As of February 2019, the national unemployment rate is 4.0%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the healthcare sector, however, that rate is substantially lower, hovering around 2.4%.
In a tight labor market where healthcare employers must aggressively compete for qualified employees, a solid recruiting strategy can be the difference between filling key positions and falling behind in attracting top talent.
Here are five ways a recruiting strategy helps healthcare organizations stay competitive in the current business environment.
Priority Setting
Every business has labor needs, but not every open job is equally important, nor is every position equally difficult to fill. The process of developing a recruiting strategy helps a healthcare organization prioritize its labor needs and develop a realistic view of what positions will require the most effort to fill with an appropriate hire. An experienced healthcare recruiter can guide the organization through this process, making the hiring process seamless and stress-free.
Optimizing Recruiting Budget
By setting priorities, a recruiting strategy allows a healthcare organization to spend its recruiting budget in the most cost-effective manner. As a general proposition, it makes good business sense to spend more money on advertising for and interviewing candidates to fill high-priority positions over low-priority ones.
A skilled healthcare recruiter who understands the business can do most of the heavy-lifting when it comes to your recruitment strategy. Developing a recruiting strategy not only helps a healthcare organization allocate their resources to the most high priority vacancies, it also maps out creative solutions to recruiting challenges. A professional recruiter can help by eliminating duplicative efforts and planning the most efficient way to reach the target market.
Targeting Ideal Candidates
An effective recruiting strategy begins with a healthcare organization taking a page from its marketing playbook by developing an ideal job candidate “persona”. This persona possesses the combination of skills, experience, demeanor, and working style (among other traits) that would make for the “perfect” hire.
Defining the ideal candidate enables a healthcare organization to target its recruitment efforts with precision, eliminating inefficiency. Healthcare recruiters who know the ins-and-outs of the wide range of positions a healthcare organization may need to fill can guide this process objectively, easing the stress some organizations face when it comes to defining who they’d most want to hire.
Selling The Organization
A good recruiting strategy also contains what amounts to a labor-market-oriented sales plan for attracting ideal job seekers. After developing a candidate persona, a healthcare recruiter can help the organization to look inward to identify its own characteristics that might catch the eye of potential hires. This may include focusing on salaries, benefits, hours, location, or other perks of living and working in the community where the organization does business.
A healthcare recruiting strategy overseen by a skilled recruiting professional can also take negative characteristics into account and seamlessly develop a plan to mitigate them so that they do not scare away potential hires. As a bonus, a well-executed recruiting strategy overseen by an experienced recruiter can reflect well on the organization and help to convince a candidate of the organization’s desirability as an employer.
Speed and Flexibility
By making a healthcare organization’s recruiting efforts more precise, targeted, and responsive to the labor market, a recruiting strategy also promotes speed and flexibility in hiring. When recruiting efforts lack the focus of a guiding hand, an organization often ends up with a pool of generic candidates applying for a generically-defined job. Sorting through these job-seekers takes costly time and can result in haphazard decision-making.
A recruiting strategy, on the other hand, represents the organization’s best articulation of who it wants to hire, how it’s going to reach that candidate, and what it is going to say to close the deal before another organization tempts the candidate elsewhere. The time and stress saved by working with a healthcare recruiter to develop a strategy can also dramatically cut the time spent on the back-end weighing which candidate is the right “fit.”
Work With an Experienced Healthcare Recruiter To Develop A Recruiting Strategy
If your healthcare organization has positions to fill and is finding the tight labor market a challenge, ease the stress and effort by retaining the experienced healthcare recruiters at Atlantic Recruiters. Atlantic Group can help you develop a smart, cost-effective recruiting strategy to capture the top talent. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your healthcare business close the deal for your next hire.