Between candidate shortages, high levels of burnout in the healthcare industry, time constraints, and increased employee turnover, hiring managers and HR teams have an increasingly difficult time keeping positions filled with quality employees at healthcare practices.
This doesn’t mean hiring in healthcare is hopeless, but it can be tricky.
To succeed, your healthcare practice must implement strategies to mitigate the most common challenges of hiring to reduce friction and build a scalable talent acquisition process.
In this guide, we’ll explore four of the most common hiring challenges the healthcare industry faces today and share actionable ways to overcome them.
Let’s dive in!
Table of contents
Key Takeaways on Healthcare Hiring Challenges
- Strategic Job Posts Attract Quality: Combat candidate shortages by crafting detailed job descriptions that include accurate titles, clear responsibilities, qualifications (including soft skills), logistics, salary and benefits, as well as employee testimonials and cultural context to provide a look into your company’s culture.
- Leverage HR Tech for Efficient Screening: Overcome manual resume sifting and time constraints by implementing an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to define candidate criteria, automate workflows, and incorporate video interviewing tools for faster, more insightful assessments of candidate communication and culture fit.
- Enable Confident, Faster Decisions: Balance speed and quality by aligning your hiring team on candidate priorities earlier in the process. Use clear evaluation criteria and leverage hiring tech like an ATS for easier collaboration, and video interviewing software to streamline your early screening processes.
- Reduce Turnover with Strong Onboarding & Support: Retention goes far beyond hiring! By implementing structured onboarding materials, setting clear expectations with new hires, offering mentorship, promoting work-life balance, celebrating wins, and exploring tools to automate workloads, you can reduce burnout and promote a more transparent and nurturing work environment.
Challenge 1: Attracting Qualified Medical Professionals
Hiring teams in healthcare often struggle to create strong applicant pools, especially for specialized roles like nurse practitioners or billing specialists.
Factors like geographic constraints, generic job descriptions, and missing job details can all cause qualified candidates to gloss over your listing among other similar job openings.
To combat some of these healthcare-specific hiring challenges, craft job posts, including job descriptions that stand out, using the following strategies:
- Write accurate job titles that avoid jargon and encompass the role’s key function at your medical practice.
- Include a list of responsibilities so the reader knows exactly what they’ll do in this role.
- Add qualifications the candidate should possess, differentiating must-have certifications or qualifications, and nice-to-have soft skills or qualifications.
- Clarify logistics such as working location, shift times, and the next steps in the application process. Candidate communication transparency should begin from the very first touchpoint.
- Discuss salary and additional benefits, such as flexible working hours, professional development, or summer Fridays. Every benefit matters!
- Feature employee testimonials, such as a video of current employees explaining why they love working with your team, or hiring managers talking about the importance of each step within your hiring experience.
- Share details about your company culture, such as your core values and your unique EVP (Employer Value Proposition), to ensure you stand out in the crowd. Here’s more on how to do this (and why it matters).
Aside from listing jobs on a careers page specifically for your medical practice, explore various job boards to find the ones that align best with your open roles; you can’t expect to hire the best candidates if the best candidates aren’t even seeing your opening.
Focus on niche healthcare job boards and professional associations, such as Health eCareers, which can help you reach targeted audiences, ensuring you find the top talent for your open positions.
Learn more about how to overcome this healthcare hiring challenge from an expert with 20+ years of talent acquisition experience working with both employers and candidates:
Challenge 2: Effective Candidate Screening
Manually sifting through resumes can eat up hours that your staff members don’t have. Worse, resumes don’t always reveal the soft skills and interpersonal qualities that matter in patient-facing roles where your people are your service offering. And interviews with your top candidates, while essential for gauging whether they’re a good fit for your practice, are also time-consuming.
So, how can you more quickly get to know your applicants, so you can narrow your screening down to the very best in the pile of eerily similar AI-generated resumes?
Invest in the right hiring tools, such as:
- An applicant tracking system that offers workflow automation, streamlined team communication, and easier candidate tracking throughout each hiring stage.
- AI features and tools that help you narrow the high volume of unqualified applicants to the best of the best, so your interviewing only candidates who actually align with your job role.
- Video interviewing software, for faster, more flexible interviewing, anywhere in the world, at any time.
An applicant tracking system (ATS) allows you to define your screening criteria for each role. For example, a practice’s billing department might look for familiarity with medical billing tools or certifications like the Certified Professional Biller (CPB) offered by the AAPC.
Your ATS can scan resumes for these keywords to ensure that candidates match your required and preferred qualifications. Plus, you can set rules to automatically flag applicants based on their qualifications or certifications.
AI in hiring is a very hot topic right now, as is how employers can overcome AI-enabled candidates. But the trick is not to overcome candidates, but to join them by utilizing AI to assist your hiring team.
For example, tools such as Spark Hire’s AI Resume Review or AI Summaries can help hiring teams move through the earlier stages of screening faster, prioritizing the top talent and offering honest feedback to those who may not align with the role more quickly.
Additionally, consider using video interviewing software, such as one-way video interviewing, that allows candidates to answer the same structured interview questions at their convenience, giving you a better sense of communication skills, professionalism, and alignment with your culture in far less time than traditional methods.
Challenge 3: Making Confident Hiring Decisions
Your hiring team must strike a balance between hiring quickly and hiring effectively.
Every day a role remains unfilled can add stress and delay to your staff members’ work. However, rushing the process can lead to hiring poor employee fits, resulting in lower productivity and even turnover for both new hires and existing employees.
Utilizing tools to create workflows that enable faster, more confident decisions helps balance speed with quality, especially for busy or lean hiring teams.
Start by setting your hiring team up for success by aligning on what matters most in a candidate.
Here are some sample steps:
- View hiring data on employees in similar roles at your organization to better understand what skills or qualifications they possess that make them a good fit for their jobs.
- Utilize this data to provide your team with clear evaluation criteria and interview questions, so evaluations and feedback stay objective and consistently cover the most important details.
- Tech tools can also significantly help the process. Implement hiring tech, such as video interviewing or AI interview transcripts, to help streamline candidate screening and provide an objective screening process.
As you scale, you may explore migrating your data into a robust ATS that enables your entire team to collaborate more easily, keeping the process moving forward, providing a better candidate experience, and otherwise reducing bottlenecks.
Challenge 4: Reducing Employee Turnover in Critical Roles
Hiring can be extremely time-consuming and costly, without the right tools and processes
No matter the industry, but especially in the medical field, retaining talented employees once you’ve hired them is critical for ongoing success among your team. That’s why, alongside implementing hiring best practices, you should prioritize strategies for reducing turnover.
In particular, having a structured onboarding process can help solidify a strong foundation for a new employee’s tenure at your medical practice.
Start by developing thorough, transparent onboarding materials, such as a new hire onboarding checklist, to ensure you stay on track, and new hire email templates to share important details with your new hire right away. These should be prepared well before you even hire and are ready to go once an offer has been accepted.
Whichever documents you prioritize, they should cover everything employees need to know about working at your practice, from how to use your practice management software to your expectations of their conduct toward patients.
Here are some important details you should consider sharing upfront with your new hires to promote a smooth and welcoming transition:
- Share clear expectations and development opportunities from day one.
- Set 30/60/90-day check-ins to provide support and gather feedback.
- Offer mentorship opportunities or buddy systems for new hires.
- Provide flexibility where possible to support work-life balance.
- Celebrate wins and milestones to create a sense of belonging.
Check out Chapter 6 of Spark Hire’s Hire Education: Guided Training for Better Hiring to dig even deeper into best practices for onboarding and integrating new employees.
Burnout is a very real concern in the medical industry.
Hiring technology can often automate manual hiring tasks that help move hiring along without losing quality, so you can fill roles before burnout hits.
The result? A reduction in employee work stress and improved general productivity, boosting results for your healthcare facility or medical practice.
