How Recruitment Software Can Help to Fill Jobs Faster in Healthcare

A major health crisis today is sweeping the world right now. 

From Australia to Singapore, to the U.S., and beyond, healthcare sectors and businesses are struggling to recruit and retain workers. 

Burnout brought about by the ongoing pandemic environment has shaken the sector to the core. 

In the U.S., for example, the healthcare sector has lost an estimated 20 percent of its workforce, including 30 percent of nurses, according to some reports. 

Numbers-wise, nearly 1.7 million U.S. healthcare workers quit their jobs over the past 12 months, which is the equivalent to almost 3 percent of the healthcare workforce each month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A more recent survey of 1,000 healthcare professionals revealed that 28% had quit a job because of burnout.

RESOURCES: Browse through our collection of ready-to-use job description templates for the healthcare sector.

Reversing the plunge

Reversing this plunge is an urgent priority for public and private sector health industry leaders. 

Strong talent pools are required to keep hospitals and other facilities running and take on healthcare opportunities and challenges in the future. 

While the sector is embattled today, demand for nurses, physicians, administrators, support, and health tech staffers will remain high as the healthcare sector is poised to grow from strength to strength in the near and medium-term.  

Additional and prolonged care for COVID-19 patients, more support for aging populations, and advances in medical science and technology are some of the anticipated drivers of demand for diverse talents.

Addressing today’s staffing challenges

Although a brighter future beckons, medical recruiters and hiring managers are battling to find people to fill roles today. 

Shortage of talent, high turnover rates, and long time-to-fill issues are some of the pressing challenges for medical recruiters, and while the macro factors are hard to fix, recruitment technologies and resume data software can make an immediate difference. 

Faster, more efficient, and targeted recruiting processes and best practices are some of the biggest benefits delivered by new technologies, and here are five ways they can turbo-charge your hiring. 

1. Speed up time-to-hire  

If your HR team members are still manually sifting through hundreds of resumes, you need to upgrade to an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) platform as soon as possible.  

ATS solutions simplify and speed up hiring tasks to help organizations (of all sizes) find the right talent faster with innovative features. 

For example, ATS systems, through the scanning of resumes – using keyword searches, tags, and filters, to effectively sort applicants and quickly weed out under-qualified candidates. This benefit is very useful for healthcare recruitment, where many roles call for specific, defined skills and industry experience. 

2. Job posting made easy and more impactful  

ATS software simplifies the job posting and enables the advertisements to be published on multiple job boards in one click away.

Tapping data generated by ATS analytics tools, hiring teams can also find the job boards that work best. ATS solutions can identify where healthcare candidates are finding open positions – if they are coming from social media like Twitter or Facebook. For example, hiring teams can change strategies to spend more time and resources on these channels and less on others.

ATS features also help to manage candidates seamlessly and easily. Hiring funnels, for example, allow HR managers to view recruiting pipelines and hiring progress at a glance. Workflows can also be centralized and simplified including the set-up of automated messages to communicate with candidates as soon as their resumes have been received. 

3. Cut-through branding

Catching the attention of available candidates in a highly competitive market is more important than ever – you have a split second to grab their eyes to spark an interest in your company or hospital. 

As most candidates visit a company career page to learn more about an organization, your page should look great, be informative, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly. If your current page misses the mark on all of these benchmarks, Manatal offers a career page-building kit that is easy to use. 

Content-wise, career pages should list the latest job openings as well as information about your business – what you do, locations, history, vision, and work culture. Quite a few also include videos or blogs created by staff sharing what it’s like to work at your business and why it is a great place to work.

Word of mouth content like this is a terrific recruitment tool because it can be shared across social media accounts and other channels. But the content must be authentic, honest, and real – this is especially important when targeting healthcare workers who see all sides of life – the good, the bad, and everything else in between – in their daily work lives. 

READ MORE: 4 Ways to Create a Great Career Page using Recruitment ATS

READ MORE: Improve Your Recruitment System by Taking Inspiration from these 6 Amazing Career Pages

4. Deliver a great candidate experience

Potential candidates will also be attracted to companies offering the best user experience. 

So, delivering a great first step in the recruitment process is essential. First impressions matter hugely in recruitment. If your application platform is clunky, visually unappealing, and hard to use, in-demand medical sector candidates will probably not apply – they could also share their experience with friends and colleagues on social media.

ATS platforms enable you to build accessible, intuitive, and attractive application platforms that are also mobile-friendly, which is vital because most job seekers use mobile devices to find and apply for jobs. 

5. Get to know candidates better

Great soft skills are a must for health professionals, as well as the ability to listen carefully and stay calm and focused in many high-pressure situations. 

Besides scanning resumes and sorting candidates based on keywords, recruiting software also allows employers to get to know potential new employees better. 

Enrichment tools can also build candidate profiles based on their social media consumption and activity. 

Public information shared on channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others, can now be aggregated and analyzed to provide a bigger, deeper, and clearer picture of candidates.

When creating a new candidate profile using Manatal’s ATS, the solution uses AI tools to search over 20 social media platforms enabling recruiters to get to know the applicant from different perspectives.

READ MORE: How to start a staffing agency

Get a recruitment head start

Given the expected ongoing challenge to hiring the right candidates in the health sector, investing in recruitment agency software and resume data software is highly recommended for medical sector organizations and businesses. 

Robust Applicant Tracking System (ATS) platforms take care of heavy lifting hiring tasks highlighted in this blog, from tracking job orders and candidates to scanning resumes, shortlisting top candidates, hosting career pages, receiving and storing applications, and scheduling interviews, onboarding, and more. 

Manatal’s ATS platform has been adopted by all types of businesses around the world, and if you are ready to streamline your hiring processes, we invite you to sign up for a 14-day free trial and wish you good luck with your future recruitment campaigns.

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