Healthcare recruiters, listen up: There is no candidate shortage. Candidates are right there in front of you, hiding in plain sight in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Try this little trick and you’ll see how. Search for Registered Nurses in any part of the country. If there are more candidates in your ATS, ask yourself if the talent imbalance isn’t more of an operational issue and less about a talent shortfall.
Hiring comes down to candidate inventory. Yet the average time an RN spends in an ATS before being hired is almost 600 days. Nearly two years. But the time to source averages 70 days — it took more than two months just to find them, even though they’ve been there for two years. And 43% of those candidates have been in the ATS for more than 1,000 days.
This is not to imply there isn’t a talent pipeline issue. There certainly is in rural areas, but if most nurses are only working toward the top of their license 28% of the time, is the talent shortage as bad as we think, or is it an operational problem? Most likely it’s a little of both.
Not recruiting at top of license
Through daily interactions with healthcare HR teams, I learned that 33% of recruiters are doing candidate search and manual tasks, which is obviously not at the top of their license. Think about that percentage. That’s one-third of a recruiter’s day spent on activities that won’t do a single thing to push pipeline forward or help the organization hire people.
It doesn’t help job seekers either, and it’s a candidate’s market in healthcare right now. In fact, healthcare occupations are expected to grow much faster than the average for all roles from 2024 to 2034, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Nearly 2 million openings are projected each year, on average, in healthcare because of employment growth and the need to replace workers who leave the care industry.
That begs the question — are humans doing what humans should be doing?
Many health systems I talk to say no. So recruiting at top of license comes back to one thing — being a talent advisor. Why? Because candidates are horrible at applying to the correct job. It’s not their fault. They go to a career site and they’re staring down 3,000 vacancies. Most of the openings that pop up are based on keyword searches.
The catch is that people are using similar keywords in similar locations. Candidates end up applying to the same job, then recruiters disposition everybody in that pipeline and only hire one person when there should be multiple hires for multiple different jobs in that pipeline.
We’re just not matching jobs to people or people to jobs. That results in lopsided pipelines. So one job description could yield a ton of applications while the others attract none. That’s the world recruiters are living in right now. If we can use AI to do that matching, then recruiters can truly be a talent adviser.
Fix lopsided pipelines with Applied AI
ATSs are perfectly optimized to decline all but one candidate. This is a big problem if an organization’s pipeline is unbalanced. There could have been 50 people in that pipeline who should have been hired into the organization.
Being a dynamic talent advisor liberates recruiters from the daily rigamarole. Their value to the organization rises when they can guide qualified candidates who were knocked out of contention for one role or may have applied for the wrong one. This is where artificial intelligence and automation can help organizations turn a corner, boost operations and rightsize pipelines. Here is just one example of a health system using technology to directly impact patient care by hiring compassionate candidates.
Candidate quality and speed
One of the largest dialysis providers in the United States used AI to unify a fragmented process across hundreds of clinics while boosting the speed of hiring and improving the quality of candidates. Not an easy feat when the hundreds of dialysis clinics had their own hiring process.
There was no central recruiting team, no career site and no analytics. The organization was still using paper applications. It didn’t know how many jobs were even open or how many applications were coming in.
Dialysis isn’t exactly one of those medical procedures that can be put off due to insufficient staffing. It’s critical care, so hiring compassionate, top-notch caretakers — and hiring them quickly so patients get the care they deserve — supersedes everything else.
After turning to an AI-empowered hiring platform, the dialysis organization can boast of the following:
Greater Data Visibility: Key metrics previously invisible in the paper system enables the organization to measure time to hire, time to fill, number of candidates and other critical recruiting metrics.
Faster Hiring: Automated scheduling and screening tools eliminated delays by removing manual coordination. Candidates can now schedule an interview directly with the hiring manager while pre-screening basic qualifications automatically. If someone is an RN, for example, that candidate is asked “Do you have an RN license?” It’s amazing how many people answer “no.”
Improved Training: The health system continues to improve interview training and bias awareness now that it has more insight into what hiring managers are asking. Those who excel at asking great questions can mentor others.
Make it easy for people to find the right job
Employment in the healthcare industry continues to outpace other industries month after month, so the candidates are out there. The shortage may not necessarily be in an organization’s talent pipeline, but in the freedom recruiters have to be talent advisors.
Uncuff recruiters and let AI and automation help them do what they do best.
Luke Carignan
Luke Carignan helps health systems hire smarter, faster and more efficiently in his role at Phenom, a global HR technology company in greater Philadelphia. He is the co-host of “The Bo and Luke Show” and The American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration podcasts.
