It’s tough out there for employers in the medical industry: a massive labor shortage has led to fierce competition to attract and retain good physicians, nurses, and other healthcare staff. While worker satisfaction was low before the pandemic, many doctors and nurses left due to the poor working conditions and high risks they faced during the first painful years of the Covid-19 pandemic, and there aren’t enough medical professionals in training to replace them.
Health Resources & Services Administration notes that the United States needs over 17,000 primary care physicians, and the numbers are equally dire in other specialties, particularly in dental health and mental health. California currently faces the highest shortage of healthcare workers, with over 1,300 facilities in the state reporting critical shortages that imperil patient outcomes.
It’s clear that as the leader of a medical facility, you need to utilize every possible resource at your disposal in order to find those top-notch workers who will serve your organization for years to come. These are some of the most powerful tools at your disposal to get the workers your system needs.
Specialized Job Boards
While LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, and ZipRecruiter work well for more generalized industries, they can be highly detrimental for organizations seeking specific types of employees with particular skills. Both candidates and companies need to sift through a variety of irrelevant listings or applications in order to find the right matcha, and this takes time away from essential hiring practices, such as good pre-employment assessments. For smaller firms with less extensive staff, this can reduce physician availability to patients and reduce income.
This is why healthcare job boards like Practice Match are such a vital tool: they have a large pool of applicants who work exclusively in medicine, meaning that you will receive far less irrelevant applications and are able to focus only on those who would be a good match for your organization.
Networking
Every good leader is also good at networking: it’s the way that businesses weather economic storms, particularly in the healthcare industry. This is one of your most valuable tools when finding employees, as you never know what connection will lead to an excellent physician who stays with you for years to come.
Communicate regularly with other professionals in your specialty in order to keep abreast of what is happening in their clinics; they can clue you into healthcare workers who may be relocating to your area or provide helpful advice on how to boost your own recruitment.
Don’t forget about those in adjacent professions, such as clinical research at medical institutions, who may know of promising young residents who you can hire once they achieve the proper qualifications.
Telemedicine
You can vastly expand your pool of potential candidates if you think outside of the office. If you are in a specialty well suited to telemedicine, such as psychiatry, rheumatology, or endocrinology, consider offering remote positions in order to find a greater pool of workers. There are some legal considerations, including finding specialists with an unlimited medical license, as well as HIPAA compliance, but you can rely upon academies and credentialing associations within your specialty to provide proper guidance regarding these issues.
Competitive Benefits Packages
As workers are so scarce, it’s essential that you up your recruitment game by providing an incredibly competitive benefits package that’s too good to pass up. Many firms are providing generous sign-on bonuses – sometimes as high as $25,000 – in order to attract good workers to their area. You might also consider assisting international residents with visas and licensing requirements to bring in qualified professionals from elsewhere; there are many talented healthcare workers from India and the Caribbean who are seeking better opportunities here in the United States. They may also have the benefit of being multilingual, which can help them compete in a multicultural marketplace. If this is infeasible for you, there are still other ways that you can prove that you’re a good place to work; for example, you may consider providing a generous family leave policy, relocation assistance, or student loan assistance.
Conclusion
It’s difficult to compete in today’s healthcare marketplace thanks to the large healthcare worker shortage, but there are still ways you can get an edge on other organizations seeking to hire the same physicians as you. Utilizing job boards, reaching out to others in your field, providing more flexible working arrangements, and improving your benefits package can make a huge impact on how many great workers you are able to find – and keep for the long term.
