
Be sure to improve other areas of the recruitment process, too. This includes updating the questions you ask in the interview, the compensation and benefits you offer, and how you represent your brand culture throughout the various recruitment stages.
14. Start a Blog About Hiring and Interviewing Tips for Healthcare Professionals
Starting a blog about hiring and interviewing tips for healthcare professionals is a good healthcare recruitment strategy because it allows recruitment officers to connect with potential candidates in a more personal way than other methods.
Blogs are a great way for professionals to share their expertise with others and to explain the reasons behind their hiring process. When looking at an organization’s job listing it can be difficult to gauge the specifics of the role and what it’s like to work there. By reading a blog instead, applicants can get a better sense of what working there specifically involves.
15. Create a Multi-Platform Campaign
Creating a multi-platform campaign ensures you reach a wider range of qualified candidates than if you were to stick to posting on job boards or social media. This approach increases the visibility of your job offerings and makes it more likely that the right candidate sees it.
You should consider posting your recruitment opportunities on social media, the company careers page, job boards, the company newsletter, emails, and the company website.
How to Retain Healthcare Professionals
1. Start with the Right Hiring Practices
Retention begins with recruitment and the ability to identify skilled and talented individuals likely to fit well into the organization’s culture. Depending on the position, it can cost healthcare providers anywhere from US$3,000 to US$7,000 and take a few months to nearly a year to fill a vacant position. Those costs don’t factor in the toll on existing staff called on to provide interim coverage. It pays to find people who will produce at a high level and stay for the long term. AI-based HR systems can help organizations identify those people.
2. Purposeful Onboarding
Across all industries, nearly a third of new hires quit within the first six months. Top reasons include feeling neglected, overwhelmed, and underappreciated—feelings employers can head off with structured onboarding programs that give new hires the confidence to succeed out of the gate. At a minimum, onboarding must make it simple for new hires to fill out forms and get trained on systems, policies, and procedures, which is even more critical in the highly regulated healthcare industry.
A modern human capital management (HCM) system’s interactive digital assistant can help new hires through the basics. Meanwhile, healthcare organizations must apply a personal touch to help new hires quickly build lasting relationships. This includes assigning each new hire a mentor early on, organizing a tour of the premises and a team lunch on their first day, introducing new employees to colleagues and senior leaders, formally announcing each new hire and providing some fun background information in an organization-wide email, and regularly asking recent hires for feedback on early challenges and celebrating successes.
3. Scheduling Flexibility is Key
Forcing healthcare practitioners to log long hours with insufficient help is a recipe for burning them out and losing them to competitors or other professions. Some doctors, nurses, and supporting staff like a fixed, predictable schedule, but flexibility and variety in when and where they work are welcome for others. Everyone wants a healthy work-life balance. Some hospital groups offer nontraditional schedules to their practitioners and support staff, including staggered start times and overlapping shifts to help compensate for shortages.
They even allow some people to set their schedules—an option that appeals to younger professionals, those with family responsibilities, and those wanting overtime pay. Some groups have built internal staffing agencies to share practitioners across locations. Novant Health, for example, runs what it calls a “float pool” of a couple of hundred nurses who travel among the system’s 15 hospitals and 360 physician practices across the Carolinas.
A major hospital group in India allows radiology, lab, and other specialists to work remotely while creating a hybrid model for others—a model that’s also attractive to young practitioners and those with families. Here, too, technology can play a significant role. The popularity of Zoom and other video conferencing software makes it easier for practitioners and patients to discuss select health matters virtually; it’s also more cost-effective for hospitals and practices and safer for caregivers and patients when dealing with contagious illnesses. Some hospital systems are exploring putting “virtual nursing” into practice to allow remote staff to handle more of the patient admission workload.
In this model, an on-premises floor nurse can physically assess the patient, and a remote nurse can update data on allergies, medications, and medical history. Upon the patient’s discharge, the remote nurse can review orders and documentation, deliver education, and check if a pharmacy is documented. Meanwhile, AI-based workforce-planning applications can help managers predict surges in patient demand and set practitioner schedules accordingly.
Northwell Health, one of the largest health systems in New York State, used a dashboard on its cloud HCM system to help its chief nursing officers monitor patient inflows, staff recruitment, and resource requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic.
4. Build a More Engaged Workforce
When HR leaders talk about improving employee engagement, they generally focus on steps employers can take to connect with their people more personally and create a sense of loyalty. Alternatively, they talk about improving the employee experience. Strategies to foster and manage employer-employee connections include providing practitioners and support staff personalized career guidance based on their unique backgrounds and circumstances.
Healthcare employers are also conducting regular employee surveys and encouraging feedback on ways to improve the organization. They’re also connecting caregivers with mental health services—as well as with communities of their peers for advice and support—to avoid burnout. The goal is to create a culture where employees engage more regularly with their peers and management, building appreciation and a sense of belonging.
5. Stay Current on Compensation
The healthcare profession may be a higher calling for most practitioners. However, everyone still wants to be paid what they’re worth, especially given the rigors of the field and the competitive market. Provider HR organizations need to use external benchmarking data to adjust their compensation plans for medical staffers and contractors. Complicating matters for the healthcare industry is that costs of all kinds continue to rise—for systems, supplies, malpractice insurance, heating, electricity, and other goods and services. At the same time, the workforce shortage puts upward pressure on salaries and wages.
For example, the price of traveling nurse services tripled during the pandemic and remains relatively high. There’s only so much money to go around, so healthcare providers must get creative with compensating their people. Financial incentives—in addition to competitive salaries and benefits—include signing and merit bonuses, tuition reimbursements, subsidies for childcare, and student loan repayment programs. Increasingly popular are relative value unit (RVU) plans that compensate physicians, in part, based on their productivity and quality of service.
6. Hire Enough People
Ultimately, the scarcity of healthcare workers creates a vicious circle: Not having enough doctors, nurses, and other practitioners leads to overwork, stress, and burnout, causing people to leave their professions, further worsening the worker shortage. Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions. At the hospital and medical practice level, employers must form partnerships with high schools, universities, training programs, and other institutions to develop and recruit workers at different professional levels.
In the long term, a cooperative public-private sector healthcare Marshall Plan will be necessary to educate, train, and make available sufficient numbers of qualified professionals. The American Hospital Association has called on US policymakers to lift the cap on Medicare-funded physician residencies, boost support for nursing schools and faculty, and expedite visas for highly trained foreign healthcare workers, among other measures.
7. Reduce the Paperwork Burden on Care Providers
Doctors and nurses are burning out and leaving the profession because they’re overworked and frustrated with the volume of administrative tasks they perform daily. This paperwork burden has spread more widely across the industry in recent years. In 2018, 70% of physicians said they spend more than 10 hours per week on paperwork and administrative tasks, up from 57% in 2017. In 2014, only one-third of physicians spent 10 hours a week on such tasks.
Azulity specializes in healthcare master data management and provider credentialing services, bringing proven expertise in implementing healthcare data solutions and credentialing across the US. Our comprehensive platform ensures consistent patient, provider, location, and claims data synchronization across all systems and departments.
Key features include healthcare MDM, provider MDM, reference data management, credentialing, and provider enrollment. We serve healthcare technology leaders – from CIOs and CDOs to VPs of data platforms and credentialing – helping them eliminate the costly problems of fragmented data systems. Book a call to learn more about our healthcare master data management services today!
Mistakes to Avoid While Recruiting Healthcare Professionals
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Forcing a Fit
Hiring healthcare professionals can be lengthy, so understandably, you want to hurry up and make a hire when you finally get a candidate interested enough to participate in an interview. However, be careful not to force a fit when there isn’t one.
In economics, this is what’s known as the sunk cost fallacy. It describes continuing a behavior you know is not in your best interest simply because of the time, money, and resources you have already invested. If you have ever stuffed yourself to a stomach ache to “get your money’s worth” at an all-you-can-eat buffet, you have experienced the sunk cost fallacy firsthand.
The problem with the sunk cost fallacy is that the losses will only continue to get bigger the longer you pursue the behavior (even though the brain has trouble accepting this logic). In hiring, this could translate to a longer time for productivity, lower employee satisfaction rates, higher turnover, and ultimately, more significant hiring costs as you are forced to rehire after a lousy fit.
Do not overlook skills lacking or your gut telling you the culture fit is off just because a candidate has “made it this far.” Even though it may mean a longer upfront time to hire, finding the right match will ultimately cost you less and be more beneficial to your organization in the long run.
The Importance of Compelling Job Descriptions
When you are focused on growing an all-star team, writing custom job descriptions wastes precious time that could be spent building relationships with great candidates. Yet, the quality of your job listing directly affects the quality of candidates you will attract. Posting the same canned job description every time you need to hire makes it look like you need to place more value on how your employer brand is perceived.
Write more compelling job descriptions to engage more top-tier candidates. Use a tone and language consistent with your company culture. Distinguish between the qualifications that are must-haves and those that are preferred. Use active rather than passive voice.
Use outcome-based descriptions to convey what the right candidate looks like. For example, for a pharmacy technician, instead of just listing ‘communicates medication information,’ you might say ‘helps patients achieve better health by providing a more thorough understanding of their medications.’ Highlight the benefits of joining your organization and the opportunities, like advancement and other benefits, the role will present.
While you do not need to recreate every single job description from scratch, take the time to update your pre-written template with a few customizations specific to the role. This demonstrates your investment in making a positive first impression and strengthens your employer brand.
A Smooth Hiring Process Matters
Experiencing your hiring process gives candidates a glimpse of how your organization runs. If that process is disjointed, candidates may conclude that your workplace is disorganized or dysfunctional.
An effective healthcare hiring process needs to have both structure and strategy. Each phase in the process should be there for a reason and should have a clearly defined set of steps and a timeline to complete it. For example, what messages are sent after a candidate takes an action like submitting an application or completing a skills assessment? How much time passes between completing that action and starting the next step?
If you can’t easily answer such questions, creating a documented phase-by-phase breakdown of your hiring process would serve you well. This documentation ensures everyone involved in hiring is on the same page and helps the process move smoothly and efficiently. A strategic hiring process creates a positive candidate experience, making you more likely to get an accepted offer.
Why You Should Avoid Being Pushy
Recruiters often get a bad rap, and one of the biggest complaints among candidates is that they are too pushy.
When you are excited about a candidate, your first instinct might be to pursue them aggressively. You mean well, and your intent is in the right place, but this can be a significant turnoff to top candidates, some of whom are likely being pursued by several companies all at once. When you come on too strong, you risk giving the impression that the company is desperate to hire, or worse, that you are desperate for the commission that comes with a successful placement.
Avoid alienating candidates by giving the relationship space to grow organically and giving the candidate time to respond on their terms. Avoid calling them at work. For obvious reasons, most candidates want to be discreet about the fact that they are looking for a new role. Contacting them when they are on the clock at their current job is the fastest way to spook them.
The Art of Conducting Interviews
It’s hard to overstate the importance of your interviews. For many candidates, this will be the only time they have an extended conversation with a representative of your company. If the interview is uncomfortable, off-putting, or even off-topic, there’s a good chance a candidate will think twice before deciding to proceed with being considered.
Some of the most common interviewer offenses include asking vague questions, which can signal that they didn’t prepare ahead of time, lacking a firm understanding of the job, and being generally awkward (being too serious or not serious enough, for example). Position interviewers to succeed by pre-planning a list of questions tailored to each role, allowing enough time to review candidates ahead of the interview, and reviewing hiring success rates by the interviewer to identify whether anyone might benefit from additional training or practice.
The Importance of Communication
Another top candidate complaint about recruiters? They go radio silent. The other side of the coin from being too aggressive is not being communicative enough. The best healthcare talent gets snatched up quickly. The last thing you want is to lose one of your top choices because they took another offer while waiting to hear from you.
Even if your hiring funnel moves slowly, keep candidates in the loop about where things stand. Check in regularly to update them on the process and let them know that they are still in the running. Remember, this does not always have to be done via phone call; busy healthcare candidates are appreciative when you use more convenient channels like email and text messaging. If a candidate has been eliminated from the running, by all means, give them the courtesy of being informed.
Speed is Key
The healthcare field is known for bureaucracy and red tape. As a result, it’s easy to become complacent about lengthy hiring timelines and dismiss them as “just the way they are.” This is a critical error.
You’re not just competing with other employers when hiring for healthcare roles. You’re also up against widespread burnout and a critical shortage of skilled workers. There’s no time to waste: your hiring process lags every additional day, which compounds how difficult it is to hire.
So how long is too long? While the overall length of the hiring timeline is essential, and speeding it up is always a good thing, focus instead on the length of time that passes between each step in the process (this is another reason why it’s beneficial to have a cohesive hiring strategy). If two weeks pass after an interview without a candidate hearing any news, for example, there’s a considerable risk they’ll lose interest or move on to another position.
By shortening your time to hire and the window between each hiring phase, you’ll keep candidates engaged and emphasize your strong interest.
Related Reading
- Employee Retention in Healthcare
- Recruitment Challenges in Healthcare Industry
- Healthcare Data Analyst Requirements
Book a Call to Learn More About Our Provider Credentialing Services
The COVID-19 pandemic has put unprecedented strain on healthcare systems. Many of these organizations now face staffing shortages due to the burnout of existing employees and mass exits from the profession. For example, a recent survey from McKinsey found that 30% of nurses and 20% of physicians said they would likely leave their jobs within the next six months. Organizations must quickly stabilize their workforce before they lose even more employees and compromise patient care.
While recruiting can help fill open positions, it’s essential to recognize that many newly hired employees will be dissatisfied if they perceive that the organization is still in a crisis mode. Organizations must invest in retaining existing staff and rebuilding a healthy workplace culture before focusing on recruiting.