Job hugging, or clinging for dear life to a role in a tough labor market, is an employment trend in virtually every industry but one: health care. Hospital and health care system employees face significant turnover in the next few years. Key roles such as registered nurses, physicians and surgeons are especially susceptible to departures.
The irony is the industry has no issue finding people to fill vacancies; it just can’t keep them. In fact, health care is one of the few feel-good stories this year, fueling almost half of the nation’s employment gains.
Employee retention is a hugely complex issue. There’s no single panacea. Rather, a combination of strategies, aided by artificial intelligence-powered technologies, will effectively reduce turnover and retain staff.
No organization knows that better than a big U.S.-based maker of carpeting, vinyl, wood and other flooring products.
Manufacturing? What does that have to do with health?
Health vs. manufacturing
Both industries depend on technology to manage operations and improve performance. Each vertical relies on a mix of skilled professionals, technical staff and support workers whose training and coordination directly affect quality and productivity.
Continuous training and safety practices are central in both environments because mistakes can be costly, dangerous or damaging to an employment brand.
Among the differences, health care hiring tends to be slower and more complex, driven by rigorous screening, credentialing and compliance requirements. Many roles require verification of licenses.
Manufacturing, on the other hand, is all about hiring with speed and efficiency to meet production demands. Talent pipelines are boosted through talent pools and past applicant databases, methods that prioritize filling vacancies rapidly rather than extensive credential verification.
Both sectors struggle to find new hires with job-specific skills, causing them to invest more in upskilling and internal training to bridge the gap.
I have written numerous articles outlining how health care organizations can attract fresh talent. The goal is to share best practices because learning is how organizations improve. It is worth stepping out of the industry and into manufacturing to see what a successful retention environment looks like.
Internal culture as external brand
The flooring manufacturer mentioned earlier in the article has about 20,000 employees and does $6 billion a year in revenue. The chief human resources officer is proud of the fact that the organization’s internal culture is its No. 1 external brand. “What we have culturally does speak to the marketplace,” he said.
Culture really is everything.
“I have received ample professional growth and development opportunities,” a software engineer wrote on the career site. Another employee with nearly three decades at the company lauds the people she works with and the approachability of managers. “I absolutely love my job,” she writes.
How does the organization successfully do what so many others tried and failed to do?
“We are people-centered,” the CHRO said. “We care deeply about each other.”
AI scales as the organization does
I wish everyone would feel that way about their roles, but sadly, many feel stuck at work. Just as worse, some can’t even get a foot in the door because of ancient processes and systems. Would you believe some organizations still email candidates to set up time for an interview? That sounds like something out of the 1980s.
Artificial intelligence improves employee retention by predicting who is likely to leave, identifying why and enabling more targeted, personalized actions that keep people engaged and growing in their roles. It does this through predictive analytics, sentiment analysis, automation and AI-powered career development tools.
AI helps people feel seen and supported with tailored internal communications. Personalization helps ensure employees get relevant resources, recognition or check‑ins at the right moments, which improve engagement and loyalty.
AI tools give employees career visibility and help managers see a team’s capabilities, skill gaps, and development progress to truly enable career ownership.
AI is the future and it’s here now. It’s helping one of the country’s largest children’s hospitals reshape its recruitment strategy. The massive organization needed people with specialty skills that can’t be found in just any old candidate. The hospital had to build repeatable, reliable processes, but they also had to be scalable because it’s still growing.
Hiring more recruiters to match that expansion isn’t realistic, so AI is helping fill niche roles while maintaining the human connection essential to health care recruiting. Instead of the manual drudgery of reviewing a towering pile of applications, recruiters use AI to quickly identify qualified candidates and turn them into bona fide leads.
Make everyone a job hugger
One of the advantages of being a global organization with multiple functions is the ease with which employees can move around. It’s not unusual for someone to start out in manufacturing and wind up in sales. “People do move across the organization quite a bit,” said the CHRO.
On the acquisition side, the organization has matured over the last 55 years, recruiting more people professionally than it did in its first 50 years, a sign of how much the organization is transitioning as it approaches the flooring market with a growth mindset.
The company is turning the job hugging trend into something permanent. That’s what great organizations do. They create a vibrant culture that makes people feel like they want to stay rather than have to stay.
Does your organization operate with the same intentionality?
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.
