Accessibility Book a Demo
How locum management software can decrease costs and plug skills gaps for the Healthcare and Legal Sectors
Article

The 6 biggest challenges healthcare recruitment faces in 2022

Tags: Recruitment Marketing, Recruitment Process, Recruitment Transformation

The global healthcare sector’s problems of escalating demand, budget pressures, and caregiver shortages existed long before COVID-19. However, the current crisis has disrupted both the nature and the timeline of industry transformation.

Deloitte say talent-related challenges are one of the four biggest threats healthcare organisations face today. That’s not only a recruitment problem – it’s also a wider issue around how we engage, retain, train, motivate, promote and reward healthcare professionals.

But recruiters do play an instrumental role – and have huge power to help the healthcare companies you support evolve. Ultimately, better recruitment powers better care outcomes – that’s what it’s all about.

Let’s dig into the six biggest challenges healthcare recruiters face today.

1 – Candidate attraction

Staff shortages have always been an enormous issue in healthcare:

Healthcare recruitment

During the pandemic, there were some positive signs for healthcare recruiters. As unemployment across hospitality plummeted and healthcare demand spiralled, new people were drawn into the sector.

Unfortunately that didn’t last. As sectors start to cautiously reopen their doors, we’re seeing a mass exodus away from healthcare again, and a return to pre-pandemic shortage levels.

In the UK, the situation is becoming even more urgent thanks to the application of a points-based immigration system to healthcare.

If healthcare recruitment can’t turn the tables, deteriorating care quality and worsening patient outcomes are on the horizon. For healthcare recruiters, then, there are major challenges around attracting workers into the sector.

2 – Retention

If attracting healthcare workers into the sector is one challenge, keeping them there is another. Healthcare turnover is notoriously high:

Even if healthcare doubles, or triples, or quadruples, successful fill rates – there’s no point pouring water into a leaky bucket. More to the point, it’s a waste of time and money – when healthcare recruiters are already short on both.

Plugging the leak must be an urgent priority for healthcare through 2022 and beyond.

And any approach must be cross-functional, not just recruitment-led. Early turnover suggests an urgent focus on onboarding is needed. But the whole picture needs examining too, to understand where turnover is worst. Everyone involved with people processes in healthcare must be asking:

  • Are we bringing the right people into the business?
  • Are we setting them up to succeed from day one?
  • Are we creating cultures where they want to stay?
  • Are we empowering them to feel fulfilled and motivated?
  • Are we providing training to allow lateral movement in-sector?
  • Are we offering enough career progression opportunity?
  • Are we safeguarding well-being, especially in the aftermath of a crisis?

3 – Rising costs

Challenging staff shortages and abysmal turnover drive-up time-to-hire and increase advertising and agency spend. Often dramatically.

Right when organisations across every sector can least afford rising costs and plummeting results, following severe global disruption. Unless healthcare companies stop haemorrhaging spend, it’s care quality that will suffer.

Healthcare recruiters, then, must urgently look for cost-efficiencies throughout the recruitment cycle. The age-old ‘do more with less’ dilemma has never been so crystallised.

One huge element of that will be reducing reliance on agencies. Both through reducing permanent staff shortfalls and moving towards in-house contractor management when using contractors makes sense.

4 – Hiring management involvement

Healthcare recruiters face compounding pressure to hire faster. Not only to meet urgent quotas, but because time-to-hire impacts candidate acceptance rates.

Hiring managers are often a major bottleneck. According to Jobvite:

  • 56% of recruiters say their biggest bottleneck is hiring managers moving candidates through hiring stages too slowly.
  • 43% of recruiters say their biggest bottleneck is hiring managers reviewing CVs too slowly.
  • 25% of recruiters say they’ve witnessed or experienced a candidate interview that took four or more hours.

That’s especially acute right now, as healthcare professionals on-the-ground battle huge pressure, increasing workloads, rising burnout and fatigue. It’s the perfect storm, where recruiters need hiring managers on-side more than ever, but hiring managers have less time (and likely inclination!).

Healthcare recruiters must urgently address this dynamic to accelerate the overall recruitment process. If recruitment is a burden for hiring managers, it simply won’t get done. And it’ll then increase the burden on recruiters, who’re under escalating pressure themselves.

Finding ways to get more from your time-strapped hiring managers is better for everyone – candidates, recruiters, hiring managers and the people they care for.

(And it’s definitely not about cajoling hiring managers to do more, which only damages relationships more long-term. Start from a position of empathy!)

5 – Black holes

Lack of data visibility is a big issue in almost every industry. But it’s extrapolating in healthcare as pressured, time-poor recruiters increasingly lose control over the recruitment process.

Most healthcare recruiters we speak to say they simply don’t have any visibility. Not only over, say, recruitment spend but over basics. Like:

  • How many roles are open, where?
  • How long have those roles been open?
  • Why have those roles stayed open?
  • How many candidates have applied?
  • Which sources do candidates come from?
  • How many candidates are we interviewing?
  • Who’s accountable for what, when?
  • Which hiring managers are doing what, when?
  • How are recruiters or teams performing?

Lack of visibility over questions like these causes confusion and time-consuming duplication of efforts. More important, it stops you identifying the efficiencies and improvements that would positively impact delivery.

You recognise the symptoms – rising recruitment costs, threatened care ratios, even CQC enforcement action – but black holes mean you can’t diagnose or cure the problem.

Healthcare recruiters need to harness data to their advantage, to move the needle on their most important outcomes.

6 – ED&I progress

For all the good intentions, recruiters in many industries have paid little more than lip service to EDI for years. It’s been hard to make EDI a priority when battling so many other priorities, many of which directly impact care outcomes.

But healthcare recruiters can’t afford to view EDI as a luxury anymore.

EDI has become a major priority for jobseekers – not only those from underrepresented groups but everyone. Glassdoor find that 67% of jobseekers consider diversity of workforce as a factor when evaluating companies and job offers.

Being seen not to take action damages employer brand and exacerbates healthcare’s already dire skills shortages. Building a fair, inclusive recruitment process also matters because it enables recruiters to tap into talent pools you might otherwise have neglected.

Healthcare recruiters face an urgent imperative to make real progress on EDI – doing your part to build a more equal, diverse and inclusive workforce.

Healthcare’s workforce challenges are a shared burden

The onus for addressing healthcare’s workforce challenges isn’t only on recruiters. Recruiters are the gatekeepers – physically responsible for placing people into roles – but you can only work with what you’re given.

Employer brand, workforce diversity, culture, purpose, colleagues, management style, workloads… these things all impact engagement, retention and ultimately feed back into recruitment.

That said, healthcare recruiters must address the six huge challenges we’ve discussed in this piece – or ultimately, quality of care will suffer.

Do these challenges align with your experiences? What’s been working for you? We’d love to hear your perspective.

Related resources

Check out these resources you may be interested in
choosing ats for shousing thumb
Article
Analytics and Reporting, Candidate Experience, EDI

Choosing an ATS for social housing recruitment: 8 factors that matter

If you’re currently researching a new ATS for social housing recruitment, here’s a good place to start. These are the 8 priorities that we reckon should top housing associations’ shopping lists, to power an effective, efficient, and sustainable hiring function.

endless agency spend thumb
Article
Candidate Experience, Employer Brand, Recruitment Marketing

Breaking the cycle of endless agency spend in social housing recruitment

Is your social housing recruitment team under pressure to reduce agency spend? But does spend keep spiralling anyway? If so, this article’s for you. Keep reading to learn which three big issues typically drive-up agency use, and how to address them.

Article
AI, Analytics and Reporting, Candidate Experience

8 signs social housing providers need better recruitment software

Outdated legacy recruitment software is a major speed restriction on most social housing providers’ hiring goals. Here are eight signs your ATS is holding you back.

Subscribe for exclusive industry insights, events and recruitment thought leadership.

It looks like you're using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser for the best experience.